Tema: Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, 2021)

Spoiler:

"This is a movie about making revolutionary art (like the Matrix movies) in Hollywood and how Lana's not sure their message was able to survive the studios and fanbase. The worry is that studios made The Matrix counter-revolutionary by franchising it into toothlessness.

The first hour is Lana explaining why she didn't want to make the movie (a videogame in this case, as The Matrix spawned a bunch of videogames milking the property dry as well), and it's probably the most damning read on Rise of Skywalker I've heard. "They'll make the story no matter what, and if we do this for them we might empower the Matrix [the studio system] itself anyway." No greater evidence of this exists than Kylo Ren's mass murders and victims from TFA and TLJ being ignored so he could be elevated to co-protagonist in TRoS above people who previously had twice his screentime.

The Analyst is a sniveling, whiny misogynist because he represents primarily male industry market analysts. He works for "the Suits" who are trying to siphon as much energy out of people they can by creating conflict and self-doubt. He complains about not being able to control women the way he used to in a market where women used to purchase the majority of tickets as late as the 2010's but have increasingly tuned out and turned to television because they're being ignored.

Unlike the Suits, the Analyst understands how people work so he can completely fail over and over but he's the only one who has any ideas above the line on how to appeal to audiences, so he will always stay in control as long as the Matrix is in place and remains "productive." And the very existence of these figures from these conflicts creates the engagement he needs for the system to benefit. He'll keep selling us lightsabers in a franchise where the hero's greatest moment was throwing away his lightsaber and end the next trilogy with the hero wielding TWO lightsabers to kill the same villain they killed forty years ago.

His argument that people want the thrill of conflict to distract them from real problems but not the resolution of real change that shows them how to move forward is identical to the modern franchise system's reliance on endless iterations that ultimately repeat the same battles and eventually forget what the original cared about (see: Star Wars and those fucking lightsabers).

Io is where the reflection of Neo's self-doubt representing Lana is clearest. He sees many of the same struggles and thinks nothing has been done, but he doesn't see how new generations recognize how different the world is now than it was then. He may not have ended all struggle but he helped usher forward new forms of solidarity in the struggles he grew up in. The fight taught others what they could fight for.

This is why the movie needed Neo and Trinity to return. As Trinity said, they have another chance to keep trying and to keep doing better. Lana knows she may not have done enough but something was done. New conflicts will arise but new generations of people who otherwise would have felt unseen or ignored will continue to come together with the same hopes and causes that existed before.

One trope that modern storytellers are deconstructing/shitting on is the Chosen One narrative. By centering stories on one exceptional person, it draws energy from the imagination needed for larger movements that rely on countless people working together. But Trinity and Neo aren't needed in this plot to save people. Neo wants to save Trinity, who ends up awakening through the help of Bugs and saving herself by seeing her true power.

But this isn't a savior story, rather it is a story about the idea of saviors. In the third act, they could have accomplished the same thing if they killed Trinity -- the goal was simply to remove Neo and Trinity from the Matrix so they couldn't be used to prop it up. We want her to survive because she matters as an individual. In the same way Neo goes back for Morpheus and proves he's "The One," an aspect carried over to the entite cast of heroes who all return to rescue their friends from imminent doom no matter how small their part. These ideas of Chosen Ones and special inividuals are tools the Matrix (or in this case Hollywood systems of audience manipulation for profit) uses to pacify people away from grand organized revolutionary action... and it's also what the end of Reloaded tried to say the first time when Neo was revealed to be a product of the Matrix, a false Messiah constructed to empower the Matrix against humans.

And it's also why Smith is important to the plot. Or as he put it, "Anyone can be you, but I have always been anyone." One of the failures of Rise of Skywalker and the prequels was bending the narrative to the charismatic appeal of villains without identifying what made them villainous. Inevitably you might end up supporting the very people you're trying to fight. But Smith is an asshat made "even more perfect" by the Analyst, who doesn't actually want resolution but endless conflict and uses the appeal of a more charming Smith to keep audiences engaged. Smith remains resolute that he's always been a shitbird no matter how much people think he's compelling.

The movie even shits on the most charming villain in Reloaded, the Merovingian, a guy who literally does nothing in those movies but babble on with his thumb up his ass. By mocking his irrelevance and tearing him down, they highlight the tendency in franchises to create likeable villains just to keep audiences attentive without saying anything meaningful. But Smith makes it clear that his goals are no different just because he's been polished up... he's still an evil shit even if he hates another evil shit. And the Merovingian was always a babbling douchebag even though he used to dress nice and loved fancy things.

Morpheus is probably not as necessary to the plot, but he does give us a relatable AI hero who follows the characters around. And his creation by Neo while being composed of the identities that both awoke Neo to his path and were also awakened by Neo to a grander purpose was fairly effective. The problem is that Smith accomplishes this on his own, so some of the seams show.

Anyway, the movie does give itself a reason to exist. Mostly to critique the entire franchise, its spin-offs, and the kinds of stories it may have accidentally taught a generation to hold up. But it firmly takes a stance on the ideas it still wants people to take away even as it cedes ultimate power over the world to the people it considers the villains of the piece -- Warner Bros".