Here’s a movie we haven’t talked about much.
Lily Wachowski’s “The Matrix Resurrections” has been getting very good buzz from test screenings. This is the fourth film in the franchise. Keanu Reeves and Carie-Anne Moss are back for the sequel. Not Laurence Fishburne aka Neo — the rumours rage that he was a real douchebag on the set of the first three films.
The film hasn’t been screened yet for critics, but plenty of fanboys have seen it. No word yet on when press will be able to watch it. It is set for a December 22nd release date and my very predictable guess is that it will make a boatload of cash at the box-office.
Regardless, a legitimate test-screening reaction has leaked and it presents us with a very meta ‘Matrix.’ Just a word of caution, the below is very HEAVY IN SPOILERS:
“I was lucky enough to watch Matrix 4 this week. It's good, not as good as the first movie obviously, but better than both the sequels. Goes in a lot of unexpected directions.”
“The plot is literally nothing you would expect. If given a chance to guess what the plot would be, no way I would even get close. The first hour is very very meta. The basic plot at a high level can be said to be about Neo and Trinity figuring out who they are but not in the way you think.”
“New Nightmare would be a really good comparison for sure. A lot of callbacks to the first movie, pretty much only the first movie gets callbacks, only a couple of things from the sequels”
Yahya Abdul Mateen - Morpheus 2.0 (a computer program coded by Neo which gains sentience
Jessica Henwick - Bugs (the movie is from her point of view for the most part)
Neil Patrick Harris - The Analyst (he's like The Architect from the original trilogy). He's the main villain of the movie. Has created a pocket universe to keep Neo and Trinity alive for the purposes of creating energy for the machines
Jonathan Groff - Agent Smith recoded
Jada Pinkett Smith - Niobe, 60 years older. She is the leader of the human race in a city named Io which was built after Zion fell
“It follows a very similar structure to the first movie. You can almost map each of them to the big moments. Actually it's very easy to map the big moments because the movie does it for you. There's a lot of scenes from the first movie which play during this movie. They serve a purpose in the plot though while also serving as nostalgia. One of the characters even comments on that.”
“Christina Ricci is not his boss, she is in maybe 2 scenes total. She feels like she is a marketing exec, but its never made clear, she just tells everyone what the Matrix sequel should be like. The game company is named Deus Machina and is owned by Warner Bros. At one point, Groff invites Keanu into his office and says something to the effect of "Our parent company, Warner Bros, wants to make sequels to the Matrix games, and they will proceed with or without us. They want to exercise our contract options and get us on board. I was thinking what is the harm in returning to the Matrix world again or a few more times"
“Zion doesn't exist, it collapsed due to infighting after Morpheus's death. Niobe created a new city hidden away from everything named Io. It's a peaceful city where humans and machines work together to create a new civilization. This city actually looks worth dying for compared to what we saw of Zion in the sequels.”
“We see shots of the machine cities as well. The climax takes place in the Matrix and in the real world simultaneously.”
“The opening of the movie is the exact same as the opening of the first movie. It's a program subroutine which is running which keeps that scene going on in loop. Bugs and her crew have just discovered that subroutine and are wondering why the Trinity fight happens there every night. Yahya plays Agent Smith in this scene. Neo has programmed him and hid him in this subroutine so someone can break him out, make him realize he's actually Morpheus and use him to break Neo out of the Matrix he's stuck in.”
“There's a pretty good recreation of all the fights from the first movie, in ways you don't expect - the hallway fight, the dojo fight between Morpheus and Neo, the subway fight between Neo and Agent Smith, the chopper shooting at Neo and Trinity with the ground level angle of the bullets falling. It's all there, just staged differently enough that it tickles the nostalgia bone while not being the exact same fight.”
“The ending of the movie is a zombie movie scene. All the residents of the Matrix are put into what is known as "swarm mode" where they are attacking Neo and his crew to prevent them getting back into the real world. There's some crazy shots of people jumping from buildings to fall onto their cars and bike.”
“The biggest applause was for a line when Trinity remembers who she actually is, the entire theater approved of that moment and the ending scene also got a lot of applause for Trinity's entrance.”
It’s been seven years since Alma Har’el’s feature debut, “Honey Boy,” which was written by and starred Shia LaBeouf — she is now set to direct her next film, with a very talented cast.