For my part, I found The Matrix Resurrections to be fantastic, almost as good as the original despite playing an entirely different game in a creative sandbox I didn’t realize had much more to say.
Video game designer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has the suspicion that his world is not real. When his boss (Jonathan Groff) insists that Mr. Anderson revisit his most famous creation, a trilogy of games called “The Matrix,” the déjà vu starts hitting pretty intensely. There’s Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), the woman at the coffee shop to whom he feels inexplicably drawn; the colorful Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who insists she knows Mr. Anderson as the savior Neo; and a dapper man in sunglasses (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who looks and acts a great deal like Morpheus, one of the characters from the “Matrix” games.
I’m being a little bit vague about the plot of the film because I think The Matrix Resurrections works best when you allow it to unfold itself like a puzzle box. Embrace the cognitive dissonance, ride the wave, and let the story play itself out. Put another way, no one should explain The Matrix Resurrections to you, but you should experience it for yourself. From the earliest trailers, fans were starting to piece together some of what the film might be about, but we only scratched the surface of the plot. Underneath the literal level of things that happen in the film, there is a wealth of self-aware and recursive subtext, somehow managing to reenact the original film while commenting on it and doing something different.
As before, the film is a kind of “awakening” story, and once again Wachowski has managed to put the audience right next to Neo as he discovers the truth about the world around him. We too are just as disoriented as Neo; we’ve seen The Matrix and its sequels, and we know that there are characters in this film who are supposed to be dead, while others are wearing new faces. Lines of dialogue, visual motifs, and even musical cues recur in unexpected ways, to say nothing of the intrusive but compelling smash cuts of archival footage from the original films. Like a two-hour mainline dose of mystery, The Matrix Resurrections keeps you engaged and guessing without losing sight of the emotional relationship that holds these characters – and this universe, this franchise – together. It’s the bond between these characters, Wachowski argues, not the sci-fi trappings or the kung fu action, that makes The Matrix what it is. It’d be overly on-the-nose if it weren’t so effective.
Of course, I’m a big fan of successful puzzle box movies like this one, so it really strikes a chord for me. I understand it may not land as well for someone expecting more of, say, the innovative bullet time sequences or the note-perfect freeway chase setpiece of The Matrix Reloaded. But that again is sort of the point of the film; having done those films already, Wachowski and her characters are doing something new, living a new life in something that both is and is not the Matrix we remember. From a certain vantage point, the action sequences are unfulfilling and unsuccessful, failing to push the boundaries of choreography and special effects the way the originals did. However, I don’t think Wachowski is as interested in those aspects of her story, just as her characters are equally keen to avoid them.
Though twenty years have passed since The Matrix Revolutions, Reeves and Moss slip into their roles with grace and precision. While they are getting back into themselves as characters, the audience never feels as though these aren’t Neo and Trinity. Keanu Reeves has been achieving a Neeson-in-Taken level of success in headlining the John Wick films, but here he truly reminds you that Neo was the role he was born to play; meanwhile Moss is so compelling that you’ll wonder why she hasn’t been a bigger star post-Matrix. I can’t say too much about the new stars without getting into spoiler territory, but I will note that Neil Patrick Harris is a real scene-stealer as Thomas Anderson’s therapist, helping him come to terms with his failing grasp on reality. Harris is a kind of update on one of the original trilogy’s most thankless roles, but with his blue glasses and air of legitimate concern, Harris’s analyst makes one of the strongest arguments for more of these films.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the end of Matrix Resurrections seems to be a collision of the endings of the last three films; there’s an impossible feat or two, a monologue from a program about the future, and the promise of a new tomorrow. Lana Wachowski has expressed no interest in a fifth or sixth Matrix film, though one imagines Warner Bros. would like to see at least one more. (Indeed, one of the film’s best gags is when Thomas Anderson learns that his Matrix video game sequel is being commissioned by his parent company, Warner Bros. itself.) If there’s more, I am just as surprised as you are to want it. But The Matrix Resurrections is – for lack of a more colorful descriptor – really, really good. It’s better than I expected, and it turns out to have been exactly what I wanted from a legacy sequel.
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