Nostalgia in Matrix: Resurrections and Spider-Man: No Way Home (SPOILER REVIEW)

What is up, nerds? Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to this two for one value video review of Matrix: Resurrections and Spider-Man: No Way Home!  Because they rely so heavily on Hollywood’s favorite street drug NOSTALGIA and came out within a couple days of each other, I thought it only made sense to comparatively review them, especially since one is a great example of how to handle expectations and fan service and the other is frankly a disappointing failure.

One disclaimer up front: it’s pretty hard to constructively speak about these films unless we delve into spoilers frequently and comprehensively so fair warning here, now let’s get into it!

We’ll start with what is the stinker between the two movies, Resurrections.  It’s no surprise that WB decided it was time to harness the power of Keanu’s world overcoming charm and market hotness to revisit one of their most beloved franchises.  But the movie never quite shakes the feeling that this is an opportunistic revisiting of the Matrix made while the getting is good and we’ll see that more and more as we go along.

The movie starts out following the life of a suspiciously alive Thomas Anderson who now works for a game company, his greatest creation being a trilogy of games called the Matrix that seems to mirror the real-world film trilogy that we know frame for frame.  He can’t quite shake the fact that something feels off in his day to day life though and goes to a blue-eyeglassed psychiatrist to sort out his strange behavioral episodes that he’s gotten in trouble for.  There’s an emptiness in him and these episodes provide keyhole glimpses into a life that feels so real.  Anderson also runs into an equally unselfaware but curious woman named Tiffany who looks just like Trinity but she’s living a domestic life with a husband and kids.  But they have a connection and we as the audience wait with bated breath to discover whether these are the same characters we know and love and if so, how they survived the original trilogy. 

This anticipation is all that got me through the first third of the movie.  Corny, out of place meta jokes about the Matrix needing to mindfuck its audience, an annoying dudebro type that feels like Greg Miller impression, and more are hard to sit through.  Eventually though, new character Bugs of the impractical eyewear and Tiktok hair and her team are here to help Neo “wake the fuck up, samurai,” and during this scene, we are treated to “scenes from Anderson’s game the Matrix” displayed on the walls as meta callbacks to jolt his memory, regain his Oneness, and get this boring movie going.   

And once they do, the movie gets going, well, MORE.  Bugs is likeable enough and is at least proactive but she’s all the supporting cast help we get.  There’s a guy named Morpheus, but he’s really just an AI that  approximates Morpheus, as the original has long since died fighting the machines.  This new Morpheus AI shows up early on but soon disappears, making his inclusion a marketing red herring.  Niobe returns in an unintentionally funny “I’m an old lady” act by Jada Pinkett-Smith.  Her motivations are murky as she now enjoys the services of defected machines who help them grow food but seems fairly content to not bother the hostile machine factions that continue to wage war against humans, even going so far as hold Neo prisoner and also not pursue them once Bugs breaks him out to go rescue Trinity from the machine city.  Who knows, maybe she was just counting on Will Smith to go slap somebody around for her.  Maybe he could use some pent up rage for passing up Neo all those years ago?

Anyway, the machines defecting is a cool but fanfictiony idea that doesn’t mean anything to the story proper, unless you count how incredibly non-threating the machines are now, but more on that later.

Another returning character that is just not done right is Agent Smith, who is not only now Neo’s boss at the company that makes Matrix games but is also a rogue AI who seems to enjoy keeping Neo alive just so he can kill him later for some reason.  His new actor is fine but this guy definitely should’ve just been a new character, as his being Smith just feels completely perfunctory.

As Neo and Trinity slowly wake up and the psychiatrist reveals that he’s a  machine called the Analyst, another cool new idea pops up as the fulcrum on which the story’s conflict hinges.  Neo and Trinity were reconstructed after their deaths and now their connection acts as the main energy source which powers the new Matrix system.  But because their connection is so strong and allows them to override and manipulate the Matrix, the Analyst has kept them close in their pods in the real world but not too close so they can make a useful connection for the Matrix but not a strong enough one to overtake it.  Two things: I like this idea theoretically but it doesn’t jive with the original movies.  Neo and Trinity weren’t always that close physically nor did that have anything to do with the strength of their connection when they met in the Matrix.  It’s also a logistical nightmare to have these two so close if you anticipate anyone trying to sabotage or rescue these two extremely important people, which is EXACTLY what Bugs and the rest of the resistance eventually do. 

