Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins.
The holiday season is here, and so are a couple of Hollywood tentpoles — Spiderman: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections. Might as well talk about them in tandem, since they’re both classified as “nostalgia bait” — targeting our fondness of the past for the biggest cash returns.
Spiderman: No Way Home - 2021 - Directed by Jon Watts - Action Adventure, Fantasy, Comic Book - PG-13 - 2h 28m
Spiderman: No Way Home
I’m not a “Marvel fanboy.” I enjoy a handful of Marvel films, but find others to be frustratingly mediocre. Spiderman: No Way Home is one of the good ones. The Marvel formula fits Spiderman’s character neatly. It’s all smoothly sanded and inoffensive, working as an effective piece of entertainment that’s a safe bet for the whole family. The cynic in me recognizes that the multiverse is a highly calculated business move, creating a universe that can perpetually reform itself until the end of time, but No Way Home is still good-natured fun despite that.
The heart of the film is Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and his wholesome group of friends, who just want to stick together. They dream of continuing their friendship beyond high school and apply to the same colleges, with MIT being the ultimate goal. And like a real movie, there are consequences to this desire.
It’s a kind-hearted film with a humanistic touch, helping to deliver the more blatant “fan service” moments with a certain amount of grace. The villains of the past films are well-used and their presence forces Peter to make a tough moral choice around the halfway point with real ramifications. Nicely done. Go get’em, Tiger.
The Matrix Resurrections - 2021 - Directed by Lana Wachowski - Action, Sci-Fi - R - 2h 28m
The Matrix Resurrections
The Matrix Resurrections, on the other hand, is not so smooth. The tragedy is that I can tell it’s trying its damn hardest to be meaningful. It’s a more personal and biting film than Spiderman: No Way Home, but just can’t help itself from being a sloppy stew of scatterbrained ideas.
The blandest ingredients of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions are back — the dull characters, the mind-numbing “real-world” mumbo jumbo, the hokey love story. The Merovingian even pops up with a band of zombie samurai and other assorted ancient warriors. At least, I think that’s what they were. It was hard to tell. So much of this fight scene was chopped into disjointed pieces. Bad choreography, messy editing, and a confusing sense of space between characters are real tension-killers.
And this is not an isolated incident.
The film is built around tensionless action and stale romance. It flops around trying desperately to get us to care about one-dimensional characters and laughably incoherent situations. There’s a “Trinity heist” that is explained almost entirely with gibberish. The explanation of why there’s a new Morpheus also feels like mental gymnastics. And why is Agent Smith still around? Wouldn’t the machines want to purge him since he was so dangerous to the last Matrix? And why would they…hold on…I’m starting to sink into plot and that’s not where a good film should lead me.
But it’s not all bad. The first act is an entertaining dose of self-awareness. Sharp, witty, and meta, it’s a perfect way to confront the legendary status of the original film and to grapple with the impossibility of living up to it. It even name-checks Warner Bros. as the force responsible for not letting the series die. Later in the film, there is a standout scene involving Neil Patrick Harris as The Analyst, when things finally gel in terms of interesting visuals, thought-provoking dialogue, and story development. Then we have to slog through more plot and the film goes limp.
The Matrix Resurrections means well. Lana Wachowski and her co-writers have interesting ideas and the brief critique of the Hollywood machine is fun. It’s smart enough to ask itself why it’s here. It just never comes up with a satisfactory answer.
And so we end the year with two types of nostalgia-fests. One is a well-oiled corporate product and the other is a sloshy personal reckoning. Choose your poison. Or don’t. Take a nap. Pet your dog. Spend time with your loved ones. Or just re-watch some of your favorite movies. Sequels, reboots, and remakes come and go. But the classics will always remain.
Spiderman: No Way Home is only in theaters.
The Matrix Resurrections is in theaters and currently streaming on HBO Max.
Resurrections… I called it a resuscitation in a Twitter review. 😬
The meta aspect really removed me from the action. There’s self awareness and what I thought was pretty close to winking at the camera or doing an old fashioned Shakespeare aside. You win some, you lose some, I guess. Good effort, though.