Absolutely unoriginal and boring. Incredible special effects.
None of the new characters have enough time or backstory for us to care about them, but they're also not throw away characters - the writers seemed to think we would be too triggered if a single good guy died. In fact, nobody died the entire movie - 100% of the enemies are bots. There aren't even meaningful interactions with agents outside of the ones Neo simulates.
The entire thing was just a big callback to what they did in the original trilogy. Lots of allusion and direct rips. All with killer special effects, but no substance. They think they're being meta and hip by acknowledging it, but that doesn't make it better; their horrible post credits scene about "just needing to elicit an emotional response" and "uploading the catrix" makes it a lot worse.
Nothing in the movie has any deeper meaning. There are zero stakes. The new human city isn't at risk. The Matrix isn't at risk. Literally the entire movie is about Neo and Trinity needing to wake up and get out of the Matrix - if they don't, they will continue living, just inside the Matrix.
None of Smith's motives were clear. He went from being a very strong and interesting character in the original trilogy to a very weak and aimless character here.
Cheapening the power of the One is really detrimental to the film. The Analyst's idea that "Neo was nothing special by himself, he needed Trinity" is ridiculous. It's rather as the Architect said "Neo's attachment to humanity was very intimate." He was still the One with or without Trinity, and his powers were unique to that position. So the idea that the machines can somehow use Neo and Trinity to enhance power generation of the Matrix by keeping them close is both fundamentally flawed on top of being ridiculous. And then letting Trinity be the one to fly them out of danger at the end just steals everything from Neo.
Despite everyone assuring Neo that his fight mattered, it seems that the world is almost identical to where it was at the start of the original Matrix movie. The Matrix is a prison. The humans are hiding in a city to keep back the hostile machines. It doesn't seem like they're freeing many minds. The only difference is that now some machines are on their side - something that's never really explained. This new alliance has yielded the incredible result of.. fruit. Neo's entire fight gave humanity fruit. That's it.
The Analyst and the machines seemed incompetent and weak. The machine on machine violence was very interesting and could have been instrumental in explaining the resurgence in war and restoration of the Matrix as a prison - so naturally it was only mentioned once offhand.
The world wasn't setup clearly or interestingly in a way to support a story existing within it. There is no substance, no stakes, and no point.
Overall it's a huge disappointment. The fact that the Reloaded and Revolutions were better movies that were more coherent and added more substance to the universe is testament to the extreme failure of this move.
Eternals, the film where Robb Stark and Jon Snow find themselves in a love triangle with Sersi.
Besides that piece of ironic casting, I’m not seeing the hook with this film.
I’ve seen some people arguing that it’s boring because of its slow pace.
It’s not, it’s boring because it’s an empty wet fart of a film that doesn’t have one ounce of personality.
It feels like one of those long, drawn out, indulgent college lectures where you’re constantly asking yourself what the point of learning this stuff is, and you’re still not sure by the end of it.
The cinematography is great, it looks like a Denis Villeneuve film with its use of natural light, but that’s pretty much the only thing I can praise about it.
Most of these films are entertaining because of their interesting characters, comedy and ocassionally the action (if it doesn’t look like artificial crap).
This film doesn’t really have characters in the first place.
It tries to balance 10 leads, which results in most of these characters being reduced to archetypes.
Most of them have one or two quirks, but none of them develop into well rounded or engaging characters.
Even some of the acting, which is the one thing these films usually get right, is a little wonky and one note.
It tries to compensate for its lack of action with drama, which I’d welcome if it wasn’t the same, generic ‘monster bad, we have to fight them’ shtick we’ve seen time and time again.
The philosophical questions that it tries to pose feel tacked on and have no meat to them, not unlike a Zack Snyder DC film.
There’s also so much handholding in this, the amount of exposition is kinda insane.
You don’t need to dumb your film down to the point where your exposition dump that starts the film repeats itself two more times during other dialogue scenes.
The third act, as expected nowadays, looks like plastic and is filled with effects that already look dated.
Is it that hard to give us something subversive like Doctor Strange again, and to stop having these fake and obnoxious cgi battles?
Then you wouldn’t have to underpay your visual effects artists to animate a battle for which most people close their eyes during.
There’s still one good thing to come out of this: we can now definitively reject this narrative (which was floating around in some circles) that critics will go easy on a film because of diverse casting, the director being an Oscar favorite, the brand or a film being ‘woke’.
So at least there’s that, though I wouldn’t be surprised if these morons find a way to twist it into their narrative regardless.
I can already see some of them claiming that critics hated it because there wasn’t enough gay sex in it.
Frankly though, I agree: where was the sex scene between Angelina Jolie and Gemma Chan?
3.5/10
