David Edelstein offers his reaction to the film, which confirms my worst fears, based on the trailer:
The film is like a nightmare in which you’re trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an animeprecursor), it’s an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue. The colors flatten everything: The cars and costumes look like they’ve been filled in with crayons—and not from the big 64-box but the dinky eight-pack. The plot is relatively intricate, which means the Wachowskis leap back and forth between hyperspeedy races and static scenes in which marooned actors labor to find a style as campy as the décor.
In The Matrix, the Wachowskis and their computer-effects whiz John Gaeta gave us the gold standard of universe-as-simulacrum movies. But here, as in the lumbering Matrix sequels, the giddiness is gone: “Free your mind” has been replaced with “Overwork your programmers.” They’ve become fussy and solemn—Lucasoids.
I just want to add that I was under the impression that I created the term “Lucasoids” in Cinefantastique magazine back in the 1990s. Maybe my memory is playing tricks, but it was fun to see someone else using the word.
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