The Surprise MVP of Matrix Resurrections
Friday, January 14, 2022 at 6:26PM by Tony Ruggio
Response to The Matrix Resurrections over the past few weeks has not been unlike response to The Last Jedi. A legion of fans loathe it for reasons of defied expectations. That's a typical response when fandom has a set idea of how a long-running tale should continue to unfold, often years later. Others love it, though, enraptured by its discursive saga and meta commentary. I fall somewhere in between, just as I did on The Last Jedi, admired and tickled by Lana Wachowski’s daring narrative excursions. She attempts to unravel and re-frame the myths and myriad cliches, but she could and should have gone even further.
The Last Jedi, for all of the belly-aching by fans, was still very much a Star Wars film beholden to black-and-white notions of good and evil, wherein the Jedi are heroes and the Sith are villains. Rian Johnson had an opportunity to dispense with such binaries and have Rey join forces with Ren to defeat both sides of the aisle. The picture waxes frequently about leaving old habits in the past, and then proceeds to follow old habits to the very end. To her credit, Lana at least one-ups that polarizing sequel by dispensing with one of the binaries central to her creation...
