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The Matrix: Revisited

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With The Matrix: Resurrections coming in December, I figured it was a good time to re-watch the original trilogy. I loved the first movie ever since it first came out back in 1999, and have re-watched it many times. But it’s probably been a good 10-15 years since I re-watched Reloaded or Revolutions. I always felt that the sequels being as sub-par as they were ended up hurting the first movie in retrospect. Trading in the fairly straightforward narrative with a bunch of pseudo-philosophy didn’t work very well for me at 20 years-old, but I figured it might work better for 40 year-old me. Here’s what I found.

The Matrix – Still an all-time sci-fi-action classic. We’ve seen the enhanced fight scene countless times since 1999 in action films, and especially in comic book adaptations. Sure, some of the fight choreography comes off as a little stilted and over-planned when held up against some of the extremely high level stuff that’s made it to the mainstream since then. Also, the lobby shoot-out featuring our heroes wearing long, black coats and killing without remorse hits differently after witnessing the tragedy and horror of mass shootings far too many times in this country. But everything in this movie else just works.

The story of a beautiful stranger leading you out of the doldrums of your underwhelming life. A wise mage teaching you to see the world in an exciting new way. The idea that you are the Chosen One who can save the world. Practically-speaking, most of the effects still hold up. Whatever CGI that was used was well-blended into everything else happening on-screen. And everything from Neo finally choosing to stand and fight Agent Smith – an unstoppable opponent – in the subway, through Neo himself becoming an even more unstoppable opponent in the end still resonates, and gets the adrenaline pumping. Neo flying into the sky after warning the machines that he was going to destroy the Matrix from the inside is still a hell of a mic drop.

The Matrix: Reloaded – This was actually quite a bit better than I’d remembered it being. Yes, the Wachowskis’ started laying in the whole philosophical free-will-vs-determinism more heavily, but not enough to really sidetrack things. The story still moves along ay a nice pace, and the big action sequences still work a lot more than they don’t. However, it’s when they don’t work that you start to see things stretching at the seams. The fight between Neo and the army of Agent Smiths starts out awesome but, about halfway through the fight, the CGI gets much heavier, and clumsier. Neo’s and the Smiths’ clothing, and movements look very Playstation 1 quality, while their faces take a detour into the Uncanny Valley. This is still a cool scene, but the bad CGI took me out of the moment more than anything in the first film did.

The big car chase is the other major set-piece, and it is also mostly awesome. The phasing ability of the Twins – the Merovingian’s main henchmen – are utilized very cleverly. And it was great to see Morpheus have his own chance to take out an Agent after taking a beating by Smith in the first film. This scene also did a good job of showing how Neo’s growing belief in himself, leads other to believe in themselves just as strongly. But then the bad CGI strikes again, most egregiously when the poorly-rendered Agent jumps – again in super slow motion – onto a car like it’s a trampoline, and launches himself onto the top of a semi-truck to fight Morpheus. One could lay the blame on the state of CGI in 2003, which was clearly nowhere near as advanced as it is in 2021, but its issues could have been hidden better by using it in a more darkened setting, and not in mega-slow-motion.

The bigger problem with Reloaded was introducing a whole new cast of character in Zion, and trying to make the audience care about them. Frankly, the real world is the least interesting aspect of this series, and we’ll discuss how that hurt Revolutions even more when we get there. Maybe they could have put Morpheus on the Council to makes us care more about that aspect of things, but then you’re benching your best character in hopes of having him elevate the weaker scenes. I’m sure there’s a draft of the script where Morpheus plays exactly that role, but it was probably better to end up where they did.

To my surprise, though, Reloaded worked more than it didn’t. Even the droning talking heads scene where the Architect drop a ton of exposition explaining that Neo is only the latest in a long line of “Chosen Ones” and that the machines have destroyed Zion several times already in the past before “resetting” the world was more interesting to me this time around. In part because Neo managing to fry the Squidies at the end was very effective in raising his power level to the point where he could conceivably take out the Source and win the war, and end the cycle, once and for all.

The Matrix: Revolutions – This is where is really all went wrong for me. The failures of Revolutions actually diminished my opinion of Reloaded without me even realizing it. I mentioned the real world being the least interesting thing about the previous film. The first major problem is that about 75% of Revolutions’ run time takes place in the real world. Also, the inhabitants of Zion still never moved the needle for me, even having been introduced to most of them in Reloaded. The Squidies’ attack on Zion, and the humans’ using mechs with giant machine guns is a pretty cool action scene that ends up hitting the same one-note for most of the third act, which makes it feel weirdly static after a couple of cuts back to it.

