The Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir. Lana Wachowski)

I stand by my initial reaction to Matrix: Resurrections, tweeted immediately after leaving the cinema:

It’s a busy film—too busy, really—full of ingenious revisitings and twists on the original Matrix trilogy, but it falls flat. The main failure is tone: there’s none of the menace, the brooding Goth-intensity or bravura kung-fu brilliance of the first movies, and worst of all none of their chewy, thought-provoking ideas. I still cleave to my rather unfashionable take that Reloaded is the best of the original trilogy, not so much because its set-pieces are bigger/better (bigger doesn't automatically mean better of course) or because of the wonderful, bonkers Architect scene (love it though I do) but because it is built around what seems to me the most interesting idea out of the three films, and I'm old-fashioned enough to still think of SF as a literature of ideas. So: the big idea in Matrix 1 is ‘reality is an illusion’: a cool idea, but hardly original (Plato's Cave, Marxian ideology, Dick-ian paranoia and so on). The big idea in Matrix 3 is: ‘everything that has a beginning has an end’, which is, qua idea, less thrilling, athough it is at least saying something. But the big idea in Matrix 2 seems to me the most exciting and thought-provoking, though it goes largely unremarked in the fan reaction and critical commentary on that text: it is that choice is not a matter of choosing (to do A or B), because you have actually always already chosen (to do A or B). Choice is a matter of understanding why you have chosen what you have chosen, because we can't see past the choices we make unless we understand them. That's a very cool idea, I think.

There’s nothing so clever in Matrix 4. In place of ideas like these, the movie performs without really interrogating metafiction. Neo and Trinity are not dead, but living in an annex to the Matrix, she as a wife and mother, he as a successful but solitary game designer whose biggest hit is a playable version of, precisely, The Matrix Trilogy. He has flashes of true memory, catches odd glimpses of a balding greybeard instead of his still-handsome if grizzled fiftysomething Keanu face in the mirror, worries that he is hallucinating. But with the help of a blue-spectacle-wearing analyst, played by a simpering Doogie Howser, and bolstered by a constant stream of blue mental-health pills, he gets through the days under a blue-sky, living in a steel-blue appartment. He has the blues, though. Do you see? Blue is the Colour, Matrix is the Game, we're all together and winning is our aim.

Things start to unravel for Neo—or from the point of view of the ‘real world’, things start to ravel for him—when he is ordered to write a sequel game to his Matrix original, and the memories of his time become harder to repress. Then a new, younger Morpheus and a new character called Bugs visit and try, first unsuccessfully and then successfully, to get Neo to take the red pill and leave the simulation.

Intercut with the scenes set in this new blue-tinged Matrix are shots from the original movies, back when the Matrix had a pleasingly submarine-y green tint. Everything is a bit blue in the new Matrix because it is only by repeatedly dosing Neo with ‘the blue pill’ that the machines can keep him sedated and in-pod, although that raises the intriguing question of why the old model Matrix was so chlorine coloured. What does the green pill do? I feel we should be told.

The thing is, Resurrections isn’t really a movie about the world, or ideas, of The Matrix. It’s a movie about The Reboot, about our contemporary fascination with reshooting (as it might be) the same Star Wars film every few years, tweaking a couple of things and calling it The Eternal Recurrence of Skywalker or The Last—Last? Are You Kidding Me? There Are Dozens of These In The Pipeline—Jedi or whatever. Certainly no shortage of remakes and reboots today: endless the-same-but-slightly-different product extrusions.

Now Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ is a really intriguing idea (not right, I think; but fascinating). But where Groundhog Day did something both hilarious and profound, actually, with that notion, this movie only dips its toe in the water. After the first quarter-hour or so of Neo’s endless loop, the filmmakers, perhaps worried about boring their audience, switch mode to kick-ass shoot-em-up. There are gunfights, there is kung-fu, there are explosions and punchings on a train, punchings in a warehouse, a motorcycle chase and the like. But these scenes all under-deliver in terms of excitement, because they lack tension, because the audience never doubts that Neo will survive them all in order to rediscover his ‘one’-osity, and reunite with Trinity. In such a context the flash-back cut-ins only serve to remind us how much more exciting and high-stakes and intense these kinds of scene were in the original flicks.

