What are you watching?

[tr0nic]

I don't know what compelled me to do so, but I watched The Matrix: Resurrections (Matrix 4) last night. Not entirely sure what to expect, except badness. But you know what? Wasn't bad. It was actually pretty fun, and at this point Lana Wachowski seemed to be focused on having fun with it rather than entirely making some social commentary. It's in there, for sure, and it's just a bit heavy-handed with it right at the beginning, but then it's just about doing cool Matrix shit. I could really tell that she's had a bunch of unfinished ideas from the original trilogy that she wanted to flesh out. She didn't fully succeed, there's like a dozen concepts introduced that went nowhere and were barely explained despite having a runtime of 2 Hours 30 Minutes, but that's all very par for the course with Matrix movies.

They jump the shark a little around the halfway mark though (they actually jump like 3 sharks at once), make no mistake, and as the second hour of the film passed I was like "come on, wrap it the fuck up, Lana" but it was fun to see Keanu do his thing. The man does not age, I swear. Keanu Reeves is a great example of a human being that has visibly done very few drugs.

I've been desperate to see this since watching all of the original Matrix films and the Animatrix last year. I'd only seen the first before then due to blindly buying into the "the Matrix sequels are bad" hype as a kid but I actually think both of the sequels had a lot to love and the Animatrix is a super cool project with some great shorts in it. I kind of want to try and catch it in a cinema, even though thats very unlikely unless its part of a marathon. My girlfriend says it sucks but idk, something in me just tells me it's gonna be a secret banger...

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Watched the first episode of Alien Earth yesterday with my girlfriend and her housemate. I didn't love Romulus so didn't really go into this expecting to love it either. I really don't know what to think of it yet. Their depiction of earth feels very shortsighted. Their use of pop culture in universe feels somewhat trite and farfetched-more for the viewer than to enrich the world. David's consumption of cinema in Prometheus did a lot for the opening scene and for his character, and it was believable but in Earth it feels...dumber? idk, it's a nitpick. It just felt very run-of-the-mill and I don't care about any of the characters yet. I'm still going to give it a chance, TV can take a while to get going but I don't feel like this leant into being a TV show as far as form goes so far. It's been relegated to 'tv show I watch with my girlfriend and her housemate' which range from slop to good.

Animatrix is such an underrated gem, truly. The Second Renaissance is something I think about constantly, it's kind of a pinnacle of modern sci fi that doesn't get talked about enough. See I was like 3 months old when the first Matrix came out so obviously I missed experiencing the Matrix as a cultural moment. But as I understand it, audiences considered that first movie philosophically profound upon first viewing, and as the sequels came out that feeling very rapidly devolved into surface level edginess that goes nowhere, which is the lens they criticized the rest of the trilogy with. And it does get kind of messy, to be fair, especially when it doesn't have to be. By the end of the third Matrix movie, it was clear that some section of Machine Society is becoming more than mindless drones and programs within the Matrix want to live actual lives, more than a new civilization controlling humans as a form of self defense. What we witness as the audience in Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 is Machine Society evolving to live alongside Humanity, but the Wachowskis are so--Fucking--VAGUE about that being the case, and it becomes this odd 6 hour cheesy bong session-level philosophical conversation with some groundbreaking CGI shootouts in between. The big thing that I don't enjoy about them is that the sequels just do not deserve 2 and a half hour runtimes, they just do not have enough ideas to fill the space. BUT I have fun with them every time I watch them, and one of those unfinished concepts (The Merovingian, the previous iteration of The Matrix, and his proto-Agents still living inside the current Matrix) I absolutely adore as a piece of sci fi media, it's something that is so alive in this bipolar universe the Wachowskis have created.

Gotta say though, there was no green tinting in the new one. The green tint was a criticism of the original trilogy, but now without it, it just feels wrong. At this point it's kind of necessary, the film overall was too colorful for a Matrix movie.