18 years on, the aging protagonists with sighs and tired eyes to prop up the same old "The Matrix 4": no new crisis, no new technology, no new philosophy. Without new questions, there are naturally no new answers.
Author: Liang Xiang
Edit: Blue Two
Layout: Wang Wei
Keanu Reeves is old. This was the first thought when watching Matrix 4: Matrix Reboot.
In 1999, the first "Matrix" turned out to be a shocking special effects screen, action fights, future imagination, and philosophical core to crush the film and television market at that time, and the global box office reached 170 million US dollars. It refreshes the audience's inherent understanding of the theme and production of the film, and is a solid landmark work in the history of film. Keanu Reeves was 35 years old.
Four years later, The Matrix 2: Reloaded was released in the same year as The Matrix 3: The Matrix Revolution, ending this matrix epic that took place in the near future in the form of a trilogy. In the movie, 39-year-old Keanu Reeves, for the peace of the new world, bears the heavy title of "savior" and disappears into the matrix. His departure made him a god. This is a necessary exit for a hero, and it is also a necessary end to a god-level film and television IP.
Not all good, all worth coming back.
But the word myth is always uplifting. After 18 years, "The Matrix 4: Matrix Reboot" was released, triggering a collective carnival of old movie fans. After the grand opening, what comes into view is the decadent figure of Keanu Reeves who is nearly sixty years old. Just as decadent as the movie itself. Disappointments rose and fell, and word of mouth fell off a cliff.
It's not that all movies favor youth, some movies are like wine, and they will become more mellow with the passage of time. It's just that "The Matrix 4" did not find a good landing point between the green and the yellow, but instead inspired the "midlife crisis" style of three deadly sins: nostalgia, compromise, and indifference.
Nostalgia: Stuck in the past
For science fiction works, the degree of foresight of the future world determines its breadth, and the logic of the formation of the future world determines its depth.
Imagining the future is simple and simple, saying that it is difficult is difficult, and countless science fiction works are trying to deduce it. Whether it is alien invasion, artificial AI rebellion, or even the scene of planting potatoes on Mars has a point of view; it is not easy to give a logical explanation, and the unified answer that science fiction fans can get is nothing more than: human arrogance, the depletion of earth's resources, the replacement of the flesh by machinery, and the exploration of new homes. But the most difficult thing is how to explore the transition period between the two civilizational worlds, in the middle of the fault zone, while reflecting on the demise of the old civilization, while predicting the birth of a new era. The Matrix gives epic answers on this level.
Imagine a scenario where one day you wake up from a dream and for a moment you can't tell which side is the dream and which side is the reality. You walk down the street and everyone you meet is real, your pain, your pleasure, your family, your workplace, chicken feathers, but it's not that bad. Until you are suddenly pulled away by a mysterious person who gives you two pills to make a choice—
"What you think is real is actually an illusion. Eat the blue pill and you can continue to live in this false world; eat this red pill and you will wake up and see the real world. ”
What is true and what is false? This philosophy of Zhuang Zhou Mengdi has existed since ancient times. And "The Matrix" embodies it as a suspenseful sci-fi proposition, and as the protagonist chooses, the truth peels off layer by layer: 35-year-old Keanu Reeves eats a red pill and finds himself awake in a container filled with nutrient solution, surrounded by naked humans sleeping in instruments with catheters inserted in them, and the world is dominated by machinery. It turned out that everything he had experienced before was a virtual illusion of data in his mind — very similar to the recently popular concept of "metaverse".
What to do, to rebel against the machine with an awakened human being, or to return to that eternal dream to live a perfect but false life?
Fight for the free will of human beings.
Keanu Reeves' choice, there is blood, there is a flashpoint. It is also this temperament that has achieved the youthful feeling of the "Matrix" trilogy: in 1999, like a prophet, he told a truth that shocked the world, but the picture turned around, and the elements with powerful energy such as freedom, fearlessness, faith, and love constituted the protagonist's action line. As the plot extends, we find that the truth is also diverse: the "reality" of the protagonist's awakening is also included in the mechanical plan, and the so-called "freedom" and "savior" are all conspiracies of mechanical upgrading and self-renewal. But the coldness of philosophy does not freeze the heart, because the blood is hot, the air through which the protagonist runs is hot, and the sun that rises after the hero falls is hot. This is the greatest tolerance that the Matrix trilogy can present at the level of science fiction: it makes you reflect on reality, makes you afraid of the truth, but also makes you face the future positively. A well-deserved science fiction epic.
After the epic is over, what's left?
The answer given in the fourth part of the "Matrix" trilogy, which captures believers with innovation, is: look back.
So, when viewers walk into The Matrix 4 with the expectation of seeing a larger world, they find that it has no new story: world peace, a game called "Matrix" that looms to reveal some of the past, and 58-year-old Keanu Reeves is disheveled and told that "you were once a savior". Dazed and shaken, he looked back and saw that the woman he loved was already a wife and had two children. If you want to break all this, you have to break it. Because all this is an illusion, you need to save humanity from the apparition.
Eighteen years later, The Matrix 4 is still exploring "real" and "unreal." The theme has not changed, the worldview has not changed, and even the protagonist team has hardly changed. But the protagonists are all old. They propped up the same old Matrix 4 with sighs and tired eyes: no new crises, no new technologies, no new philosophies. Without new questions, there are naturally no new answers.
What's even more dramatic is that the film constantly gives the audience a plot flashback of "The Matrix 1-3" with a very dense frequency: classic characters reappear, classic scenes reappear again and again... Nostalgia is a sentiment, but the treatment of filling with past fragments is to instrumentalize nostalgia. Like a man in a deep middle-aged crisis, dressed improperly, self-conscious and self-conscious, he does not match the preface, but he pulls you who still have feelings for him, and constantly repeats his past glory. Of course, he's also not so disconnected: picking classic hotspots that seem to be talked about by everyone from popular elements makes himself still seem relevant to the times. This kind of shaking cleverness, on the contrary, appears greasy.
