What separates the best action movies from good action movies? Of course they require all the usual narrative nuts and bolts that any good story has: character, pacing, conflict, etc. But the purview of the action genre necessitates something beyond that, call it a physical puzzle, a definite set of limits and expectations within which the protagonist can act on the world. In Die Hard, it's John McClane in the vents with no shoes. In Inception, it's dreams within dreams. A large part of the enjoyment in these films comes from a quasi-participatory witnessing of the action, and the subsequent reaction, within the limits of the established scenario. It's a speculative pleasure which rewards our imaginations by validating their hypotheses. It's akin to the pleasure of catching a ball; you predict its trajectory based on observations of speed and direction, you move to the location, rearrange your body, and catch it. I don't know why this is pleasurable, but it is. Likewise, I don't know why watching action protagonists act and be reacted to in consistent ways is pleasurable, but it also is.
Catching balls and good action scenarios are what have been called hard magic systems. In other words, a system in which the rules are clearly established and respected. Feel free to replace the word "magic" with a more universal word like "logic." I don't consider "hard logic" necessary for the making of a good movie, or good action within a movie. The Lord of The Rings is a good example of a movie with a soft magic system that still has enjoyable action. It's great watching Gandalf banish the Balrog, even if you have no idea what he's doing or how. But I do consider a hard system necessary for the making of a good action movie. Again, I'm not sure why this is the case, but anecdote can prove the point. Imagine any action movie where the protagonist violates the laws of the system to win. There are names for this. Deus ex machina is one. Sloppy writing is another. In both cases, it feels like a disappointment of imagination.
Action should always be a function of plot, but there exists an additional level of artistry in which the action becomes an extension of premise as well. One becomes a reflection of the other, and they are mutually reinforcing. In this case the action is elevated to the realm of the metaphorical. For example, in Inception, the characters aren't literally firing guns (although we get to experience the lizard-brained pleasure of watching them do so), they're overcoming psychic processes. This subliminal unification likewise unifies us with the result of the action, inasmuch as we are sympathetic to the protagonist's goals within the premise. The catharsis of witnessing the completion of the physical movement is enhanced by and enhances the catharsis of witnessing the overcoming of the main conflict. This is what makes these films so indefatigably watchable, and paragons of their craft.
I think you could make an argument that this is the greatest action movie ever made, as justified by the arguments above.
To start, the premise is immediately intriguing. The year is 1999, and after the "End of History” the Western World, denied an external edifying nemesis, had spent a decade wallowing in its own consumptive malaise, the daily humiliation of exchange, and the structures of control enforcing it. The primary experience had become a vaguely perceived prison of pleasantness, devoid of want, but also of meaning and authentic life. A prison that the prisoners were invited, encouraged, to recreate for themselves, simply by executing on the same familiar patterns. Existence was reduced to an input into an endless pointless self-perpetuating system. At the same time, a terrible violence lingered just out of sight, but waiting to spontaneously manifest in the figure of variously uniformed state agents, should anyone wander too far from their constraints. The only conceivable goal of anyone imprisoned within was to be freed from the whole ruse entirely.
The fact that you can't tell whether I'm describing the plot of the film or the world into which it was released demonstrates how perfectly it observed its own context. These ideas aren't new. The Wachowskis ripped off The Revolution of Everyday Life* almost verbatim. What makes this telling so superb, and so superbly cinematic, are the metaphorical flourishes used: the idea that the dehumanization of the system reduces its participants to literal batteries**; the characterization of the antagonists as literal machines; and, perhaps most importantly, the system as produced by computers. The brilliance of this conception of world-as-production-of-computation is that it takes an all-encompassing, reality-defining, and therefore potentially invisible, system and represents it as a symbol that we can then see and understand (it substitutes the simulacrum for the simulated). In doing so, it defines the outlines of an opponent that might otherwise exist entirely and merely as a constant feeling of discontent. People who may not have the language to understand society as a social system of hierarchic oppression and exploitation can do so via the language of computers and computation.
Furthermore, the idea of computation captures an essential aspect of the system it's critiquing. Computation isn't generally considered intentional. It's a given output for a given set of inputs. If you were asked: who imprisons you? Could you produce a definite answer? Probably not. A boss might come to mind, or a specific cadre of politicians, or a vaguely despised celebrity figure. But that's not really the answer, not entirely. They're simply facets of a pathological system, acting out their role. Your oppressor is not your boss, herself, but the power of bosses, the role of bosses, a byproduct of the hierarchy of the world. Less intention than a consequence of the algorithm that organizes society.
