“Neo is informed that they’re making a sequel of his game with or without him, and he’s pressed into meetings with other creatives who are actively roasted by the film. There are constant references to the dangers of nostalgia, knowing callbacks to the original trilogy, and a political allegory that is both painfully thin and something desperately in need of unpacking”
“The big maneuver that Resurrections makes is a simple one. The structure of the original matrix was about control and freedom, and what Neo’s big intervention did at the end of Revolutions made it clear that that was not tenable”
“The new matrix, operated by the Analyst (rather than the Architect), is less about direct control and more about the modulation of affects”
“Resurrections directly has the Analyst arguing that the workaround for human choice is that humans will, in the words of Deleuze & Guattari, desire their own repression given a certain organization of the world. This is a world that has moved from authoritarianism to protocol, from domination to management”
“a more productive route is to think of the film through McKenzie Wark’s gamespace”
“Wark conceives of gamespace as a kind of logistical and protocological thread that weaves through disparate spaces and knits them together through predictive and assumptive technologies”
“Top-down control is obsolete, and instead it has been replaced by systems of rules and regulations that you learn at your own pace so that you can begin to master them”
“if the first three films were all about prophecy, and this movie is about the history after that prophetic moment, then what was learned?”
“this film is, itself, telling me to prepare for the onslaught of a world beyond our control, a world that is powerful because it cannot be controlled, only managed”