Literary Expeditions

Director: Lana Wachowski
Written By: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemo
Cast: Keanu Reaves, Carrie Ann Moss, Neil Patrick Harris & some kids no one cares about.

Plot:

Neo and Trinity are stuck in the matrix again leading separate lives. Neo – a renowned game designer who designed the game upon his own life (The original Matrix trilogy) while working in a game company actually headed by Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff). Neo is leading a troubled life where he experiences flashes from his previous life but is made to believe by The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) that he has a tendency to overlap reality with the events of his video game because he designed it using his own feelings.

Neo is striving to break out of the matrix but each time is put back and is led to believe it is all in his head using the ‘Blue-pill’. While it has been 60 years and everyone out in the real world has believed that Neo and Trinity are dead. This is when Bugs (Jessica Henwick) who has seen Neo once jump off a building – the incident which freed her mind, has been searching and finally finds Neo. She along with Morpheus (Yahya Abdul Mateen II (don’t know who that is and don’t care)) – who is there in some cyborg or bionic manner or something, manages to free Neo from the matrix who discovers that in the real world there is another pod in front of his which has Trinity. They both are being kept in specially designed pods separate from ‘The Farm’.

Neo goes to a city called IO (what happened to Zion?) which has old Niobe as its leader. And as expected, he wants to free Trinity from the clutches of The Analyst. Grown-up Sati (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), the little girl in Revolutions, helps them and tells Niobe that she knew all along that Neo and Trinity were alive but didn’t tell because she wanted Niobe to maintain peace for the humans. So they head back into the matrix to free trinity from the ‘evil’ clutches of The Analyst who was using Neo and Trinity as power sources for his new version of the matrix after overtaking from The Architect.

They all fight (with Agent Smith on their side because with Neo’s freedom he is free too from the Analyst) and lo-and-behold they win in the end with Trinity also now having the same powers as Neo! How unexpected was that! (Sarcasm).

Conclusion:

The movie is so shoddily made that I wanted to cry at this injustice being done to the original Matrix trilogy. Lana Wachowski didn’t shy away from using the same stunts, settings, even action sequences! The only difference was that now they can go back to the real world using mirrors instead of telephone booths (which if you ask me made much more sense but then this movie does not make any).

Almost everyone who went to see this movie went for 2 reasons – Nostalgia and Keanu Reaves. We all loved the original matrix movies. They blew our minds. And we went to see this garbage expecting to see some of that old charm, and also because we all love Keanu. However, it was like we paid for a first-class meal and got stale pizza instead, with a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo nobody cared about.

Here are some issues I have with this movie from just the top of my head:

1. Bugs is freed when she saw Neo. In the real world, she is about the same age as when she saw him (as shown in her flashback) while she was doing her job of cleaning windows in the matrix, and she is a Captain of a ship and has a crew! How did that happen? She suddenly became the expert after being freed from the Matrix?
   
2. Her cyborg or synthient or whatever it was called Cybebe – was blocked out permanently from the chamber in which Neo and Trinity were kept after it freed Neo. This was claimed in the first half of the movie by Bugs. However, in the end it helps in freeing Trinity inside the chamber. How did it get there? Why were the machines not alerted?
   
3. How did Trinity suddenly got powers? Don’t tell me that this is what the Oracle meant by a new power is rising because that’s just pure idiocy! Trinity suddenly realises that she can bend the rules of the matrix completely though she was equally or even more heavily dosed than Neo was in the Matrix?
   
4. Neo has not been able to use his powers properly throughout the movie even though he was freed much before Trinity. But Trinity suddenly got powers and was able to use those within minutes of her being freed. How? This is just borderlining on absolute stupidity.
   
5. The girl at the beginning of the movie portrayed as Trinity was not Carrie Ann-Moss. Rememver that iconic beginning of the first matrix movie where trinity fights a bunch of cops and jumps off a building into another? They couldn’t manage to reproduce the scenes even though Carrie Ann-Moss was in the movie? Even her clothes were different! How lazy can you get!

These were just some of the many concerns I had with the movie. The list is long. Needless to say, this seemed more like a loosely written fan-fiction than a mainstream movie – No one gives two shits about Neo all through the city even though he has been a legend. No expression of surprise on any of their faces. There seemed to be only a handful of people in such a big city. What happened? Budget for the movie was low? The dialogues are absolutely pathetic. Dialogues come across as if some kids are trying to sound very deep and philosophical but only manage to come across as cocky (not good cocky), inexperienced and idiotic; the viewers did not care for any of it. To add insult to injury of the audience, some dialogues seem to mock the original matrix movies and the iconic dialogues such as – “We Need Guns. Lots of Guns.”

None of the characters manages to make the audience care about them. Lana Wachowski fails to understand that the original matrix movie was so popular & iconic because it was original, its concept blew away everyone’s mind. It focussed on the concept, had strength in its storyline with perfect balance on characters’ stories which made us care about them. It did not focus just on the technical mumbo-jumbo, which exactly was the problem with this movie. Apparently, the filmmakers believe that they can throw around fancy words like ‘synthient’ or ‘modal program’ and make the viewers believe anything without a solid plot. This is most unfortunate.

The misuse of actors like Keanu and Carrie Ann-Moss is saddening especially if you’re making a Matrix movie. No one dies in the end from the real world. This makes a very crucial difference in the levels of filmmaking of the previous trilogy and this movie. It was like the makers of this movie were living in some fairy tale land. (Even if any character was made to die, no one would have cared anyway). It was so pathetic! Neil Patrick Harris feels like he was doing ‘How I met your mother’ again.

Overall, the Matrix Resurrection is a far cry from the original Matrix trilogy. An absolute disappointment and an abomination forced upon the public by mediocre writers. I suggest Lana Wachowski retire from filmmaking if she thinks this was good work. I will give it 1 out of 5 stars and a 3/10 rating.