Another glaring plot hole is that Bugs and the rest basically just will their way into the machine city and start jacking with Neo and Trinity’s hookups to make them wake up and start resisting the Matrix.  They have all the time they need to, just enough to unlock Neo and Trinity’s latent memories and connection through realizing that the Matrix game is actually THEIR REAL MEMORIES. WHOAAA.  Good plan, machines, I’m sure constantly reminding them of their exact reality from before would in no way cause them to relapse into autonomous people!  Even funnier is that as soon as they escape, the machines show up in droves like where the FUCKKKKK.  Really? Where were you all for the last fifteen minutes while they’re inside the Matrix brazenly trying to influence each other against their programming?

Another plot hole is that unless you’re going to argue that the Matrix footage we keep is just the in-universe game’s cinematics, it makes no sense why live action footage is supposed to represent game graphics, especially when Tiffany notes that in-game Trinity looks and acts just like her and it’s weirding her out.  Duh shit, lady, you are literally a photographic identical match, a problem of confused identity that would only make sense if the game footage looked like game footage and not just an exact replica.  There’s another similar plot hole too from earlier that notes the reason it’s taken Bugs and company so long to find Neo is that while he had the same name of Thomas Anderson as before, the machines had made him look way different to other people so they’ve passed him over.   In a world of contrived reality, that’s the excuse you’re giving for 60 YEARS OF FAILED SEARCHING?  Good grief. 

Anyway, so our heroes break Neo and Trinity out of their mental bondage, they’re back together and ready to jack in and out of each other’s matrix, all is well.  So then we get to the final showdown where the machines are really trying to contain these two, in what can only be described as a car chase with pretty awesome car crash effects but with Neo just force pushing zombies or mind-controlled humans over and over.  It’s so mid 2000s zombie obsession but it speaks to yet another problem: the Matrix’s story and characters are weak but that’s not because they focused too much on making the fight scenes look good.

Nobody in this film looks comfortable fighting.  Maybe it’s their age or the wrong choreographers but the action has gotten worse and worse over the years, losing its grounding in actual martial arts and replacing everything with effects and floaty wire stunts.  Here, though, it’s not cynically overwritten by CGI, but it is so slow and telegraphed, it’s hard to take seriously.  Only Bugs’s actress, who is a proven martial artist as seen in Iron Fist, seems to be either given or capable of fighting confidently and with some spark.  Everyone else is moving in bullet time but not in a good way.

So that brings us to the final leg of the movie and the last major problem: Resurrections has a terrible villain.  At first the Analyst AI is murderous and manipulative and cold, but soon we find his bark has no bite, and he sounds like an agitated babysitter that just finds Neo annoying like a baby that spits up too much, not a being of immense power that threatens his rule.  The whole movie lacks any real danger as some machines have started to play nice with the resistance and the ones that are supposedly still mining us for energy in the Matrix can’t be bothered to have any security around the two most volatile Matrix members in Neo and Trinity. 

And then there’s Neil Patrick Harris’s performance, the true villain of the movie.  I bear the guy no ill will, I mean any faults of Barney in How I Met Your Mother were usually those of the writers, and he definitely gave Count Olaf his all, despite him not really being scary enough to be a villain.  The same holds true here.  At first I thought his sassiness would imply his callous disdain for Neo and humanity but turns out he really is just that dispossessed of any substantive thought or menace.  He’s a shitlord, a memey, 2021 slang dropping dweeb who self-aware pauses to land his jokes and side eye the camera.  Its so tonally off base I got a little angry watching him, especially in the last scene, which is a trainwreck end to end.  Between Neo and Trinity’s terribly unfunny banter, the Analyst taking no steps to stop them, but acting like he just wants them to get off his lawn, to Trinity randomly being able to fly because time’s up, me too and then that egregrious final shot of laughable CGI Neo and Trinity flying away together, I just can’t.  What is this movie?  Why are there no stakes?  How has this once vaunted series succumbed so fully to Resurrectile Dysfunction?   

