Has Western Culture hit a creative brick wall?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it might have come to your attention that a fourth Matrix movie is in the works, and is going to drop in the next few months called The Matrix Resurrections (wow, how original).

Its trailer has already dropped, and looks like a simple retread of the first movie at best, or at worst like a really expensive video game. It can’t be good if Laurence Fishburne — an actor who wasted his considerable talents on films as awful as Event Horizon and Predators, one might remember — seems to be completely uninvolved, and it is instead populated by actors who either should know better or have been better in the past.

If I was cynical, I would guess that its director Lana Wachowski hasn’t had a commercial hit since funnily enough, the third Matrix movie Revelations came out back in 2003 — even her more well-received work, like 2012’s Cloud Atlas flopped at the box office — and this is a blatant attempt to recycle their best material to stop their career from utterly imploding, similar to what Guy Ritchie did with RockNRolla, or why Sylvester Stallone made more Rocky and Rambo movies, despite calling the idea ‘stupid’ back in the late 1990s, clearly before the money dried up.

But that has got me thinking; is pop culture so devoid of creative vision is its inevitable get out of jail free…