There are several ways Lana Wachowski might have framed a story about postmodern self-reflexion as constitutive of modern life,  but I have to say the way she has actually chosen flirts with self-indulgence, a love letter to the earlier movies that reads them, facilely, as a simple narrative of heroic self-liberation. I mean, you’re free to interpret those movies any way you like of course, and this is certainly a reading. My problem isn’t that it’s ‘wrong’, it’s that it strikes me as not an especially interesting reading. There are cleverer, more striking and powerful things going on in 1-3 I'd say.

At any rate this film is essentially the same story retold, somewhat smugly, with some superficial self-referential upgrades—you remember the ‘exiles’ from Matrix 2, holdovers from an earlier version of the Matrix who can only be killed with a silver bullet? Werewolves, in effect. Well, Matrix 4 not only brings them back in for a curtain call, it includes Matrix-zombies, ‘the swarm’. You remember ‘bullet time’? Matrix 4 name-checks this constantly, bathing in its coolness, and then offers a bullet-time-plus, which turns out to be actually considerably less cool, a kind of super slow-mo.

This means the movie reverts us to its worldbuilding and story, and those, in Resurrections, are both shonky. Believe me, I love me some Meta, but a meta-gesture towards worldbuilding and story-coherence isn’t the same as actual worldbuilding and story-coherence.

So the premise behind the story is: a new programme, the Analyst, has taken-over from The Architect the job of designing and running the Matrix. He has discovered this One Weird Trick for maximising the power-output of the system: namely, to grow new versions of Neo and Trinity inside special pods that are near one another without actually touching. These two characters have been parked in a kind of annex to the Matrix, called a ‘Modal’, and run through endless cyclings of their respective lives, occasionally seeing one another but never actually connecting.

This tantalising unconsummated-yearning is, it seems, super effective at generating the electricity the machines need to survive—though, whatever Morpheus told us in Matrix 1, this is clearly not the same electricity that is generated by Duracell batteries and that flows around copper wires. It is, rather, some Monsters Inc style abstraction of human affective intensity, which the machines are able, somehow, to convert into workable energy. Fair enough. My problem isn’t really with this. I mean, it’s bobbins qua premise; but a premise is a premise. My problem is with the way this Monsters Inc premise is spun-out.

So: the machines can literally resurrect dead humans? Like, clone Neo, restore his eyes, restock his cloned brain with his personality and mentation, all that? That seems to me, if I may quote Ron Burgundy for a moment, kind of a big deal. The movie spins this as ‘special’: resurrected Neo and resurrected Trinity are kept in special pods in a special secret machine tower hidden from the rest of the machine city. But presumably ‘growing humans’ has been the machine modus operandi from the start. Where else do all the human bodies come from, otherwise? I assume it was never the case that the machines occasionally wake in-pod humans, have them fuck, wait for the females to come to term and so on? Which is to say, what’s big about this deal is not that the machines are cloning humans, but that they’ve found a way of recreating not just the bodies but the psychological, emotional and memorious aspects of specific humans. That’s—wow, though. If the machines are not only growing the flesh but adding-in consciousness, why not edit the latter to make the in-the-pod person more contented with their lot? Or if (as per the unfulfilled yearning energy-source) not contented, then discontented in ways that don’t lead to people taking the red pill?

