C | Thomas Anderson runs into a familiar lady at a coffee shop. Directed by Lana Wachowski Starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss Review by Jon Kissel |
If the Matrix Resurrections is to be believed, every property that belongs to a movie studio will be recirculated and rehashed ad infinitum. A creator can take the paycheck and churn out some mindless pap that evaporates the second the viewer leaves the theater, or they can see what they can get away with and make something visionary and idiosyncratic. The best scenario is Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that somehow sharpened its action choreography on top of a visceral, heart-grabbing hymn about the righteousness of freedom. The worst case is 2011’s Robocop, a soulless cash grab and a thin shadow of its former self. To Lana Wachowski’s great credit, she won’t let her, and her absent sister Lily’s, work be thrown to some director-for-hire, and she made a fourth entry that is exactly what she wanted to make. Kudos for receiving a reported production budget of $190 million and making fun of the studio that gave it to you. However, Lana, and maybe Lilly too, have lost whatever it was that produced the Matrix 22 years ago, and Matrix Resurrections is a sappy academic exercise in search of stakes and compelling interest. The original Matrix, and at least Matrix Reloaded, started with world-building and action and the charisma of its actors and layered philosophy and meta-commentary on top of it. Matrix Resurrections inverts the pyramid, boring the viewer with the commentary and turning everything that follows into an unmotivated slog.
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When I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft in the mid to late 2000’s, talking about it to anyone, even if they too played the game, made me extremely self-conscious. I’d have to preface it all with concepts and proper nouns that were specific to this one thing, and it could only sound insular and stupid. My mind’s eye would hear me talking about instanced dungeons and farming thorium and I’d start to shrivel up with embarrassment. It’s hard to imagine those involved with David Lynch’s Dune feeling any different when they have to say sentences like ‘Take the kieswa maker hook of our sietch.’ Any fantasy or sci-fi work has to balance its world-building with its storytelling. How weird is too weird, communicating concepts in ways other than dialogue and exposition, making some kernel of the world relatable to present-day earthbound relations, etc. Lynch’s Dune does no balancing at all, vomiting out the terminology of Frank Herbert’s novel plus some other invented-for-the-movie ideas in a stream of made-up words delivered in the most banal way possible. Lynch has disowned this film in the decades since its release and what’s on the screen justifies his decision.
My only experience with Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi tract Dune is from the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, so any contact with the material is going to have been informed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. He’s a director who, after making gory, mindfuck midnight movies in the 60’s and 70’s, took a crack at Dune that produced influential concept art but no actual movie. Jodorowsky was himself a big advocate of psychedelics and shamanism, so he connected to a story about a drug whose users find enlightenment and spread that enlightenment throughout the galaxy. For the big-budget modern remake after David Lynch’s campy and disavowed 80’s attempt, Denis Villeneuve is not the obvious choice. Sure, he’s handy with a soundscape and his visuals are top-notch, but he’s never been into magical realism or surrealism. Indeed, Villeneuve’s Dune relies on breathy voiceover and literal visions to convey the story’s psychedelic prophecies and spice inhalation, but his vision of the far future is otherwise a towering achievement and the best thing he’s done yet. Dune overwhelms the viewer with interplanetary power and possibility and world-building.
Tenet is a film that finds its director giving into his most irritating tendency. Christopher Nolan has never been able to judiciously parcel out his exposition dumps, and this is the most clunky and dense of his films. Inception and Interstellar at least had recognizable rules and stakes. Tenet is a series of unmotivated decisions that occur because some offscreen future version of the characters dictate that they must, a film obsessed with plot and uninterested in making the audience care what happens, a story whose most interesting ideas could be lifted out of it with no impact. Nolan clearly wants viewers to watch Tenet over and over again so they can decipher the machinations and the visual cues, but why would anyone put themselves through this disorienting headache of a trial for a second time? Congratulations on your 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle, Nolan, but maybe make it a picture of something more interesting than a brick wall.
The legend of Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, holds that he consulted the wise algorithm for ideas about what original programming to produce, and he discovered that subscribers loved Kevin Spacey and David Fincher. Voila, House of Cards is born. Seven years later, Spacey has a lesser Q-rating, but the same smell of calculated imitation is all over Freaks. A hearty base of Stranger Things, some Dogtooth for indie cred, a seasoning of contemporary buzzwords for political relevance, and there’s your movie. Directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky have enough pull to entice well-known actors, and that seems to be the only reason this was released in theaters instead of buried on the SyFy channel. |
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