Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:
Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.
Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.
spoiler
Basically, the first act of the movie is (re-)awakening Neo so all the marketing makes it feel like a reboot of 1. Except then it takes a pretty big shift as we find out that everyone who fought in the original wars is old and retired, if not dead. And The Machines want Zion to return as a power source except a faction of The Machines believed in Neo and fought, leading to basically the premise of the MMO where there are two big factions. One wants to return and the other wants to stay free. And a key part of The Matrix is that it requires a Neo and Trinity to provide just the right amount of rebellion (which is more power) but to torment them so that they can’t ever move on and have a happy ending. And the rest of the movie is basically The Kids rescuing Trinity and Neo and Trinity both having The One powers. Culminating in basically a repeat of the ending of 1 where they challenge The Machines and fly off into the distance. All while a fucking ska cover of Rage’s Wake Up plays. And… that is kind of what made me really like the movie even if I really fucking disliked watching it? Because… we (GenX/Millennials) fought our fight and… what did we accomplish? The world is a shitty place that gets shittier by the moment (exponentially in 2025…). We choose to go back to our cages because we are too afraid of the world outside of it and our lack of comforts. And that is what the movie was about. Humanity escaped The Matrix because of Neo… and Humanity went back in because the outside world is scary. And Neo and Trinity are going to have to fight our war again and maybe we’ll care this time but we probably won’t. Rage Against The Machine should have been the anthem of a generation and it mostly was ignored or loved by the machine de la Rocha et al were raging against. And… that is also the thing that gets too real. Because we have a generation that were inspired by what we did. But… what fucking kid even cares enough about Rage to want ska covers? Much like… what kids actually care enough about The Matrix to want a sequel? The sequel is still for the crowd that largely didn’t learn the message of the originals.
So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?
MimicJar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think that’s a pretty great summary. When it comes to unnecessary/years later sequels most are just garbage. I think Matrix 4 is still bad, but I have to give it credit for trying something interesting. It doesn’t work ultimately, but it tried something.