More: if the continued power-source of the machine world relies on Neo not realising who he really is, why are the machine intelligences insisting he design a video game that rehearses, in minute detail, all the specific details of who he really is? Why not have him designing Minecraft? Or Candy Crush? I suppose it’s possible (this isn’t spelled out in the movie, but I’m speculating) that the machines can’t stop Neo remembering, howsoever vaguely, his ‘true’ past, and have created this world to give him a plausible explanation for these odd memories. But then you’d think they wouldn’t repeatedly insist that Neo return to this project. The whole opening move of the film is Neo’s boss—actually Smith, in a new, younger-handsomer skin—insisting over Neo’s demurral that he go back to the Matrix. Why would he want such a thing?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Young Morpheus is an agent programme that has switched allegiance and decoupled from the Matrix into a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings. So—not in any sense Morpheus, then? Why not a new name? And if his real-world avatar is a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings then why does he have to, as he does, clamber strenuously up the side of machine-world structures? Couldn’t he just float up?

Anyway, Neo's corporeal body is freed from the Matrix a second time in a smash-and-grab by a Quisling machine betraying its kind—I’m sorry did I say ‘Quisling’? I meant a brave fifth-columnist machine, secretly allied with humankind, truth and justice. The rest of the movie is about the mission to likewise free-up Trinity, which, since liberating Neo used-up mankind’s only insider fifth-columnist Quisling-robot, is tricky to achieve. That’s the whole story.

The ‘real world’ set-up is more than a little incoherent. On the one hand, since Neo’s sacrifice in Matrix 3, there has been peace between humans and the machines for 60 years, which has allowed such machines as wish-it to leave machineland and live with the humans, gigantic floating metal dolphins and insects and whatnot. Subterranean human city Zion, renamed Io, is enjoying the peace-dividend by growing strawberries and generating misty patches up by the rock-ceiling so it looks more like sky. Io is hidden from the machine’s spermatozoaesaque soldier robots by a magic holo-curtain, though I wasn’t sure why this was necessary, given that the two worlds have been at peace for so many decades. I also wasn’t sure how the camouflage was supposed to work: as if Poland erected an invisibility curtain along its border with Germany on account of their 60-year-old former beef, leaving invading German troops standing around scratching their heads, I guess. I mean: I guess?

President of humanity is Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe, the actress aged 60 years by the application of much latex. Pinkett Smith’s performance of a 90-year-old woman is a dreadful pantomime of creaky-voiced bent-backed shuffling about, and reminded me of nothing so much as the ‘I'm a poor old man, my legs are grey, my eyes are old and bent’ geezer from Life of Brian. 

Niobe rebukes Jessica Henwick’s ‘Bugs’ for rescuing Neo, and forbids any attempt at rescuing Trinity. She even locks Neo in a Rapunzel Tower, but real-world Morpheus is pooed out of a pipe as a stream of ball bearings in order to jailbreak him, and off they go to rescue Trinity anyway.

And here, actually, the movie briefly flickers with actual dramatic potential: Niobe tells Neo straight it’s a choice: leave Trinity trapped in the Matrix, or rescue her, restart the war and destroy all humanity. If the film had had the courage of its convictions where this choice was concerned it would have been much better. But it doesn’t: Niobe changes her mind, Bugs is reinstated, and leads the team to rescue Trinity through a baroquely over-complicated process of incursion, goop-draining, double-bluff, replication, shouting, fighting, motorcycle-chasing and assorted nonsense. This all felt markedly unexciting, partly because we the audience are never in doubt that Trinity will elect to leave her ersatz hubbie ‘Chad’ to ride again on the grizzled john ‘wick’ of the true love-of-her-life Neo, but mostly because the stakes here remain too low to generate drama. This is no longer saving humanity: it's reuniting two old flames, and just that. I mean: alright? But also: so what? It turns out the reunion doesn't damage the peace, reignite the war, or have any larger effects whatsoever. So: so what? So.

