From the perspective of theatrical movies, "The Matrix 4" is not a good movie.
It's not friendly. The opening chapter neither explains the relationship between humans and the matrix, nor does it warm up the new characters, and it is a chaotic battle. The hilarity was hilarious, but it also hit the audience with question marks all over their heads.
It's also not exquisite. The shape is closer to the aesthetics of killing Matt, the action scenes in addition to the set of moves is the rough "opposite wave", and some scenes are scrawled to make people feel that they are watching a chick movie.
It's not even a story. After 147 minutes, the first half was the savior and the second half was the savior. Why the rescue is not clear, how to save is not according to the rules of the card. Aside from a few group fights and a few large sections of obscure philosophical proverbs, The Matrix 4 doesn't seem to have made anything.
But it is not a bad movie in the ordinary sense, but a freak who should not have been born. Frustrated and cynical directors, long-arm regulators, and overzealous fans of the Matrix series are the midwives of this freak.
Don't care about the red pill or the blue pill, in fact, it will be finished
The Red Pill and the Blue Pill are the most famous bridge segments in the Matrix series.
When the protagonist Neo is initially awakened from the Matrix, he is faced with a choice between swallowing the Red Pill or the Blue Pill. Swallowing the red pill, you can liberate from the matrix to learn the truth, that is, the so-called "real world" is actually just a sensory simulator controlled by an artificial intelligence system called "mother", and humans are raised like animals as a source of power for the evolution of mechanical civilization. And swallowing the blue pill, you can forget all this like a dream, and return to the original life, stable, calm and of course boring and confused.
Identified as a savior, Neo swallows the Red Pill and leads an awakened minority of humans in their struggle against machine civilization for freedom, rights, and the "world of infinite possibilities." That's the central theme of the first trilogy of The Matrix.
Jumping out of the story, in the concept of the director and screenwriter Wachowski sisters, the "Matrix" trilogy is also a "red pill" for the audience. They hope that after watching Neo's awakening, struggle, and tragic sacrifice, the audience will at least rethink the relationship between the individual and the individual, between the individual and society, and discern the narrowness of anthropocentrism and even the blindness of grand ideology.
Unfortunately, however, despite the success of the Matrix trilogy, spawning many animations, game texts, and becoming cultural symbols that have been repeatedly homaged, the little twist they expected to make to the human consensus did not materialize.
In contrast, in the context of new technologies, the organizational structure of human beings continues to atomize. Loneliness replaces relationships, and lies obscure the truth.
This made the two masters of popular culture, the Wachowski sisters, somewhat collapse their beliefs. First, there are doubts about shaking public thought through popular culture such as movies, dramas, and games; second, there are doubts about whether human beings really yearn for independence and freedom by nature.
These two doubts are expressed in "The Matrix 4".
In the film, Neo's identity in the simulation program is that of a top game designer. His life experience in the first three films has become a blockbuster game called "The Matrix" designed by him. The most disgusting thing he encountered at work was that his boss told him to abandon the new game he was working on to make a sequel to the Matrix game, and told him that he would have to do the sequel without him.
At this time, the middle-aged Neo, who was forced to start work, became a stand-in for the director. After Neo's awakening, the director said, "The matrix instrumentalizes everyone's ideas and dreams, but makes the really important things trivial, and then hides them in something as insignificant as a game, and that's its purpose." ”
This is clearly the director's deconstruction of his own artist identity, his significance in popular culture, and the "awakening" meaning of The Matrix.
In the film, Neo repeatedly asks a new generation of human rebels, is I really the chosen son? Didn't all that I did before not change?
I believe that this is also the question that the director asked himself.
The first three films of The Matrix have a strong salvage temperament, and although no one knows where the new world is, Neo's dedication still leaves an infinite possible future.
In the world constructed by the Wachowski sisters, no matter how the form of civilization and human-computer relations evolve, there is a core premise that will never change, that is, human beings have a nature that yearns for freedom and independence, which is also the driving force for the development of all contradictions.
But in The Matrix 4, Lana Wachowski wasn't so convinced of that. In the film, the premise of the new matrix system designed by the analyst can be established is that human beings do not want to face the sad real world to some extent, do not want freedom and rights, but want to be controlled.
