danport’s review published on Letterboxd:
I really wanted to see this again through the lens of the recent political turmoil in the United States and I have to say I enjoyed it more than I did the first time around.
The heavy-handed quality that put me off this years ago seemed pretty on-point here given current events, with seething old white men jockeying for power by manipulating the media, and while this certainly hit home in 2020-1 with the plotline of a plague being miraculously cured by politicians as a means of controlling the populace, living in the aftereffect of that period really puts this on another level.
The action scenes seemed a bit silly compared to the hardness of the power struggles and the orchestrated uprising, but I think it mostly walks that line well and even supporting work from Stephen Fry and a slew of British actors work to add some levity to the scariness rolling out before us.
This is, of course, a Wachowskis joint and thus there's a level of self-seriousness in the ideology that I never quite get on-board with as we dance through long arguments and slick action scenes, but overall this is a damn good movie that I think needs to be rewatched every few years, if only to recontextualize what's going on in the headlines.
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