I see the point in swapping the grand-guignol melodrama of Hugo Weaving for the smarm and gym-built good-looks of Jonathan Groff—it’s a point about the blandification of modern life: everyone standing around in the elevator checking their phones, everything banalised. Lambert Wilson’s ‘Merovingian’, now trampified and dishevelled like Alan Moore dragged through a hedge, appears briefly ranting about how in his day it was fine wine, theatre and elegant conversation and now it’s all homogenised commodified soullessness and iPhones. But the movie as a whole doesn’t really commit to this satirical point. Lacking that we’re in a replay where the hero not only gets the girl, but does so costlessly. Imagine if Neo and Trinity getting back together actually entailed the destruction of Io and resumption of the war: imagine if this movie were actually The World Well Lost For Love. But it’s not. Neo gets his cake, has it too, and flies around rainbow skies with his newly freed, empowered and beautiful partner. Old tricks. Meh.

Robots and Orphans

 

The word robot, as every schoolchild knows, was coined in the 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek (though the ‘robots’ in Čapek's play, though artificial, are organic rather than metallic creatures). I sometimes see it claimed that robot is the Czech word for ‘slave’, but that's not quite right (the Czech word for ‘slave’ is otrok), although it's not entirely wrong either. In fact robota means ‘serfdom, villeinage, corvee’ and came to be used for any arduous work or drudgery. ‘Robot’ is Čapek's back-formation from this term. There are versions of the word robota in other European languages: Arbeit in German, arbeid in Dutch (the Middle English word arveð is a cognate) and that's because they all derive from a now-lost common etymological ancestor: *orbъ (“slave”), which itself is derives from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₃erbʰ, “to change or evolve status”. This speaks to a world in which not only was work what slaves did, but anybody might become a slave if their status was overturned or degraded, as for instance when a man or woman was captured in war, or a child was orphaned. Indeed, *orbъ is the root, via *h₃órbʰos, of the English word “orphan”. 

So many of our stories and folk-tales concern the magic orphan, the Moses or Oedipus or Harry Potter figure, the special child whose orphaning is only the prelude to a story of heroism, rise and greatness, that it's easy to forget the fate of children orphaned was, for thousands of years, servitude, so much so that ‘orphan’ and ‘slave’, and now ‘robot’, are all, fundamentally, versions of the same word.

Neal Stephenson, "Termination Shock" (2021)

This review is a pendant to my previous piece on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future (2020), by way of thinking through the way we narrativize climate change. My argument in the Robinson review is that, by refusing the easy narrative satisfactions of eucatastrophe, Ministry of the Future does something interesting in terms of how we conceptualise and storify and therefore apprehend the enormities of climate catastrophe. Neal Stephenson’s new book is also about climate change, but it embodies a different story-shape, and that’s what interests me.

I blow hot and cold on Stephenson, some of whose books are interesting, but who often writes books are a remarkable, puddingy badness: bloated meander-fests in which the prolix lucubrations of a high-IQ moderate-EQ individual are rehearsed at excessive length. Lots of research is kneaded into the dough of the text, characters and the narrator trading great gouts of infodumping with one another and the reader. In this respect Termination Shock (2021) is representative Stephenson. I’ll describe it briefly in the next couple of paragraphs, with spoilers.

We’re a few decades into the future, and the global climate is deteriorating. Sea levels are rising, day-time temperatures in many parts of the world are too hot for humans to endure, and a ‘whirling dervish troposphere of superstorms’ wreaks havoc. People struggle through outbreaks of ‘COVID-24 and COVID-27’ and other terrors and horrors. The book’s opening sentence is: ‘Houston’s air was too hot to support airplanes.’ This is a problem for Saskia, one of the book’s three main characters and Queen of the Netherlands. A hands-on progressive monarch, Saskia is flying her own jet to Texas to meet with an elderly billionaire named T.R. Schmidt, who has a plan to address the climate catastrophe She diverts her plane to Waco, but on landing she smashes into a troup of feral hogs dashing across the runway.

