What did Lana Wachowski hide behind the mirror in Matrix 4? To analyse.
You have just stepped out of the movie theater. After months and months of waiting, you’ve finally seen Matrix 4: Resurrections. And there is the drama: you do not know exactly if you liked it or not. The film has, admittedly, turned your brain at times, but not as you imagined – nor as you hoped. The fight scenes seemed pretty poorly choreographed to you, Keanu Reeves a bit limp, and the narrative at times confusing. Still, clever scenes and relevant dialogue left a mark on you. Short, Matrix 4 puts you in big trouble: it’s hard to decide if this is a good movie.
It is for all these reasons that Lana Wachowski has succeeded: Matrix Resurrections is none other than a cinematographic hacking, a Trojan horse, a satirical fable orchestrated in the details.
The remainder of this article contains spoilers for the content of Matrix 4.
“It’s a metaphor for capitalist exploitation”
” Art is a mirror. Most people prefer to look at the surface, but there are people like me who love what is behind the mirror. I made this movie for them “, Warned the director Lana Wachowski, ahead of the release of this fourth opus. Crossing the mirror of Matrix 4, what do we find?
Far from wanting to make an abstruse film, Lana Wachowski takes us by the hand, in the first part of the film, by putting the feet in the dish. Within the new matrix, the previous installments of the saga exist as a video game and the distributor (who is named: Warner) wants a sequel. The employees of the company then engage in brainstorming – sorry, a display of cynicism – on the financial interest of producing a reboot. ” It can’t be yet another reboot Someone worries when the other responds: Why not ? Reboots are selling well “. One reboot which would use the codes that made the success of the trilogy, therefore. What codes, exactly? ” What people want is to say ‘what the hell’ “,” ideas are sexy nowadays “,” Matrix is from mindporn “,” it takes bullet time ! “, ” it has to shoot everywhere! “.
Then comes this key statement: “ It is a metaphor for capitalist exploitation. In one sentence, the meaning of the film, like that of its raison d’être, is established. Lana Wachowski tells us both why she did Matrix 4 and why she is going to savage him. The film will not be able to tell a new story, will not be able to be riddled with references and fan-service: a work critical of capitalist exploitation cannot tolerate its own alienation from the system it denounces.
We understand that Lana Wachowski could not, artistically, deliver a new Matrix. In her mind as a director and screenwriter, she had told everything she had to say, shown everything he had to show. Only the appeal of nostalgia and new profits justified a new film. This is exactly what Lana Wachowski will tell with Matrix 4 – and ostensibly mocking (which does not necessarily bother the Warner: as long as the film makes entries, everything is ok) (except that obviously, it does not do that much). It even goes, quite simply, to stage the denounced alienation.
The Merovingian returns in a ridiculous caricature of himself. The fight scenes with “bullet time” are only pale, muddled reminiscences of what they were in the trilogy. The looks are clichés. Neo looks more like Jesus than ever and remains passive. Cute little robots enrich the universe of the saga. Scenes from the trilogy are reused. From already seen, again and again, regurgitated. Lana Wachowski achieves the unthinkable for a blockbuster: caricaturing the banality of her own reboot. It forces the line as in a satirical drawing or a mockumentary. She crushes the brilliant ideas of the trilogy under the weight of their unnecessary and exhausting repetition.
“Everything that is important to us”
After an hour of filming, it is the character of Bugs (Jessica Henwick) who delivers new keys on the meaning of Matrix 4. Speaking to Neo, she explains: “ They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something mundane. This is what the Matrix does. She arms every idea. Every dream. Everything that is important to us. ”
Then, through the character’s voice, Lana Wachowski reminds us that Matrix 4 remains the Land of Wonders: “ Where better to bury the truth than in something as ordinary as a video game? “. The famous mirror. Where better to bury the truth than in the sequel to a hit sci-fi movie? The stakes, in the middle of the film, are narrative markers. But they do not constitute the film. The conceptual narrative – robots, matrix, fights, blah – turns out to be a Trojan horse for something else entirely.
That’s why Matrix 4 struggles to describe to us a globally apathetic Neo. Yes, he’s lazy. Save the world, fight machines, be the Chosen One, lead the world to a new utopia, we’ll come back. He wants to find Trinity. It is ” all that is important to us », For Neo, for Lana Wachowski and her co-scriptwriters. The truth of Matrix 4 is therefore in its romanticism.
By freeing oneself from conceptual ideas (” ideas are the new sexy »Claimed a character at the beginning of the film), what remains, if not this love story? This is what the final scene signs, Neo and Trinity regaining control and openly mocking the Analyst. The metaphor postulated at the beginning of the film holds until the end, with however a victory: the Matrix – the capitalist exploitation – is disarmed. Better yet, playing on the Matrix’s own greed, Neo and Trinity have, in their own words, a ” Second chance “.
Matrix 4 is not a betrayal. The director does not make fun of us, but invites us to think critically – or more broadly open minded. If we perceive the film as a commercial object with which to associate a certain number of expectations like the last product in the household appliance department which must meet such or such a criterion at the time of purchase, then yes, the film is a shipwreck.
If we lay bare before Lana Wachowski’s experimental proposal, however, Matrix 4 aims very fair and fulfills its own artistic mission. Matrix 4 is not a cinematic revolution, just a love story that sets Hollywood on fire.
