The Matrix Resurrections is a boring, sloppy, incoherent mess. But it does offer some valuable cultural insights that we should pay attention to. Despite endlessly talking about “democratic norms” and holding democracy summits, Western liberals don’t like democracy. They actually hate democracy and associate it with weakness, and this attitude is very apparent in their movies.
The whole movie felt hugely rushed, and I couldn’t help but feel that Lana Wachowski didn’t even want to make the movie but was forced to. At one point, Resurrections breaks the fourth wall completely with some game designers at Neo’s company lamenting that Warner Bros is pressuring them for a movie. That actually made me wonder if Lana is okay, and not being held in a basement against her will (Lana, if you’re reading this and are in trouble, blink twice).
As for the cast, well, most of them were replaced by younger, cheaper, more forgettable, and often interchangeable lookalikes. Often when a returning character is introduced, footage from one of the previous movies plays to remind audiences who this person even is. The dialogue is a disaster, everyone seemed half-asleep while delivering their lines, every scene felt like it was all filmed on the first take, and even the special effects were poor. The original Matrix entry was more than 20 years ago, but was still visually better than Resurrections.
I don’t want to go into detail explaining the plot in detail, but fortunately there just isn’t much to say. The machines resurrected Neo and Trinity, wiped their memories, and reinserted them back into the Matrix. Apparently, as long as Neo and Trinity accept the false reality of the Matrix, everyone else does as well. Okay, upon further reflection I admit this is kind of clever. Neo thinks he’s the co-owner of a video game company and the events of the past three movies were plotlines in games he published. Then other people play his video games and this makes them less likely to question reality.
Then Neo is rescued by a girl named Bugs. Like Bugs Bunny, and yes, that’s how she introduces herself. Revolutions has the subtlety of a brick and every little thing has to be explained out of fear that the audience won’t get it on their own. She even went so far as to tattoo a rabbit on her shoulder. But how would she know such an obscure detail from Neo’s origin story from 60 years ago? Well, because she played his video game, apparently. The most important thing to remember is that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros character, because even in the Matrix copyright infringement is still a crime. That’s so ironic it’s almost clever, but not quite.
Oh, and Morpheus is back to life as a program Neo on his computer at the office. Isn’t this clever writing? He looks different because the original Morpheus died a long time ago, and also because Laurence Fishburn refused to participate in the sequel. But why does he dress like A Pimp Named Slickback?
Anyway, Neo,Bugs, and Morpheus (programs can now inhabit magnetic CGI bodies outside the Matrix) return to the real world, and this is where things get sort of interesting. The survivors of Zion relocated to a new city called Io and are now ruled by Niobe. You may or not remember who she was, Niobe was the sexy female pilot from the previous movies. But anyway, she yells at Bugs for rescuing Neo (why????) and then starts a weird, jarring monologue about how Io is better than Zion because programs and humans live together here. So Zion was bad because only humans lived in it? What a weird thing to say. It also doesn’t make any sense because humans and programs did work together numerous times in the previous movies, the Oracle being the most obvious example.
Humanity is just depressing. Despite being mostly at peace for 60 years, everything still sucks. People still live in gloomy, undecorated steampunk corridors like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. It’s understandable that Zion was a miserable place to live because it was fairly new, built from scratch, and in a condition of continuous warfare. So what’s Io’s excuse?
After that, the gang does an Oceans 11 style caper to rescue Trinity and that’s basically the rest of the movie. Apparently, Lana also wanted to have a zombie movie, because there’s this new weapon called “swarm mode” (yes, really) that causes people to wander into machine gunfire. It’s actually the most useless weapon ever and I don’t think even one good guy was hurt by it. Then Trinity learns how to fly too, which is cool.
“Alright, Morpheus…”
“No, no, it’s a Pimp Named Morpheus, you gotta say the whole thing.”
Watching Resurrections made me think of The Last Jedi and these two movies do have a lot in common, and the similarities go beyond being lazily written. Being a rebel in the resistance is cool and every movie aspires to do that, even when it doesn’t make any sense. The Star Wars and Matrix trilogies ended with the good guys winning, so it doesn’t make any sense for them to still be ragtag rebels decades later. That aesthetic comes at the expense of sensible world-building.
In Star Wars, the “First Order” just appears as a recycled version of the empire, but with no plausible explanation for where their resources came from or how they recruited an army and then effortlessly overpowered the “rebels” who had 20 years to consolidate and prepare for new threats. Matrix Revolutions makes even less sense. Are people and machines at peace? Is there some sort of ceasefire? Are there still teams going into the Matrix and handing out red pills? What happened to the machine government? Niobe mentions an energy crisis and a machine civil war… but why? Don’t know, don’t care. Watching this, I really had no reason to care because Neo, who was gone for 60 years and is a surrogate for the audience, doesn’t even seem to care to learn what happened. In fact, nobody seems to be interested. It doesn’t help that everyone is mumbling their lines like they’re half-asleep.
But it was the political similarities I found most significant. In The Last Jedi, General Leia and Admiral Holdo rule the rebellion with an iron fist, and expect absolute obedience to all orders given, even when those orders sound really stupid and counterproductive. Liberal and feminist writers do seem to be interested in military titles to the point of obsession. Naturally, Leia isn’t a princess anymore. She’s a general. But in a traditional feudal regime, wouldn’t a general be a lower rank than a princess? Well, yes. This is what you get with a bunch of people who fetishize the military and worship absolute hierarchies. JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy are too ignorant to understand why “princess” is a significant hereditary title.
Maybe the next Pinochet or Mussolini can be a girl. Progress!
Now how about the Matrix? Despite being squalid and post-apocalyptic, Zion clearly had a normal democratic government. Military leaders are subordinate to elected civilian politicians and no one person has too much unilateral power. But at some point in the 60-year interlude between Revolutions and Resurrections, all that changed. There isn’t even a hint of democracy left. Everyone refers to Niobe as “the general,” and she rules with absolute authority like a dictator. She doesn’t even attempt to incorporate reason or persuasion into her decisions. When Bugs takes the initiative to rescue Neo, Naobi berates her for it, and Neo himself just stands passively on the sideline with a stupid look on his face and doesn’t even try to intervene.
Is democracy just not cool anymore? There are probably many reasons, but I honestly think the biggest one is that we have turned democracy into a weapon. The reality is that the vast majority of countries now are at least partially democratic, and that’s a weakness. The USA and NATO sponsors NGOs and opposition candidates to find faultlines in those countries and destroy them from the inside. When the USA is openly funding and supporting an opposition candidate, the smart thing to do is shoot him to death twice, but that’s usually not possible in a democratic country. Western liberals use democratic processes as a weapon to undermine rival nations, so of course they’re not going to trust democracy in their own countries. If you don’t believe me, look at how liberals reacted to the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, or the Crimea referendum. Despite all the talk, liberals really, really don’t like or trust democracy. They don’t trust it in stories like the Matrix, and they definitely don’t trust it in real life.
Ian Kummer
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Wow. Bombing at the box office is not enough to stop the sequel… https://www.looper.com/718541/the-matrix-5-release-date-cast-plot/