But the real deal-breaker for me is still the way things turn out for Neo and the Source. The Wachowskis made something of an attempt to humanize (for lack of a better term) the AI in the Matrix by introducing a family of two programs who apparently had a baby program together. It lasted for all of one undercooked scene, and did not manage to form any emotional connection between myself and the machines.

Neo goes to the Machine City to seek out the Source and end the war. Trinity travel with him, only to be killed when their hovercraft crashes – which is amongst the least cool ways to kill off an iconic character. Neo then reaches the Source and offers a truce. Neo offers to take out Smith, who has grown into a virus that the matrix cannot cleanse itself of, in-exchange for leaving Zion alone. The Source agrees, and Neo does his part by seemingly sacrificing himself to stop Smith and reset the Matrix. At that point, the Source calls off its attack on Zion. Yes, Zion was under siege at the time, so Neo had to do what he could to stop that. But, to me, this was like a person making a peace treaty with a bullet.

Aside from the five minutes spent with the Program Family, the machines’ whole reason for existing seems to be hunting, enslaving, and devouring humankind. My problem here is that I don’t see how there could ever be lasting peace between two parties when one party retains all of the power, and that party actually needs to consume the other party to ensure its continued survival. The machines wiped out Zion a number of times before and, aside from the one job that they needed Neo to do for them, they could still wipe out the rest of humankind at pretty much any time they feel it is necessary. The only thing keeping this from happening is the assurance of an Artificial Intelligence for whom, by-definition, morals and ethics do not exist.

I ended up feeling the same way this time as I did 15 years ago: That, when Neo came face-to-“face” with the Source, he should have used the new power he demonstrated at the end of Reloaded to destroy the Source. Presumably, this would lead to the collapse of Machine City, the widespread deactivation of the machines, the destruction of the matrix, and the only real chance humanity would have to escape enslavement and re-claim the world.

I’ll be watching The Matrix: Resurrections when it hits theaters in December. I’m hoping it can offer a better resolution than Revolutions did, but I’m not overly-confident that it will. Revolutions was bad and, sadly, it being bad defeats the purpose of watching Reloaded since they are essentially two parts of the same film. But that first movie, The Matrix, is still worth revisiting again and again. Maybe, if we’re lucky, Resurrections can live up to its title, and earn Reloaded and Revolutions a second chance at redemption.

Justice League: The Snyder (Un)Cut

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Like millions of other people, I watched Zack Snyder’s Justice League (to be referred to in this blog post as The Snyder Cut) over the weekend on HBO Max. And like almost everyone else who watched it, I’ve decided to post some thoughts.

I watched it over two nights, splitting it to about two hours each night. The chapters that it was broken up into didn’t really seem like especially natural break points, so I set my own viewing schedule, since I didn’t really have any desire to burn through four hours in one sitting. This felt like the right way to watch it to me, so my viewing experience was probably about as good as it was going to get.

I will be getting into spoilers, so consider this your warning.

Unlike Snyder, I’ll be cutting to the chase, and getting immediately into my main gripe with the movie. This thing is every minute of four hours long, and the Justice League never actually throws down with Darkseid himself. The closest they get is tossing Steppenwolf’s decapitated body through a portal to Apokalypse. At which point, Darkseid essentially grunts, shrugs, and walks away. I found this to be massively disappointing, and that sentiment was only compounded by the fact that the last time we see Darkseid, he’s gathering up his armada to invade Earth. So, we’re left with a cliffhanger of a movie that – as of the writing of this blog – there are absolutely no plans to make a sequel to.

This all begs the question of what the extra $70 million dollars, and two hours were even for? I have a hard time imagining Warner Bros agreeing to pour that amount of additional budget, and give Snyder that amount of runtime, back when this was intended to just be the first part of a trilogy. I’d figured that the extra budget, and the extra 90 – 120 minutes were given to Snyder to film some sort of completed version of his Justice League story. Sadly, I was mistaken. This really was always just going to be the mega-over-stuffed version of his first-of-three movies.

