...when The Matrix was cool.
Picked up The Matrix 4 on dvd this week. I sorta wish I could put it back.
This movie should be subtitled "What The Hell Did I Just Watch?".
Honestly, I don't even know how to review this thing. It's just a bloody mess.
Drop one Keanu, slightly depleted, into a bunch of hot digital refugees with in game hair that is nearly as physics defying as Bullet-Time. Stir.
There's a new pseudo-Morpheus, a same but older Trinity who isn't Trinity. Naiobi is creaky and crabby. They all have some new robot friends. And insane, precisely sculpted hair.
Doogie Howser is now a psychiatrist AND has branched out into being an evil digital dude. His hair is unsculpted but I did dig his purple horn rims...
Stir some more.
Smith is back but he's no longer Hugo Weaving. He has homeless ninja friends. The fight is narrated by an annoying French hobo. Much less menacing.
There's a character named "Bugs" who actually at one point says "What's up, Doc?" with a straight face. A younger, more volitile me turns the movie off at that point. Today's me just sipped tea and checked to see how much longer before the credits roll...like my eyes....
There's flashbacks, callbacks and middle aged actors covered in goo. Neo and Trinity whisper meaningfully. A lot. Then the shouting and the chaos. A lot. Leather, lycra, latex and some pretty nifty sunglasses, too.
It's got some cool visuals but honestly, nothing we haven't seen a LOT since that first Bullet-Time back in the day. The effects are more refined but there's nothing revolutionary here and it's obvious that the filmmakers know it. They pretty much throw the cgi kitchen sink at us here. I like the story to be jazzed up by the effects, not hung on them in hopes of making a buck.
The movie tries hard to be self aware, often referencing how popular reboots and franchises are and how they make big bucks. It's intended to be funny, I guess, but out here in the real world it just makes me realize I'm watching a handful of millionaires and their wannabe millionaire friends regurgitate and rehash just to get $20 out of me. It's enough to make you as cynical as the meta-jokes they crack...
I've watched it twice and I'm still not really sure what the point of it all was. Beyond getting my $20, that is.
If you made this film in 2000, the visual trickery would be the talk of the town and damn the story. Two sequels to that original brilliant vision of The Matrix largely trod that path. This third sequel adds little to the mythology and nothing to the story that it really needed. I wish I could just go back and see that first film for the first time and stop there.
The cat's not called Deja Vu for nothin'.
Maybe I am the cynical one here...
What the hell did I just watch?
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