There are no answers and the whole thing just reeks of a skeleton crew doing another day’s work to mine the series for its last dime.  In case you were wondering, that particular observation is  even a meta joke in one of the early scenes where Not So Agent Smith tells Tommy Andy that Warners Brothers has asked for a cash grab sequel to their game.  Haha, get it? (“why” Tommy boy about paint chips) Why tell the audience you didn’t’ want to do this unless you think you’re so subversive you secretly made a counter corporation film right under their noses or you’re just so guiltless that you’re telling us you don’t care?  It operates like a fan film with few good or new ideas and seems to enjoy retconning old plot points for shiggles.  It’s not that you can’t watch the movie and get some of enjoyment out of it.  Seeing the old folks back together is fun and it’s a pleasant enough looking movie.  Resurrections is just simply a movie that didn’t need to be made and often doesn’t feel like it wanted to be made.  I’m sad to say, but The Matrix should’ve stayed dead. 

Ok, so I killed and reburied Resurrections for you so let’s get to a movie I’m actually really excited to talk about, No Way Home.  This is one the most fun and heartfelt Marvel movies we’ve had, which I’ll be honest, isn’t saying a ton about the usual 7.5 to 8 out of 10 Marvel filler movies but I digress.  No Way Home’s all about friends looking out for each other and features at least Marvel and Sony, and possibly even Netflix all working together to make sure their respective properties fit together in a cohesive universe and it’s beautiful to see.  I can’t say I ever thought I’d see the day.  There are some big problems with the narrative but ultimately they can’t overshadow how much fucking fun the fan service is or the sheer joy of the Spider-Man mythos just whipping it out and giving us the business.

Ok, so if you’ll recall, our last Spidey movie had Mysterio using doctored footage to make Spidey look like he killed Mysterio and then proceeded to broadcast his identity across the world.  (insert Sonic commercial “and that’s no good!” Whenever that happens, people die? Right?  You’d assume that’s where the movie’s going but not quite, at least not yet.  Peter, his girlfriend MJ and best bud Ned can’t get into MIT now because of the vigilante double life he’s led.  He gets sort of looked at like a weirdo as he walks through high school.  I mean hard hitting stuff here.  The worst thing that happens is that SHIELD charges him with him with reckless superheroing or something and this prompts an unexpected treat in none other than Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock stepping in as his lawyer.  I fucking love that show and it’s so great they kept him in this role and didn’t recast it.  But that’s the long and short of the fallout from this extremely bad news: no villains come after him, nothing.

Peter then visits Dr. Strange, hot off his using the time stone to defeat Thanos, promptly buggering up the timeline as evidenced by Wandavision and Loki’s recent seasons (so I’ve read, I’ve not seen them yet).  Peter’s like “bro, can you go back in time and unboink my life? It’s hurting my friends” which is sweet, but God’s sakes, we just messed up the timeline doing this.  Dr. Strange promptly says NO.  And then he says YES, I won’t undo time but I’ll make everyone forget Peter Parker is Spider-Man.  Which is BONKERS to me.  Then to top off the ridiculosity of this scene, Strange starts doing this spell and Peter keeps interrupting the incantation with indecisive modifications so that only the people whom he loves can remember, like Aunt May, Happy, MJ, and Ned.  This messes up the spell and causes Strange to cancel it  and contain what he’s already cast in a magic box.  Unfortunately, the spell has half worked so it’s pulled some people into their plane that know Peter’s alter ego.  Why the spell physically retrieves people to wipe their memory makes no sense whatsoever so chalk that up as crazy story point numero dos.  Peter first runs into Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, who’s great fun, and then Willem Dafoe in an awesome turn.  These guys act like they never stopped playing the characters, stepping right out of the early 2000s without missing a beat.  We even run into the Lizard, Electro, and Sandman, all played by their original actors.  They’re written with less care but their inclusion is still welcome.  We learn that all these villains have been pulled back from the brink of their own imminent deaths and so they agree to play nice with our heroes as being sent back to their timelines means they will die.

