In an attempt at resurrecting their cash-cow/calling-card franchise, the Wachowskis, or rather Lana, who takes sole credit, tries to have her cake and eat it too on their signature Gordian Knot fable of multi-layered realities.* Playing both sides of The Emperor’s New Clothes fence, the main debate asks if message & meaning exists within these MATRIX films, or can empty pyrotechnics serve as both surface display and subject? From there, we go ‘meta’ as Keanu Reeves’ Neo, living the corporal corporate life as video game designer Thomas Anderson, suffers thru company conference meetings on the public’s reaction to previous gaming editions of The Matrix. All this coming after a zoomy prologue that sees digital entities in human form battling for their lives in, on and over skyscrapers. Though technically, are they alive or merely lithium charged data? One piece of the puzzle Neo will have to solve while renewing his feelings for Carrie-Anne Moss and his sessions with quirky analyst Neil Patrick Harris on fear control. Parsing all this well-nigh impossible though subtitles help, if not for gal fighter Jessica Henwick whose diction is so indistinct, you can’t make out two words for every ten with or without the sub-titles. Lots of famous faces to spot between CGI overkill, and a moral to contemplate: never trust your analyst. Alas, the cool which sold the original MATRIX in 1999 a thing of the past; subsumed by a new emotion for one of these films: Pity.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Stick with the first in the series . . . only the first.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The ending also a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ cop-out.
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