Brad Foley

This movie was pretty damn good, I thought. It had plenty of self-aware nostalgia pandering (the cat!), but it also had lots new to say. It feels like it's speaking to our current culture through the familiar Matrix looking glass in a few ways. Maybe it's because I've aged with the movie, but it spoke to me that the original generation felt creaky, broken and uncertain, (while the younger generation was scrappy, idealistic and cute, totally Gen Z). It is so real that the techno optimism and punk attitude of the late 90s has flamed out hard. All the techno-optimism we felt back then has been lost. Online communities? Hacker ethos? Free knowledge? All that promise has become a bunch of draining mindf***. It makes sense that all this energy, expended by the sheeple, is feeding the machines at accelerated rates. Maybe we want to get free, but we're stuck in the Matrix like never before. And the framing of video games, and reboots and brainstorming wordclouds really hit home; the setting of grim 90s offices has been updated to Bay Area creative spaces. And I liked the cast. It was fun spotting the Sense8 crowd in the mix. Harris and Groff were fantastic. And Henwick stole the show. This was a worthy new entry into the Matrix world.