This juncture is where we encounter our second or even third plot contrivance: instead of sending all these badguys back, Peter decides with the sentimental advice of his outreach loving Aunt May that we first need to try and cure all these mentally ill people.  The problem with this bleeding heart idea is that these aren’t just lions with thorns in their paws, these are all murderers and to suggest otherwise is idealistic to the point of intentional naivete.  How does Aunt May even know they can be cured, much less at a moment’s notice?  Regardless, Peter and friends decide to do just that.  And by friends I don’t just mean MJ and Ned, I’m talking no-holds barred, legit versions of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spideys.  Turns out not only villains came through into Tom Holland’s world, but all the other Peter Parkers who of course also technically know Peter is Spider-Man.  Brilliant!  The time has come for rejoicing; they’re really in the movie and they’re great!  It’s wonderful to see Sony and Marvel working together to make this happen and the interplay between is very funny and nostalgic and creative in getting them to learn from each other.  This move is also genius because it legitimizes any and all movies as being part of the multiverse, not disconnected false starts.  The only aspect of this reveal that isn’t great is how incredibly nonchalant Garfield and Maguire’s Spideys are that they just been stolen from their dimension.  It’s a really weird oversight but I guess they figured we wouldn’t care much so they didn’t bother to make this more realistic.  Regardless, Maguire’s wisened Spidey is cool to see here and he has some great acting moments without even saying a word and Garfield steals the show with his comedic timing and a heartwarming callback we’ll get to soon. 

Ok, so we have our villains and heroes assembled and the Spideys are using their scientific knowledge to manufacture cures for the villains.  Again, this is so MacGuffiney and preposterously easy that it begs the question why it was never tried before, not to mention it will definitely affect other people’s timelines in ways we’ve been told not to do but….this decision does not come without consequences.  The Green Goblin is struggling with his split personality and unfortunately the bad side wins out and he convinces the other villains to break the tenuous peace they’ve brokered, the villains escape, and Aunt May is fatally injured.

This scene crushed me, mostly because I recalled Aunt May’s passing naturally in the comics and how much that reminded me of my own grandmother’s passing as well.  The cynical side of me hates this twist as it was all brought on by an improbable and sentimental course of action taken to correct what was a rather silly, unnecessarily messy magic spell but yknow, the scene still hits you hard.  And when she delivers Uncle Ben’s line about great power and responsibility, it feels a little tone deaf but where this scene takes Holland Spidey is mature and well meaning.

Holland goes mental, brutally fighting the Goblin, and it feels a lot like the intense Raimi fights from the old Spidey movies.  The Goblin gets away and  Holland vows to kill him, a darker path than I could’ve imagined and a welcome one.  The Spideys reconvene and decide to lure the villains to the remote Statue of Liberty for the final showdown.  Once the villains bite and show up, they get handled by the Spideys working together.  The battle’s exciting enough to watch but Garfield steals the show yet again.  When MJ is knocked off the Statue of Liberty, Garfield dives over and rescues her, a beautiful redemptive moment that’ll have the audience in as many tears as Garfield as we recall the tragedy of Gwen Stacy’s death.  But there’s one last great moment, and it all comes down to the Goblin.  Holland is out to kill him for the death of Aunt May and once he gains the upper hand, it’s only Maguire that can stare him down, like “you don’t want to do this.”  It’s brilliant wordless acting, and it works because we’ve experienced the same rage and sadness at her death as Holland’s Peter has.  Holland has grown up and we’ve gotten to see a darker, more rewarding character arc than any of his previous movies or really the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general outside of Iron Man.

And that’s how you do nostalgia and fan service.  It’s magical to see what we had dreamed was possible—all three Spider-Men—working together to stop all the original villains together.  It’s great to see all their stories ratified as canon, not to mention this movie appears to have garnered enough fan support to give both Garfield and Maguire at least one more film each, a totally unexpected but wonderful turn of events.  Giving Holland a wide range of emotions and a melancholy ending where he’s alone but his friends are safe just feels right, like we’ve grown and watched something more profound than the average super yarn.  But based on the cookie scene, there might be a black symbiote lurking in the wings to take Peter to a truly dark place again.  Who knows?    

Ok, fam, that’s my review of two late 2021 movies that bank on nostalgia.  Resurrections doesn’t work despite its efforts to make us feel anything more than loathing that it’s not building on the trilogy before it, but cannibalizing it for parts, to mix my turns of phrase.  No Way Home is certainly a little contrived in how it gets characters where it wants them to go, but like my old film teacher used to say, if people care about the characters and the story in your movie, they will excuse almost anything else.  No Way Home is exciting, heartfelt, and absolutely worth your time if you’re obsessed with the comics or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  That’s all for now so see you next time!