THE MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS - Wake Up

Director: Lana Wachowski
Writers: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksander Hemon
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith
Runtime: 148 mins.
2021

The Matrix is what so much art strives for and so little accomplishes: iconic. The Wachowski sisters blended gun-fu, Hong Kong-style wirework, existentialist philosophy, anticapitalist realism, sci-fi apocalyptica, trans allegory, seething cynicism, and bleeding heart sentimentality into a tight package. The film's sickly green cyberpunk visual aesthetic dominated our collective imagination for years.

No surprise that The Matrix: Resurrections is worse in every way. The narrative is chunky and rambling. The 'real world' political stakes are unclear about what exactly has shifted for machine/human relations in the last 60 years. The recasting of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) features a decent performance hemmed in by lackluster writing, and the recasting of Agent Smith features decent writing hemmed in by a lackluster performance (Jonathan Groff tries to play up the smarm, but Hugo Weaving he is not). The city of Io feels like an empty knockoff of Zion. The script's technobabble combines with imperfect sound mixing to create a dizzying array of garbled phrases. Worst of all, the action is shoddy. You could chalk this up to an aging cast (Keanu spends much of the movie doing CGI hand blasts rather than kung-fu), but even the young actors' combat is edited to hell. Besides, Keanu certainly seems capable of skilled and beautiful action choreography right over there in the John Wick franchise.

Yet we must evaluate art on its own merits, rather than compare it to a checklist of our expectations. The Matrix: Resurrections is a poor Matrix sequel, because it focuses on being an unexpectedly rich Matrix reboot.

The Matrix fandom has spent the last week griping about their unfulfilled checklists. The real kicker is that Lana Wachowski (directing this franchise entry without her sister) has made a film that shares their affection and even many of their critiques. It also has the gall to suggest that perhaps this anger is entitled, misplaced. Wachowski has made an anti-reboot reboot, one that respects the legacy of this story while also showing how it can be twisted into something ugly. Resurrections is furious about the ways stories get corrupted and co-opted. "That's what the Matrix does," says Bugs (Jessica Henwick), Neo's enthusiastic young guide. "It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that's important to us."

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 3 - Transference

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Touch

The elder Crane siblings, least affected by the supernatural, are committed to the idea that they can control their environment. The two youngest siblings are forced to be more reactive. They do not shape the world around them, they are shaped. Theo, a consummate middle child, exists between these two paths. She is sensitive, stricken by the world around her, yet still she strives to exert control over her thoughts, feelings, experiences. She has the power and the burden of touch.

The opening stinger sees Theo sleeping peacefully while a pallid arm wraps around her. She assumes it's Nelly, but when she flips around there is no one to be seen. "Whose hand was I holding?" she asks.

This is the first review in which I will venture to critique showrunner Mike Flanagan. His style of connecting dialogue beats with overarching themes can be on the nose. Usually that neatness is a strength, sometimes it goes too far. The scene I just described is visually clear-- Theo's certainty that her sister is behind her, the jarring absence of anyone at all, her consternation at this discovery. Did we really need to make this actor sell the line, "Whose hand was I holding?" like it's an episode of R.L. Stine's Are You Afraid of the Dark? It turns a serviceably spooky moment into a lame zinger.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 2 - Perversion

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Open Casket

Episode 1 of "Hill House" shows us a man who, like so many men before him, sublimates his anxiety about death by claiming ownership over his narrative. Steve makes his family's baggage digestible for the world so that he can elude his own psychic heartburn. Lucky for him this sublimating process involves becoming a best-selling author. We all bear this burden of grappling with our childhood fixations, be they positive or negative. The world pressures us to transform these haunts into something that will make us money. Episode 2 shows us Shirley's trajectory into her own career: funeral home director.

Unlike Steve's impulse to to pin his childhood into the pages of a book like a butterfly, Shirley's primary directive has always been to help. Her nurturing soul is put to the test when she imprints on an abandoned litter of kittens in a shed. There are five kittens, just as there are five siblings. But life is fragile, and it isn't long until one of the kittens wiggles its last.

To navigate her grief, her parents stage a modest funeral. She asks to see the dead creature in the box. After a few heartfelt words, Shirley is alarmed to see the kitten's throat move-- breath? She picks it up to her parents' distress and insists that it's alive actually, it's alive! This fantasy collapses when the kitten's lips part to reveal a large bug working its way out of the esophagus.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 1 - Nachträglichkeit

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Steven Sees a Ghost

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

So begins Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel, and so begins Mike Flanagan's 2018 miniseries adaptation. It's a sublime passage, one that struck me immediately upon opening the book. The words "absolute reality" evoke existential angst; the interjection "not sane" is too eager to isolate the sentence subject; what is not said about the house takes on a sinister bearing. Flanagan-- longtime horror film director, first time television showrunner-- is wise to replicate the paragraph in voiceover, despite the show having very little at all to do with the book.

In fact, the context of the passage is uprooted quite violently. What was once the musing of an omniscient narrator becomes a quotable line from a book of schlocky nonfiction written by the nominal protagonist of episode 1. Steven Crane, one of five children to experience a terrifying childhood in Hill House, has grown up to exploit that violence by channeling it into the aforementioned best-selling book (itself called The Haunting of Hill House). This, predictably, drives a wedge between him and the rest of his folks. "I need to help my family," he opines, gesturing towards his wife. "We are your family," his sister responds.