So, after what was said in this thread, I just had to stream it. My curiosity got the better of me and, well, I didn't hate it but it is certainly with faults.
It's deconstructionist and feels like a begrudging love letter to itself. The best thing I can say about it is that it isn't doing much but at least it knows it. I like the first film and don't hate the sequels---I just found them a bit muddled and too heady for its own good---but there's a lot secondary and tertiary characters that spring up in this that should give all tens of die-hards about the trilogy a good time.
As I understand it, WB wanted to make this and pressured the Wachowskis to either be involved or not; it was going to happen anyway. One of them had completely bowed out of filmmaking and the one that made this felt obligated to shepherd the project in some way. With this movie, there's a lot of clever ideas that essentially reconstructs and re-contextualize the first movie while condensing all the films into one entity, but it's a bit clumsy in its writing and story. There were moments where I was won over by what it was doing, or tried to do, but most of the time it felt juvenile and awkward. Like, as Anakin Starkiller said, fan-fiction. This felt like online fan-fiction.
Now, that's not the worst of the movie for me: it's everything else. The impression that I got from this film is that whichever of the Wachowski that did this is the "ideas" one of the pair, while the other is the one that can do the work, the one that can construct a film. This movie is lifeless. It lacks atmosphere and tension and, my God, is the action dull. Remember the fun gunfights and cool action choreography that made the Matrix what it is? Yeah, that's out the window. The action isn't filmed clearly, it's mostly close-ups and frantic, and lacks any drama. Those sequences are dead here. Keanu does the bare minimum of fighting and it may be contractually obligated for him to never have a full costume again, as he just runs around this film in a dark t-shirt and jacket with his arms out-stretched for much of the time. It doesn't help that the film is ugly as sin to watch. It shifts from something that looks like a movie, to Days of Our Lives, and it switches back and forth in quality repeatedly. The credits list that RED cameras were used to film this, and my God, if that isn't damning on RED; this movie looks awful. It looks like it was shot on home-market DV camcorders at its worst. You can see the how fake the effects and sets throughout the entirety of the movie. There are trappings that make this a Matrix movie... but clearly on a budget.
It isn't great, but it's nothing I don't think anyone is going to get upset about considering the series' standing. The best of this is Carrie Ann Moss, I thought. She was the best out of all the performances in this and, I don't know if she was trying or not, I thought she out-shone everyone. Morpheus-but-not-Morpheus isn't terrible, just hammy. The only saving grace was that I thought this movie moved quickly for something two-and-a-half hours.
It's deconstructionist and feels like a begrudging love letter to itself. The best thing I can say about it is that it isn't doing much but at least it knows it. I like the first film and don't hate the sequels---I just found them a bit muddled and too heady for its own good---but there's a lot secondary and tertiary characters that spring up in this that should give all tens of die-hards about the trilogy a good time.
As I understand it, WB wanted to make this and pressured the Wachowskis to either be involved or not; it was going to happen anyway. One of them had completely bowed out of filmmaking and the one that made this felt obligated to shepherd the project in some way. With this movie, there's a lot of clever ideas that essentially reconstructs and re-contextualize the first movie while condensing all the films into one entity, but it's a bit clumsy in its writing and story. There were moments where I was won over by what it was doing, or tried to do, but most of the time it felt juvenile and awkward. Like, as Anakin Starkiller said, fan-fiction. This felt like online fan-fiction.
Now, that's not the worst of the movie for me: it's everything else. The impression that I got from this film is that whichever of the Wachowski that did this is the "ideas" one of the pair, while the other is the one that can do the work, the one that can construct a film. This movie is lifeless. It lacks atmosphere and tension and, my God, is the action dull. Remember the fun gunfights and cool action choreography that made the Matrix what it is? Yeah, that's out the window. The action isn't filmed clearly, it's mostly close-ups and frantic, and lacks any drama. Those sequences are dead here. Keanu does the bare minimum of fighting and it may be contractually obligated for him to never have a full costume again, as he just runs around this film in a dark t-shirt and jacket with his arms out-stretched for much of the time. It doesn't help that the film is ugly as sin to watch. It shifts from something that looks like a movie, to Days of Our Lives, and it switches back and forth in quality repeatedly. The credits list that RED cameras were used to film this, and my God, if that isn't damning on RED; this movie looks awful. It looks like it was shot on home-market DV camcorders at its worst. You can see the how fake the effects and sets throughout the entirety of the movie. There are trappings that make this a Matrix movie... but clearly on a budget.
It isn't great, but it's nothing I don't think anyone is going to get upset about considering the series' standing. The best of this is Carrie Ann Moss, I thought. She was the best out of all the performances in this and, I don't know if she was trying or not, I thought she out-shone everyone. Morpheus-but-not-Morpheus isn't terrible, just hammy. The only saving grace was that I thought this movie moved quickly for something two-and-a-half hours.
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