It was cranky and messy, which I usually love, but what happily surprised me after the reviews was the relative coherence of the story. I was prepared for that to be largely abandoned and I thought what was left was a love story that was pretty congruent to the central principles of the original trilogy.
I also thought Wachowski was gentler and more incisive with her crankiness than I expected. There's a genuine ambivalence here about the way that art (and commercial art in particular) means taking an intimate, unknowable experience and making it universal so that everybody can latch onto the metaphor as an engine for the story through its emotional exhaust. She seems honored and grateful to know that the trilogy touched all the alienated weirdos who saw themselves in that work, but Solondz-level guarded about the breadth of people who can make that connection.
That's an attitude that she gets to play out in film because she's the one who has genius and we're a bunch of dipshits on the internet, though I can understand if people don't enjoy engaging it that way. Though there's been an awful lot of head-scratching trying to explain a move that's existed at least as long as the second volume of Don Quijote. Artists don't like it when their work is co-opted and they've been making pretty on-the-nose art about that for at least five hundred years now. I think the more accessible thing that she's doing, though, is poking at the idea of 1:1 metaphor as some kind of guiding purpose. I was in grad school when Reloaded and Revolutions came out and it was insane fun to talk about neoplatonism and what it means to return to the source and whether this was an Augustinian vision or if the anti-somatic thing was a bit firmer so that antagonistic dualism needs to be read into the whole thing and now I'm 20 years older and I desperately don't care. Or, rather, I don't care about (The) Wachowski(s) ability to faithfully re-create ancient thought systems in a modern metaphor of a robot apocalypse. I care about what kind of truth those systems can enhance in this weird, personal story of the contradiction between painful inevitability and incredible liberation of becoming who you actually are. Maybe other people didn't need to be reminded of that, but I did - and it was cool to see it with some characters that I've loved for literal decades now and some wicked fight scenes.
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"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"