This is not a breezy four hours, I’m not even sure four hours could ever be described as “breezy” regardless of what you happen to be doing. It felt like an hour of it was filled up just with all the slow-motion shots, and the actor reactions shots that lasted twice as long as they should have. This is especially egregious in the first two hours, which may best be summed up by the fact that Batman and The Flash don’t even put their costumes on until a full two hours into the movie. Superman doesn’t show up until a half-hour later than that.

There was also some strange stuff that could have been dropped from the film without losing any effect. There is a scene where Martian Manhunter, posing as Martha Kent, visits Lois Lane and gives her the sort of familial pep talk that would make complete sense for Ma Kent to give Lois as they were both grieving the loss of Clark. Why Snyder decided it it ought to be J’onn J’onzz rather than actually Martha is fairly confounding. Are we to assume this means Martha never bothered to check in on Lois after Clark died? That seems very un-Martha-like. Martian Manhunter also shows up at the very end of the third part of the epilogue, thus making this earlier appearance redundant.

Willem Dafoe also shows up in a terrible wig, while Amber Heard shows up with a terrible faux British accent for scenes with Jason Momoa that don’t line-up with the Aquaman solo movie that came out two years ago. Dafoe’s wig was much better in the solo movie, and Heard wisely dropped the fake accent. Snyder also spend several scenes setting up a reason why S.T.A.R Labs would need to be evacuated when a giant Biohazard Warning flashes on every monitor in the building. It seems pretty self-evident that you ought to clear out of your high-tech super-science lab when you see there’s a biohazard warning, so laying that groundwork was completely unnecessary.

With all that said, this version is superior to The Whedon Cut in every way. And – I’ll even do you one better – despite everything that I wrote above, I rather enjoyed The Snyder Cut. For one thing, it’s a much more cohesive, and comprehensive (one could easily argue too comprehensive) story. Apart from my desire to see a true Darkseid vs Justice League Rumble, my expectations were pretty low, which I’m sure helped with my experience.

The Flash and Cyborg’s characters and stories are fleshed out a lot more in The Snyder Cut. In fact, my biggest surprise was that most of The Flash’s scenes were lifted almost directly from this for The Whedon Cut. My guess is that the suits at WB saw those scenes and decided they wanted the whole movie to be more like them. Meanwhile, Cyborg gets a full character arc, while also showing the audience all the things that he’s actually capable of. Not only with his cool robot-parts blaster stuff, but also in cyberspace and some sort of loosely-defined mechanical telepathy.

Steppenwolf is presented as more frighteningly bestial in The Snyder Cut, which really plays into his favor. He’s also given a motivation that is, at least, partially revealed. Apparently, he failed on some big mission that got him into the boss’s doghouse, and needs to conquer 50,000 planets to get himself back out of it. Despite my disappointment of no true Big Bad Battle, I was glad that Darkseid was actually in this movie. His presence does add an extra threat level that wasn’t really present in The Whedon Cut. The flashback to Darkseid’s first attempted invasion from thousands of years ago plays much the same as The Whedon Cut, except with Darkseid himself leading the charge. Again, having it be him rather than his leg-breaker Steppenwolf makes everything about the battle matter more.

Also, everything in The Snyder Cut is bigger, and more open then in The Whedon Cut. The battle over the Mother Box with the Amazons on Themyscira happens more in the wide-open spaces of the island. It also includes many more Amazons and Parademons, both of whom seriously boost the scale of the scene.

Big, establishing shots, and other wide shots are more prevalent in The Snyder Cut. There were several times where I had to shake my head at the amount of money the studio flushed down the toiler when they cut them from the initial theatrical release. All-in-all, it’s much less claustrophobic than The Whedon Cut. Which is a good thing, because one word you never want used to describe your massive, franchise, tent-pole film is “claustrophobic.”

The three part epilogue is one part wrap-up, one part set-up, and one part post-apocalyptic nonsense. The first part is shots of all the heroes doing their hero thing while an inspirational message that Dr. Silas Stone recorded for his son plays in the background. It was a nice little flourish with some much needed optimism after the grimdark of the proceeding 3+ hours.

The second part was a slightly different version of Deathstroke visiting a newly-escaped Lex Luthor on the latter’s yacht than we got in The Whedon Cut. The difference was that, instead of Luthor suggesting they make “a league of their own” he flat-out just tells Deathstroke that Batman is Bruce Wayne. I assume this was meant to set-up Ben Affleck’s long-since abandoned Batman solo film, and was therefore completely irrelevant.

