Somewhere over the digital horizon, down the rabbit gap and straight on til morning, a brand new Matrix episode is brewing. After handing us three deeply common (at finest) sequels to the majestic authentic 1999 movie, studio Warner Bros has determined at hand the keys of the Nebuchadnezzar to Drew Goddard, whose writing credit embody The Martian, The Cabin within the Woods, and Cloverfield. It’s most likely a good suggestion, as a result of the collection’ creators, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, have clearly run out of concepts if 2021’s fully superfluous The Matrix Resurrections is something to go by (though to be honest, Lilly didn’t even become involved in that one).
Resurrections joined the ranks of belated sequels to science fiction and fantasy totems that by no means fairly stay as much as the requirements of the unique, but someway nonetheless maintain coming. Subsequent yr we’re due a brand new Tron film, Tron: Ares, which is able to star Jared Leto, Gillian Anderson, Evan Peters and Greta Lee. These are all actors who’ve executed high-quality work, and director Joachim Rønning is an Oscar nominee who made a satisfactory effort on 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Lifeless Males Inform No Tales, but there’s at the very least a 50% probability the film will carry all of the cultural weight of a brand new Lighthouse Household album. There may be additionally a brand new Alien film within the works, which does at the very least look promising. And it may well solely be so lengthy earlier than someone in LA drags Arnie out of retirement for one final Terminator retread.
What number of occasions have we seen these movies enter the limelight with a flurry of promotional exercise, elevating the determined hopes of ravening followers earlier than the inevitable unhealthy critiques kick in and the unlucky entry slips sheepishly by the again door of the Odeon hearth escape, by no means to be seen once more? Terminators three, 4 and 5 (six was OK); Alien vs Predator; Prometheus; practically each film with Star Wars within the title for the reason that authentic trilogy … I really feel as if I’ve spent half my life hoping these episodes would recapture the surprise of the movies that impressed them within the first place, solely to be disenchanted when it turns into clear one thing is lacking. It’s the hope that kills you.
And but each few years, a sequel comes alongside that bucks the pattern: a Prey or Blade Runner 2049, which opens up the artistic structure and makes us imagine once more. And that is one of the best we will look ahead to, as a result of undesirable new follow-ups to style classics will seemingly all the time maintain coming, for a similar purpose that every a model of McDonald’s or Burger King is way much less more likely to fail than the great new unbiased bistro that simply opened up down the street.
Maybe, if we’re fortunate sufficient, the brand new Matrix film will probably be one in every of these outliers. Goddard is on the very least an concepts man, fairly than the form of employed Hollywood hand who typically taking cost of those sequels. And that’s clearly what the undertaking wants. The world imagined by the Wachowskis in 1999 was an endlessly open artistic sandbox, however clearly it wants a serious revamp whether it is to have any credibility 1 / 4 of a century on.
Goddard’s first job is to work out precisely what the essence of The Matrix is. Is it the display screen chemistry between Keanu Reeves’s Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity? Proof from the lukewarm response to Resurrections would counsel not. And but if Goddard junks the unique forged totally in favour of all-new adventures in the true and digital futures, how does he achieve this with out mainly writing off the final three motion pictures? We have been all the time informed Neo may not be “The One”, but when it seems he truly isn’t, then a hell of loads of display screen time would appear to have been wasted.
Maybe the film-maker may pull an previous Hollywood trick and produce again the one Matrix alumnus who didn’t make it into the newest sequel: Laurence Fishburne. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who changed the venerable actor as a youthful model of Morpheus, did not seize the creativeness, and if Goddard does plan to feed off nostalgia, there isn’t a one higher to seize the spirit of the unique 1999 entry. However, Resurrections’ failure to resonate with audiences hints that if there actually is something left to be harvested from this aching previous sci-fi franchise, it’s most likely no more glossy-eyed nostalgia. If we’re actually going to get enthusiastic about taking the purple tablet as soon as once more, the director is perhaps higher off selecting a distinct rabbit gap altogether this time round.