From this point of view, the planning of "The Matrix 4" at the audience level is a huge failure: the fans are serious, but the fans do not recognize it; new audiences can't understand it, so it is better to directly re-watch the first part of "The Matrix". Its existence has become a chicken rib, and there is no inheritance in the scene of the new era, and there is no better future.
Compromise: Passive resistance
If "The Matrix 4" has a large number of flashback shots of the past, it is a kind of middle-aged nostalgia, then the first half hour of the opening is to convey a middle-aged compromise through lines.
Have you ever seen a movie complaining about the capital power behind you in the plot, "The Matrix 4" is:
"Times have changed and the market is sluggish, and our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy. They told me that they would do a sequel with or without us. They made it clear that if we didn't cooperate, they would terminate our contract. ”
It is not difficult to imagine whether the naked lines that appear in the movie also appear in reality.
Of course, in some funny films that like spoofs, such a treatment will make people laugh, but the "Matrix" series is known for its grand and serious science fiction issues, and the teasing and satire that appears hastily does not complete the surrender, and the audience is included in the B camp, but instead makes people stay away with an unpleasant posture.
When it comes to the most famous place of the "Matrix" series, it is indeed necessary to put the philosophical level back a little - the main creative team is very commercial film-minded, even in the future science fiction world, there are many action scenes and emotional entanglements. In particular, the action shots account for a huge proportion of the trilogy, and the Chinese kung fu is matched with laser gun battles, and the "bullet time" of dodging bullets at the lower waist is particularly broken.
If The Matrix 4 can't tell a better story, at least at the action level, there should be a new breakthrough, right?
The answer is obvious.
The word great is relative and needs to be grounded in time. If in 1999, "The Matrix" was amazing in production, then in 2021, the screen and special effects of "The Matrix 4" can only belong to the network texture. Not to mention the action scenes of the middle-aged protagonist team, even the most classic "bullet time" has become a secondary self-imitation, and there is no new branding.
And all this, the main creative team has long been premonitioned, while compromising, while resisting, through lines and hints, projecting their emotions. As a result, we see the passive resistance of a man in a midlife crisis: seemingly unwilling to be honest but laissez-faire, seemingly self-deprecating but lazy, seemingly paying tribute to the classics but actually powerless to innovate. The Matrix was originally about a mechanical matrix that could not achieve innovation, enslaved and manipulated humans, and used the awakening of human beings to complete the self-renewal story. There, humanity strives against machinery to prove that free will exists, love exists, and that the world needs the development of human intelligence, not mechanical reproduction. Inspired by the trilogy, countless people are deeply thinking about themselves and the future.
On the contrary, in "The Matrix 4", this incapable reproduction of the story, personally greeted the mechanical civilization that was originally to be fought, and pulled the savior off the quagmire of mediocrity.
It is a compromise, and it is also the greatest sorrow under the midlife crisis.
Indifference: Bursting into silence
The Matrix trilogy is revolutionary, using forward-looking images to reveal a certain possibility of the future, while also asking the oldest stylistic theory: Is the world real, do I exist, can I be free? These philosophical issues are conveyed by advanced technology and cool pictures, embedded in the popular culture of contemporary people.
In the world it presents, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, can actually be anyone. For it is not a story of discovering a savior, but a story of a man who, under various choices, chooses to become a savior. Putting aside the fatalism of the latter two parts, Neo has fought at every intersection, as has been the case in human history.
Therefore, the biggest problem with "The Matrix" is that it is too self-contained, and everyone except the protagonist is a passerby. The Savior literally saved the world, but he also ignored it.
If the "Matrix" trilogy is not worth mentioning because of its novel worldview and stimulating adrenaline action scenes, then in "The Matrix 4", this disregard is magnified: except for the savior, everyone else is a tool man. Someone is responsible for reporting the letter, someone is responsible for guiding, someone is responsible for the training, and someone is responsible for the final showdown. Even the heroine's love is a kind of established laying.
Back in 1999's The Matrix, the heroine Trinity is cool, stylish, and powerful, but she's still just a passive character who is prophesied to "you'll fall in love with the savior." The audience does not know her life experience, can not see how her heart weighs, how to run to this fateful love. As a result, in "The Matrix 4", trinity, who is also middle-aged, actually has a huge digging point, especially when she is bound by a fake marriage given by the machine and is pregnant with two children.
Salvation mainly saves the world, how do women escape their families?
This was supposed to be a very realistic entry point, but it was ignored by the plot. We see a man in a midlife crisis stumbling through a heroic rescue, and this "beauty" naturally falls in love with him because he is a hero. Under the indifference, such a self-confidence seems arrogant.
Also ignored are, of course, the audience. With full of expectations, the audience waited for 18 years and saw a new era old movie with internal contradictions, constant classic flashbacks, inability to innovate, perspective self, broken cans, like a man who suffered a mid-life crisis, while chattering about the past, while reaching out to grab box office money.
It is true that different eras have different contexts, and even under the control of capital, everything may burst out of sound. Treating IP as a cash cow, too market-oriented dog-tailed mink, may destroy not only a matrix, but even spread to a deeper and wider universe. The audience may not be able to shake anything, the film and television practitioners may not be able to shake anything, but they can expect, need to expect, when a sufficient number of people wake up first, there will be a prophet to guide THE ONE to wake up from the chaotic illusion.
This is the savior of film and television.