And the means of control are desire and fear — human beings always yearn for what they don't have, afraid of losing what they already have. Manipulating humans with desires and fears can instead maximize their output. Humans, on the other hand, stay in their petri dishes and are as happy as pigs in a pigsty.
The presentation of this matrix system in the film is not successful enough, lacks visualization, and relies almost entirely on line output. But it still reflects the director's judgment of reality. Translated from this setting, isn't it the atomized, "inner volume" society with which we are familiar?
Deconstructing the human nature of yearning for freedom and independence is actually destroying the cornerstone of the most fundamental concept of "The Matrix".
In other words, the director's perception of real society and the solution he wants to propose are beyond the metaphor of "The Matrix". Given the choice, the Wachowski sisters would not have used a $190 million budget to make a sequel to The Matrix. But Warner, as the copyright holder of the film, is determined to restart the series, and it will have to pay money to reproduce a nostalgic, fan-oriented series. This is why the unnatural product of "The Matrix 4" was finally born.
Even if you swallow the red pill, the world seems to be over. This idea, presumably, the two Wachowski directors have it should not be a day.
In 2020, in the Twitter interaction between Musk and Ivanka Trump, both men used the "red pill" stem. However, director Lily Wachowski, as the inventor of the terrier, scolded both of them in the message.
Two years later, "The Matrix 4" was rebooted, and Lily Wachowski was not involved in the writing and directing work, which is also a kind of irony.
The answer to The Matrix is in The Incredible Hunt
Although "The Matrix 4" is difficult to write, this does not mean that the Wachowski sisters are not good writers and directors.
In fact, they have been trying to convey their worldview and values in their works as authentically as possible. The Netflix drama "Super Sense Hunting" that met the audience in 2015-2018 is the disgusting work of these two ghost directors.
In this play, they construct a "synaesthesia" world that challenges the limits of the human senses, lays out a secret war between Homo sapiens and super-touching people, creates 8 protagonists with different personalities and identities, scattered on five continents of the world but can perceive each other, and once again emphasizes what they believe to be the most critical part of the human world - relationships.
"Synaesthesia" is actually an ideal assumption of a relationship—a seamless communication without loss or misunderstanding. With "synaesthesia", there are no more lies, and there is no longer the so-called estrangement born of "incomprehension". Therefore, there is no alien, and the discrimination and brutality that accompany it, and there is no soil for survival in war. In "Super Sense Hunting", the Wachowski sisters even made it clear through lines that the biggest cause of the human crisis is the lack of "synaesthesia" - because without "synaesthesia", killing becomes so easy.
Sound familiar? Yes, in "The Matrix 3: Matrix Revolution", director Wachowski made a corresponding statement that the future of human and machine civilization is not in confrontation but in connection, and in an equal relationship.
As for how this relationship is established, the director feels that it is too redundant and tedious to do the logosian answer in "The Matrix". So they created "Super Sense Hunting", which gave an imagination of building a human community through "synaesthesia", and it was quite direct to people's hearts.
Unfortunately, "Super Sense Hunting" was stopped by Netflix because of its excessive volume and long production cycle. In 2018, the "Super Sense Hunting" with many fans ended in the form of a special edition, and the grand creative blueprint outlined by the Wachowski sisters collapsed.
Then, this is the "Matrix 4" this pot of cold rice hot fried.
In "The Matrix 4", the director, despite his resentment against the capital forcing himself to restart, designed a new human city, IO, in which not only the racial identity, gender identity and orientation of human beings are pluralistic and equal, but also the relationship with the people in the program and the synthetics (mechanical) is also equal and cooperative, and their ethnic group symbolizes the future of civilization.
This setting is actually one of the few highlights of the whole work, and it is also a direct output of the director's personal values. But unfortunately, in the film's careless deconstruction and loose nostalgic elements, this setting is misread as a heap of "politically correct" elements.
An authorial film that is originally directed by a sexual minority, in today's public opinion environment, it is also a bit absurd to think that it is necessary to prove "pluralism".
Finally, share a screenshot of The Matrix 4 fans. As a rustic viewer, I do think it would be better to spend $190 million on such a crowded target than to make a cat video.
【Text/Tin Drum】