RogerBW's Blog

2021 SF, dir. Lana Wachowski, Keanu Reeves, Jessica Henwick; IMDb / allmovie. What if we ignored the films that were not so good?

Well, by now Keanu Reeves has done John Wick and Destination Wedding and is actually a pretty good actor. And he's very watchable. But Hugo Weaving is missing (he stuck with his theatre work) and they didn't even ask Laurence Fishburne back.

The first half, establishing a new mystery, has some enjoyable moments. It's leaning very hared on the nostalgia button, though: remember when you liked this, 22 years ago when you were young and optimistic? Here is this all over again from a different camera angle.

But it all falls apart in the second half. You needed these two people to be close to each other but never meet? Then why did you introduce them to each other? Never mind, here's some more CGI action, but now rather than being innovative it looks like every big-budget action film.

The particulate body is a lovely visual effect. But it's explicitly described as a projection that you can only do in a safe environment; so how come it gets to go along on the dangerous mission into enemy territory later? At the very least you should be distracting me enough with action that I don't notice the problem until after the film is over.

Henwick is pretty good as Bugs when she's just this random hacker. But it turns out she's a ship captain as well? No, never got that feeling of leadership from her, and the character didn't need it anyway.

All right, the gods have finally realised that they can project force fields to stop people shooting them. Took a while, didn't it?

It's pronounced mnem-os-u-neh or mnem-os-ai-nee, not nemm-o-sine.

The only bit of this that feels really honest to me is the game-developer scene in which it's clear that the actual creative types have no interest in a Matrix sequel, but the accountants have made them do it anyway, so they're hashing out what can be jammed in for maximum market appeal.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.