The third part was another dream/premonition of Bruce Wayne’s that takes place in the “Knightmare” future from Batman V Superman, and that was also alluded to during Superman’s resurrection scene earlier in The Snyder Cut. By Snyder’s self-admission, it was not much more than an excuse to have Batman and the Joker share a scene together. But it’s a rather pointless scene, with eye-rolling dialogue that hints at a future that will likely never come to pass in the DC Movie Multiverse. Honestly, I felt he could have just stopped after the first part of the epilogue and left it at that.

Judging by the reception to – and apparent number eyeballs on – The Snyder Cut, I wouldn’t be completely shocked if they actually do let Zack Snyder make at least one more Justice League movie. They are starting to lean into the whole Multiverse idea, after all, so it wouldn’t have to alter the current direction of their shared continuity. But, going off of Snyder’s own description of what JL 2 and JL 3 would have looked liked, it’s probably too close to the story that was told across Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

In a nutshell, JL 2 would be Darkseid’s army invading and conquering Earth when Superman succumbs to the Anti-Life Equation after Lois Lane is killed. This would also result in the deaths of Wonder Woman and Aquaman, which were shown as part of Cyborg’s visions while bringing Superman back from the dead. And JL 3 would have been Cyborg sending the Flash back in-time to ensure that Batman sacrifices himself to save Lois, so Superman doesn’t lose the will to live, and leads the world, alongside also still-alive Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and Flash to victory against Darkseid. So, if there were to be more, it would need to be revised to better differentiate itself from Marvel Studios’ magnum opus. Which, after hearing some of Snyder’s other specific future plot points, is really for the best.

In the end, I guess I liked more of The Snyder Cut than I disliked. With that said, Snyder himself has again demonstrated that he doesn’t truly understand these superheroes enough to make a truly great movie with them. His Justice League Batman is eons better than his BvS version, and his Cyborg was pretty solid as well. But Patty Jenkins has a much better grasp of what people respond to about Wonder Woman. James Wan better tapped into the gonzo, fantasy adventure myth-building fun that made Aquaman finally work. And the brain trust at The CW have had better luck bringing out the traits, and stories that fans love about the Flash and Superman. Still, my opinion is that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is worth a watch. Even if that watch takes you three or four nights to complete.

I’ve updated my DC Multiverse Movies ranking list to add The Snyder Cut, and it lands right around the middle of the pack.. Whether that’s praise of this film, or a knock against the others, is the topic of a separate conversion.

Go To War For ‘Warrior’

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“It’s Deadwood, but with Kung Fu!”
I’d bet dollars-to-donuts that was the elevator pitch for the Cinemax (now HBO Max) series ‘Warrior.’ And, if that’s enough to get you to watch it, then my work here is done. But if you need more reasons, then I’ll do my best to provide them below.
I’ll state this right off-the-bat, I’ll be going into some spoilers, but nothing that should affect your enjoyment of – or investment in – the show.

Here’s the jumping off point: Ah Sahm arrives in 1870’s San Francisco from China. When confronted with some racist dickweeds, he promptly whoops their asses with ease. This puts a damper on his plans to take a job as a “coolie” – a derogatory term for an unskilled laborer – building railroad tracks.

Fortunately for him, Wang Chao pulls him away from the ruckus with a seemingly better deal. Chao is that character you find in these types of stories who knows everyone, plays every side, and always has an exit plan in his back pocket. His exit plan for Ah Sahm, less fortunately for him, involves selling the man to the Hop Wei to serve as a “hatchet man” or enforcer.

The Hop Wei is a Tong, essentially a Chinese crime family, who are currently in the midst of navigating their way around two other Tongs in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Father Jun is the hard-ass head of the family. But his son, Young Jun, takes an immediate liking to Ah Sahm when he finds out just how well he can “Scrap.” Scrapping is fighting and, yes, some of the vernacular of the period gets a bit overplayed (especially another one that I’ll get to shortly). But that’s just a small complaint.