She is helped from the wreckage by Rufus, a swine-hunter who is chasing one pig in particular, a gigantic wild sow called ‘Snout’ who had previously eaten Rufus’s daughter. We get a brief chunk of Rufus’ backstory: a no-nonsense, ex-military man who tried to make a go of a farm until his daughter was killed, and who afterwards went all Captain Ahab on the feral swine, hunting them at night. Saskia happens to have crashed into Snout herself, and Rufus is finally able to dispatch the monster. Rufus joins Saskia’s team, and they trek across Texas to meet with Schmidt. It’s an exciting opening, but the novel soon bogs down into an awful lot of directionless infodump-lumpy wandering about. Interspersed are sections concerning the novel’s third main character: a young Canadian Sikh called Deep Singh but known as ‘Laks’: an outdoorsy, well-built type who travels to India to reconnect with is roots, and afterwards uses his martial arts skills manning the ‘Line of Actual Control’ between India and China.

Those are your three main characters. For the middle 400-or-so pages of this 700-page novel nothing very much happens. Stephenson puts in more infodumps; Saskia and Rufus become lovers (in a fearsomely unerotic scene: ‘Rufus now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear since his penis was getting bigger and rubbing against the mil-spec stitching [of his cargo shorts]’ [273]). Laki gets a reputation as a kung-fu hero, ‘Big Fish’, fist-of-fury-ing at the Chinese. They retaliate by baking his brain with a targeted microwave weapon, after which Laks has to spend a long time in hospital, the Indian government paying for him to be rebuilt as a kind-of Robocop. He’s not properly Laks any more after this eventuality, although he does make his way to the States to join Saskia and Rufus for the big denouement.

That denouement? So: the reason billionaire T.R. Schmidt called Saskia (and representatives from other low-lying sealevelrise-threatened countries) together was to pitch his Big Gun solution to climate change: to shoot very large levels of sulphur (‘sulfur’, as US-citizen Stephenson insists on spelling this word) into the atmosphere, to cool things down. This happens, and has a broadly positive though uneven effect on the climate: temperatures do come down, although the atmospheric sulfur messes with the monsoon in Northern India, causing droughts (‘India’s pissed off’ one of Saskia’s people tells T.R., late in the novel. ‘“What’s India got to be pissed off about?” T. R. asked. “Perhaps,” Wilhelm said, “they regret you did not consult with them before building a giant machine that fucks with the weather.”’ [596] But the drift of the novel is that this intervention, this firing of what the novel calls ‘The Biggest Gun in the World’, arrests the worst of climate collapse.

There’s a shoot-out when T.R.’s compound on the Rio Grand comes under attack, and is defended, mostly by Chinese troops flown in for the purpose. Rufus, who had previously made his living hunting feral hogs for money, tracking them with drones before dispatching them with his rifle, uses his skills as ‘The Drone Ranger’, to help fight off the assailants. Laks is sent in by the Indians to sabotage the sulphur-gun, but gets killed a second, and final, time before he can.

This is, to return to the terms of the Stan Robinson review I link to above, a eucatastrophic sort of story. Stephenson doesn’t tie-up everything with a neat little bow: climate collapse isn’t ‘solved’ with this one neat trick, and the purpose of the Biggest Gun in the World is to slow global temperature rises long enough to allow new carbon-capture technologies to come online. As a solution it is, T.R. admits, ‘messy’. But the whole story is built around this massive intervention. I think this is bad. I don’t mean, or don’t just mean, in terms of the likelihood of the science of this (though obviously this is a jejune ‘solution’: the Earth’s climate is a super-complex system, and altering one single variable is not going to reset it in one fell swoop). I mean it’s bad in terms of the story-shape of it, for the reasons I outline in the link above. Not for nothing did Tolkien talk about the eucatastrophe in terms of Fairy Stories—something he did to dignify the fairy story, rather than to denigrate the eucatastrophe, since for him the greatest ‘fairy story’ of all was the sacred narrative of Christ’s passion. I might almost think Stephenson is self-consciously playing with this: for all the tech-thriller specifics of guns and planes and big machines, and all the adventure-story running around and fighting, Termination Shock is fundamentally a fairy story: it’s about how the pig boy shows himself brave and resourceful enough to marry the princess (or, in this case, Queen), It’s about how a happy ending is just waiting there, to be pulled from the story’s hat. It’s mendacious.