The concept of computation also lends a convenient "hard" system for the action. The power of the Agents is that they're playing with a stacked deck of inputs. However, as Morpheus says, the system that produces limits also produces its own limits. As such, the power of The One derives from the rejection of those rules -- specifically, the rejection of ones own belief in them. The action underscores the message that Neo, freed from his old beliefs, has transcended the system, and is therefore outside the laws of computation. A freed mind is no longer an unthinking machine. And thus, when Neo defeats Agent Smith, he does so not by having greater inputs (as is so often the case in Marvel movies, where, absent any obvious change, the hero simply decides to out-punch the villain), it is by refusing to submit to the rules of the system at all. It is, then, the dual, mutually-reinforcing, pleasures of watching a hero succeed literally against the villain and metaphorically against the premise.
Tragically, these same aspects are a large part of what doom the sequels. The premise became too lofty and the action became disappointing.
The premise works best when it's simpler. Everyone can relate to the cloying monotony of clocking into an office job and the liberating fantasy of flying into your boss and exploding him from the inside. Beyond that, the ideas get bogged down in the mire of free will and destiny and everything becomes too conceptual and confusing. The ending of the first movie was perfect in that it only teased at the ultimate resolution. Neo's monologue into the phone line was met with silence, presumably to signify that the future was now uncharted, and the machines knew only that they were fucked, but not in what way or to what extent. Then Reloaded begins and they're.... back in the Matrix? To do.... something. Also now there's a French man with a mansion who has werewolves. Not to suggest that there's not a coherent (if impenetrable) symbolism to all of it (the Merovingian himself could be a nod to the idea that the proletariat must return to feudal ideas of a unitary man to supersede the exchange-based life of the bourgeoisie), but at that point it's hard to follow the symbolism and metaphor.
Regarding the action, explain this to me: once Neo becomes The One, how does any program ever land a hit on him again? Is it even necessary that he stoop to the level of punching guys? Or could he just unmake them with a wave of his hand? If punching is required, does Neo not at that point exist essentially outside of time? By our own expectations, he should be shadow-stepping around like Akuma and shit-housing every agent in the span of a nanosecond. The fact that he does not do any of this, and instead we are forced to suffer through watching him float around like a gumby man kicking potato sacks, is the surest and most disappointing betrayal of our imaginations. I understand that the action-as-metaphor constraint prohibits the invincibility of the protagonist where plot still needs to happen--or does it? I'm not interested in speculating on what could have been here. Or at least, only inasmuch as it demonstrates how the premise got away from the action, the unity was disrupted, and the results speak for themselves.
A Matrix sequel under duress. As such, it's at its worst when that's what it is. It's at its best when it's a reflection on the impact of the Matrix Trilogy, on its creator, the public, and in the context of franchises and sequels.
You can see this in the initial premise. Neo is again Thomas Anderson toiling away at his software job, except this time he's the creator of a wildly successful video game (named "The Matrix") the success of which defines his life. His differing antagonists presumably mirror those of Lana Wachowski. The "Matrix" that oppresses him is no longer simply an authoritarian boss demanding that he be at his desk on time, it's his parent company, Warner Brothers, demanding that he make a sequel to his hit IP from decades ago. Subtlety was never the strong suit of the Wachowskis. Agent Smith is no longer an ambassador of state violence, but now a business partner who informs Neo that Warner Brothers is going to make a Matrix sequel with or without him, so he had better stop work on a new passion project and get on board.
This is followed by a montage of hacks (all self-professed Matrix fanatics) in boardrooms talking over Mr. Anderson to brainstorm sequel ideas that completely miss the point of the original Trilogy and focus only on the aspects that made it an action blockbuster. I can't condone the condescension to other creatives here, but I can appreciate the blatant and total contempt Lana has for the studio system and its pathological drive to exploit IP. It's always funny to me that the suits (our main antagonist often refers to his machine bosses as "the suits") allow movies to make fun of them like this. I guess it doesn't matter as long as a man named Keanu Reeves is in a movie called "The Matrix" around Christmas time. Or rather, that concession acts as another form of control. The "suits" know that this kind of impotent and undirected rage only serves as release valve on the pressure cooker of life, an illusory but satisfying rebellion.
The "real-world" plot (that is, the in-universe world outside the Matrix) is a reflection on Revolutions, as a reflection on revolution writ large. A character says to newly re-liberated Neo, "the story doesn't end just because you do." Which is a sentiment not usually expressed within the strict ideological confines of Hollywood, but makes perfect sense. What did we expect to happen after Neo defeated Agent Smith in Revolutions? Likewise, what should we expect as the aftermath of any violent revolution? Certainly not peace and harmony. Especially in cases where entrenched power is threatened. It never simply accepts the dying of the light. In this case, the "real" power (of the machines) began a civil war for the now scarce resource of human biofuel and the system of control that power used to exploit that resource had to similarly adapt to the new explosion of revolutionary anomaly.
