BEFORE: OK, now that October is over, on with November, back to any and all subject matter, whatever's going to get me to the topic of Thanksgiving and Christmas is fair game at this point.
Yahya Abdul Mateen II carries over again from "Candyman".
Also, here's the format breakdown for October's films:
9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Don't Let Go, Carrie (2013), The Addams Family 2, The Amityville Horror (2005), Ma, Swallow, Love and Monsters, Us, Candyman (2021)
5 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, The Nines, Colossal, Underwater, The Invisible Man (2020)
2 watched on Netflix: Identity, Hubie Halloween
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania
1 watched on Tubi: Lizzie
1 watched on a random site: The Witches (2020)
19 TOTAL
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Matrix Revolutions" (Movie #156)
THE PLOT: Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life, the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more.
AFTER: Wow, so it's been a minute since the last "Matrix" film, which was released in November 2003. But I watched it in June 2009, back in Year 1 - still, it's Year 14 of the project, so even though I caught up with installments #2 and #3 LATE, it's still been 13 whole years since then. Do I even remember what happened in "The Matrix Revolutions"? Does anyone?
What the hell was the Merovingian? Or the Trainman? The Architect? Anybody? I watched all three "Matrix" movies before this one, but I only remember what happened in the first one - that is NOT a good sign, especially if this new film is going to pick up on a few of those threads after a long period of down time and try to get something going again. There's no momentum, like the series came to a dead stop and it's going to take a ton of energy to get it moving again, let alone moving in the proper direction. Let me go read the plot summary from the previous 2003 film on Wikipedia before I talk about "Resurrections"...Wow, back then I labeled "Matrix Revolutions" as a "pointless waste", but why did I also rate it as a "6"? What the hell?
Yeah, both Trinity and Neo were toast at the end of the last film, but we know that in the big movie (and comic-book) franchises, nobody dies forever, right? They only stay dead until a new writer came come up with a new angle and a semi-believable way to bring them back. A large sum of money is also frequently required to convince an actor to step back into a role, though apparently no amount of money was enough to get Laurence Fishburne to come back, he's been replaced with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus, or the entity that was Morpheus, or the digital avatar that's replacing Morpheus, whichever.
It's years later, though - 60 years later - and there is a thing that looks like Neo, only he goes by Thomas Anderson and he works as a video-game designer, specifically a game called "The Matrix", which has the characters Neo and Trinity in it. But Bugs, someone from the real world, spots this code-within-the-code somehow, and they investigate, only to find a thing that sort of looks like Morpheus, but instead is just some kind of digital simulation of him. (?) Neo/Anderson is stuck in a daily routine full of endless meetings when his company decides that a sequel to "The Matrix" is needed, after a long period of avoiding sequels. There's a HUGE inside joke here, I'm guessing, because the Wachowskis also declined all efforts to make another "Matrix" movie for a long time. (What changed?). Neo/Anderson takes the prescribed familiar "blue pills" every day so that he'll stay in the virtual reality world, presumably.
But Morpheus and Bugs strive to free him from the Matrix, and drag him into the real world, which once again is populated by machines that feed off of human energy, keeping millions of people alive in those pods while their minds inhabit the simulation. This is something that never really made sense to me about the "Matrix" films, these aliens came and took over Earth at some point, and they captured people one by one, or perhaps en masse, and transferred almost everyone over to the pods - but these machines feed off human energy? Wouldn't solar power be a lot more efficient? I mean, the sun is like RIGHT THERE. But no, let's spend a TON of energy to keep the pods running, just to harvest a bit of energy from the humans?
I know, I know, this is all about the effects, what can happen in what is essentially a virtual world where people can run up the walls and force-push a car or move faster than a bullet. So expecting this world to make some kind of coherent sense is pointless, but I'm also talking about the world outside the virtual world, the one that's run by the alien machines. Once some of the humans know that THAT one is the real world, why continue to spend so much time in the virtual one? Why aren't all efforts being directed to (once again) defeat the evil power and take back control of the planet? I'm not quite getting it, where's the sense of focus, it's like everybody's distracted by the minor details and they're not acknowledging the bigger picture. So, am I missing something? Why are things this way?
Everything here seems to be about Neo and Trinity, even though these aren't really those characters, but some kind of recreated version of them? (Another thing that's pretty unclear.) But why would the machines spend so much energy rebuilding them from the ground up? I think they NEED them somehow because the virtual world is so damn boring without them, it's all just staff meetings and brainstorming sessions and the occasional office birthday party. OH, if only we had a couple of creatively trained fighters who could liven up our drab workdays! Gimme a break...
I think perhaps they waited too long to make another "Matrix" movie? The fans came out, of course, but the problem with making a movie that's THIS expensive is that the film can gross over $157 million and still be considered a box-office bomb, because they spent over $190 million making it. I'll say again what I said after watching "The Matrix Revolutions", that's it's a damn shame so much money got spent on this and not eliminating a disease or world hunger or something more positive and useful. It's a great deal of time and effort just to get Neo and Trinity back together. Come on, was it really worth it, in the grand scheme of things?
Oddly, this is the third film to directly reference "Alice In Wonderland" that I've seen in the last two weeks: "Underwater" and "Us" both had a bunch of this stuff - one had a stuffed rabbit and a bunch of dialogue lines about going down the "rabbit hole" and "Us" had real rabbits and an underworld situation, plus the doppelganger characters wore red outfits, and I guess "Red" was a take on the Queen of Hearts? But really, the "Matrix" franchise has them all beat, one you factor in that Jefferson Airplane song, with those lyrics "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small..."
Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Jonathan Groff (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "Downsizing"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "Scream 2"), Priyanka Chopra Jonas (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Christina Ricci (last seen in "Mermaids"), Lambert Wilson (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Andrew Lewis Caldwell (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Toby Onwumere, Max Riemelt, Joshua Grothe (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Brian J. Smith, Erendira Ibarra, Michael X. Sommers (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), L. Trey Wilson, Mumba Maina, Max Mauff (last seen in "The Reader"), Purab Kohli, Freema Agyeman, Sabrina Strehl, Andrew Rothney (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Cooper Rivers, Leo Sheng, Telma Hopkins, Chad Stahelski, Julian Grey (last seen in "Downhill"), Gaige Chat, Stephen Dunlevy (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Ellen Hollman (also last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in 'Term Life"), with a cameo from Tom Hardy (?) (last seen in "Stuart: A Life Backwards") and archive footage of Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Running with the Devil"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "Mortal Engines").
RATING: 4 out of 10 exomorphic particles
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