The teaser trailer for the fourth installment of the sci-fi classic series, The Matrix, just dropped and fans are feeling less than content. The teaser trailer for the new feature film titled The Matrix Resurrections was released on the series’ website on September 7 through an interactive “choose your own fate” style.
As one enters the website, they look upon a simplistic white screen, in its center displays a red pill and a blue pill, which one must choose between. Depending on the pill chosen and the time in which one clicks on their choice, a variation of short clips from the upcoming film is shown over different narrations respective to the pill selection.
If the red pill is chosen, a short monologue narrated by actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays over the selected clips, detailing how the reality we believe to be living in “could not be further from the truth” and informing us that this could be the “first day of the rest of our lives” but that if we want it, “we must fight for it”.
However, if the blue pill is chosen, a different short monologue, this time narrated by actor Neil Patrick Harris, plays over the teasers. He informs us that we have lost our capacity to “discern reality from fiction” and that anything beyond that moment there and then, is a result of our minds "playing tricks" on us, which endangers us.
The montage rounds off by asking the audience a simple yet eerie question: “We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Do we?”
Whilst the presentation intends to rile up audiences in anticipation of the full trailer, set to be released September 9, many fans are feeling anything but. In fact, as the series hits its 22nd year since the first film’s release, many believe that the series should have ended as a trilogy in 2003 with The Matrix Revolutions. Following the teaser release, many argue against the need for a fourth installment.
For example, as one fan pointed out how nobody had asked for another Matrix movie, another disgruntled fan wrote, “'Matrix-4'? Three too many then; 1st set a new gold standard for action movies, but that visual language is familiar now and the hollow profundity of its now-worn cyberpunk clichés is as tiresome as it is pretentious.”
Meanwhile, another fan labeled the latest installment an “unwanted sequel” as they wrote, “Why is there a Matrix 4 and an Avatar 2 coming out in theatres? What other movies are getting unwanted sequels? Let me guess, 2010's The A-Team but the sequel is minus Sharlto Copley, the most entertaining person in the movie?”
Many fans are also poking fun at the upcoming film as they point out the similarities between Keanu Reeves’ appearance in the teasers and his role in the John Wick films.