The Matrix: Resurrections continues to confound its fans almost two weeks after it’s premiere in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. After a string of mistakes were noticed by fans, comedian Paul F. Tompkins (BoJack Horseman) tweeted a clip of an “impenetrable line read” from early in the movie.
The scene occurs only 12 minutes into The Matrix Resurrections, when Bugs (Jessica Henwick) presents the new Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) with a red pill and a blue pill. Looking at the pills in her hands, Morpheus incredulously says, “You call this a choice?” With a shake of her head, Jessica Henwick delivers the most incomprehensible string of dialogue ever heard in film this year, inflected with a British accent. Or maybe Australian? It’s kind of hard to tell without being able to understand a single word.
According to the English closed caption subtitles on HBO Max, Bugs' line is, "Oh, honestly, when somebody offered me these things, I went off of binary conceptions of the world and said that there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. (breath) And the woman with the pills laughed ‘cause I was missing the point.” Tompkins, who, as the voice of Mr. Peanutbutter on Netflix’s animated series BoJack Horseman, knows a thing or two about line delivery, delighted in this delicious word soup and posted the clip, replying to his earlier thread live-tweeting his first watch of The Matrix: Resurrections. “This impenetrable line read is absolutely incredible & I keep watching it every few hours,” he wrote. “When she takes the big breath and it’s STILL indecipherable? That’s the prestige.”
For Henwick, this is neither her first sci-fi role nor her first brush with a bad scene going viral. Henwick is known for playing Colleen Wing in Marvel's Iron Fist series on Netflix, and one of her first film roles was X-wing pilot Jessika Pava in Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, a character with few lines but nonetheless a fan favorite, especially to female fans. She also played Nymeria Sand, the whip-wielding Dornish assassin, in Game of Thrones. A fight scene from Game of Thrones involving Henwick went viral in 2015 for its extreme editing and poor fight choreography– though a writer for the show later clarified the issues with the scene were mainly due to the loss of the stunt team for that episode. The Sand Snake actresses, including Henwick, were doing the best they could, having just started their fight training.
Still, it's unfortunate for Henwick to have another less-than-stellar performance make the Internet rounds when she has no control over the final cut of the film. Directors have final say on which take to use, and there could be many reasons director Lana Wachowski chose to use this one for the final cut of The Matrix Resurrections. That decision does not necessarily mean Henwick didn't give a more intelligible reading of the line in another take. Perhaps there were time constraints on the shoot for that scene, or some technical problem that prevented other takes from being usable. Maybe Wachowski even preferred the rushed and nonsensical quality to Henwick's line delivery.
Whatever the reason, it’s unfortunate we don't get a clear set-up to the following exchange between Morpheus and Bugs, which hits at the core message of the entire Matrix series. "What point?” Morpheus asks, prompting Bugs to say, “The choice is an illusion.”
The Matrix Resurrections is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max.
Sources: Paul F. Tompkins/Twitter