You could without trouble see the Matrix Trilogy as a parable for the proliferation of any number of deviant and liberating ideas and the resultant counter-revolution they provoke. What Resurrections correctly observes is that once the system realizes it can't suppress these ideas, it's as happy to absorb and repurpose them. Popular culture is a graveyard for all truly revolutionary ideas. You can see this most blatantly in the appropriation and castration of 60s counter-culture into silly hippies and tie dye shirts. The reactionary forces of the Matrix have done exactly that. They resurrected Neo and Trinity and reinserted them into the Matrix as facets of the system itself. They took the liberating and threatening ideas of rebellion and neutered them by regurgitating them back to the public in forms appropriate to control, a video game in this case, and smothered their violence in the erasure of pop psychology vagaries.
Neo experiences this as an irresistible feeling of unease, waved away with a healthy dose of tranquilizing blue pills, breathing exercises, and dissolution in meaninglessly psycho-therapeutic terminology. And, in a more sinister way, in the flattery of comfort that comes from success within the system. As perhaps we all do. The same teenagers who felt revolutionary joy in the original Trilogy have now presumably been bribed off by decent careers, mortgages, wives, kids, etc., the gentle systems of control which need not resort to the violence which backs them. The unease they feel can be confounded in purpose and origin by an infinite well of shallow pop-psych clickbait simultaneously proclaiming them a unique and spontaneously powerful anomaly of existence and deriding them for their laziness in not adopting the 5 habits of the most successful venture capitalists. A virtual army of equivocations rises to obscure you from yourself. Again, this film seems like a well-observed reflection of its time.
So what's bad about it? Everything that is not meta-commentary on the existence of the movie itself, which is unfortunately the bulk of what you will watch when watching this movie. Keanu Reeves, for whatever vacuous charm he used to have, is now getting on in years, exhibited in both his line delivery (ranging from kind of tired to very tired) and his performance in action scenes, which could be described as "elderly man asks you to stop hitting him." All the plot about the "real" world and robots and freedom fighters, etc., feels very rushed and almost not there at all. I know the basics, but even after two and a half hours I couldn't really tell you what's happening there or why. Or like, why there even still is a Matrix, besides the fact the you need it for the movie to happen.
The action choreography is really uninspired. I'm talking old Buffy the Vampire Slayer levels. I shit you not, in one scene where Neo is basically The One again, and is doing his thing on about 25 S.W.A.T. guys at once, you can see in the background one of his entourage hit a dude with a chair, wild west style.
However, is that the rub? It's bad because it's supposed to be bad? If Lana had no qualms about exposing her contempt for the people who made her make this movie, would she not be equally willing to expose her contempt for the audience who ultimately are the people who condemned her to make this? Surely she appreciates the people on whom the original trilogy had real psychological impact, those who liked it for more than just the "bullet time" and kung fu. But those people are surely the minority, given the general slack-jawed cinema-going public at large. "Bullet time" is, in fact, a thing the villian co-opts to nearly defeat Neo in this movie. As if to say, "Oh, you like bullet time? Here, choke on it!" As if to say, "I bet you swine were clamoring for another Matrix movie full of cool fight scenes, weren't you? Well, here it is. With the most boring and unsatisfying fight scenes I could make without being removed from the project." A commentary on the idea that, 20 years later, after the immeasurable impact of the Matrix on nearly every piece of pop culture, action or otherwise, there could still be anything to explore in the Matrix IP. I'm not sure it could be anything else. The Wachowskis showed they had nearly perfected action scenes 20 years ago. How could they have forgotten so thoroughly? It must be intentional. And if so, it's a Kaufman-esque prank I thoroughly respect.
That doesn't mean I recommend the movie, because it's subversion is ultimately its own self-destruction. The smug self-satisfaction you'll get from recognizing these themes won't make you any less uncomfortable for two hours of poorly-paced, badly-shot, barely-acted, scenes of nonsense. And maybe that's the point. If Lana couldn't kill Neo as a hero, she'll kill him as a villain.
As long as he rests in peace.
i. I've been told that Simluation and Simulacra was the ideological inspiration for the Wachowskis. Having read part of both books, I see much more direct resonance with The Revolution of Everyday Life. I would recommend reading both.
ii. I originally started writing this email to talk about how I considered it a real tragedy that the script didn't contain the original idea (that the machines were using human brains for extra processing power) and not the ludicrous, physics-defying, idea that humans are somehow excellent batteries. And that this would be thematically perfect because it would mean humans are creating the Matrix in their own minds, and Neo shaping the Matrix would be him literally changing minds. I've since come to realize that this distinction is unimportant, and that, in a morbid way, the reduction of labor exploitation to the harvesting of actual bio-electricity is even more fitting.