Young Jun is a bit restless, and has a tough time keeping his thoughts about maybe being more fit to run the Hop Wei than his father is to himself. At any rate, he promptly takes Ah Sahm to the local hot spot (i.e brothel) run by Ah Toy. At the brothel is where we learn one more, very colorful term that you’ll hear a lot – “getting sticky.” Considering where they are when you hear this euphemism, you can likely figure out what it means. Ah Sahm bonds pretty quickly with Ah Toy, who has a very cool after-hours hobby of her own that I won’t spoil here. But she earns Ah Sahm’s trust enough to learn the reason why he came to Chinatown: To find his sister.

It doesn’t take long for his to find his sister in the last place he’d expect. She’s (unofficially) running one of the other Tongs: The Long Zii. Mai Ling fled to America years before to escape an arranged marriage to an abusive warlord. A marriage she was forced into to save Ah Sahm’s life, which she is absolutely nurturing a big-time grudge over. But she’s also planning to take down the Hop Wei using group of people who might as well be gangsters: The politicians.

Mai Ling has secret meetings with Walter Buckley, who is running his own schemes alongside the fairly incompetent Mayor Samuel Blake. Blake is married to Penny, in an arrangement not unlike Mai Ling’s. Penny’s formerly wealthy father’s business has been free-falling, so she volunteered to marry the mayor in order to get a city contract to pump back up her father’s financials. The wheelings and dealings of city officials, and broke businessmen bring us back around to cheap labor, and coolies. Which, in-turn, bring us to the truest villains of the story.

The Irish laborers have fallen on hard times, and are not helped by the fact that the Chinese are willing to work for a lot less money. Coupled with the fact that the manufacturers are more-then-willing to pay as little as possible, makes for a lethal combination. There is a level of vicious racism on display here that, up until recent years, we were happy to pretend no longer existed in this country. The silver lining is that we get to watch these guys get kicked in the face pretty regularly by Ah Sahm, and others.

The exception to this is the character meant to singularly represent all this heinous bigotry, and “patriotic” fury: Dylan Leary. Leary is an undefeated bare-knuckles boxer in his spare time, though most of his free time is spent riling up anyone without earshot about the Chinese “parasites” who don’t belong in this country, and are stealing their livelihoods. This line of bullshit probably sounds all-too familiar these days, as people like Leary still exist today, and will never stop sounding the drums of a race war.

Putting the least amount of effort possible into preventing this race war, the city creates a Chinatown Squad that consists of all of five cops. Only two of these cops really matter to the story. The first is Sgt. “Big Bill” O’Hara, who’s seen more than his share of Chinatown vices. Most of which comes from his own gambling addiction that puts him in the crosshairs of the Fung Hai Tong. O’Hara is your classic used-to-be-a-good-cop who will eventually find his way into trying-to-be-a-good-cop-again territory thanks to the other pertinent member of the Chinatown Squad: Officer Richard Lee.

Officer Lee is a transplant from the south, who made his way so far from home for reasons that are addressed near the end of season 1. He’s a good deal more open-minded than pretty much any other white character on the show, besides Penny, which is a bit of a twist considering his geographic origins. He also dabbles in some shockingly modern crime scene investigation techniques. If there was one character besides Ah Sahm who could support their own show, it would probably be Lee.

Ironically, Lee was likely given his name as an homage to the man who wrote the actual original pitch for the show: Bruce Lee. ‘Warrior’ was something he tried to get off the ground back in the early-70’s, but it never happened. I expect this was due to America not being ready for a TV show with a predominantly Asian cast at the time, and Lee’s own tragic, untimely death. But his daughter Shannon Lee is a producer, and she’s brought along the creative team from another Cinemax show that featured weekly ass-beatings: ‘Banshee’

Which bring us full circle back to the Kung Fu. If that long list of characters and their relationships to one another seems a bit dense, fear not, it’s all dished out in easily digestible segments between awesome scrapping, and getting sticky. The fight choreography is as good, if not better, than anything I’ve ever seen on TV, and they give you two or three of these fight scenes every episode. I mentioned Deadwood earlier, but the way the characters speak to one another is more akin to the lighter, snappier dialogue of Justified (itself a modern western).

The title of this blog post is Going to War For ‘Warrior.’ But really, the war in this case is just to sit back, fire up your HBO Max, and plow through the first two seasons that you find there. It was recently re-located from Cinemax, and not yet renewed for a third season. I expect they’re waiting to see how many eyeballs they can get on the show before decided whether or not to renew.

So do yourself a favor, and get your eyeballs on one of the most purely entertaining TV shows that I’ve watched in years.