Film Review: The Matrix Resurrections
“Maybe this isn’t the story we think it is.”
A bare-knuckle haymaker across the dome of our obsession with nostalgia and Hollywood’s reboot complex, The Matrix Resurrections is ambitious, sci-fi metafiction sure to be divisive. Tackling themes of creator vs. destroyer, revival, and the illusion of choice in a brand new context, it’s Lana Wachowski’s meditation on why she didn’t want do another Matrix movie…via another Matrix movie - and it’s great. Minor spoilers ahead…
The Matrix is a formative film for me. Growing up, it was perhaps the first moviegoing experience to have an ineffable quality; I mean, how do you distill a cauldron of the Wachowskis’ biggest obsessions on the cusp of a new millennium? Simulated reality, artificial intelligence, anime, martial arts, and dualist philosophy perfectly wrapped up in a cyberpunk conflict between man and machine, The Matrix is the very definition of “you just have to see it to believe it.” And The Matrix, along with its under-appreciated sequels, is also a film that grows with you, revealing layers - transgender allegory, the illusion of choice, the miasma of consumerism - as your own brain expands. It’s ballsy, ambitious filmmaking, leaving an indelible imprint upon the pop culture landscape: lightning-in-a-bottle storytelling taking permanent residence in your brainpan.
The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth entry in the franchise, has also jangled around my skull for weeks now without any sign of abating, but for different - but no less compelling - reasons. Lana Wachowski, returning to the series without the involvement of her sister Lilly, knows that recapturing the magic of The Matrix is nigh impossible, and has instead crafted expansive, forward-looking metafiction in an engrossing sci-fi vessel. An ambitious shift in perspective that winkingly skewers our chase of the next IP high, the next “rebootquel,” The Matrix Resurrections inspects its own place in pop history while thumbing its nose at the very system that birthed it.
“…The Matrix Resurrections inspects its own place in pop history while thumbing its nose at the very system that birthed it.”
Roughly twenty years after the events of The Matrix Revolutions, Neo (Keanu Reeves) inexplicably finds himself back in the identity of Thomas Anderson, in this reality a famed programmer responsible for a trilogy of smash-hit video games, aptly titled The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions. Popping blue pills prescribed by his analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) to stem (or perhaps enhance) his existential haze, Anderson grapples with the winking corporate decree laid down by his buttoned-up business partner (Jonathan Groff): make another Matrix game, or Warner Bros. will do it without you. Elsewhere, a new cabal of real-world rebels - led by wily ship captain Bugs (a scene-stealing Jessica Henwick) and a new, mysterious version of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) - locate Neo and make preparations to extract him.
During the film’s white-knuckle opening scene - a brilliantly clever nesting doll set-piece - Bugs makes the observation: “Maybe this isn’t the story we think it is.” She couldn’t be more right. Watching The Matrix Resurrections, it’s obvious that Lana Wachowski is wholly uninterested in revisiting The Matrix through the lens of a legacy sequel. There will undoubtedly be those who bristle against the absence of the enormous stakes, the deep philosophical ruminations, and Yuen Woo-ping’s precision wire-fu, but Wachowski has jettisoned the past in favor of a new set of tricks. Where the The Matrix and its sequels were a little dour - revealing liberation as just another form of control - Resurrections explodes the kernel at the center of a lot of Wachowski fare, including the original trilogy: love. More hopeful and optimistic without losing its biting edge, Resurrections - which has more in common with Sense8 and Cloud Atlas than its namesake - is at its heart a phoenix-from-the-ashes love story between Neo and Trinity. Is it corny? Maybe. But remember, it’s no less earnest than Trinity reviving Neo with true love’s kiss at the end of The Matrix.
“Watching The Matrix Resurrections, it’s obvious that Lana Wachowski is wholly uninterested in revisiting The Matrix through the lens of a legacy sequel.”
Like any other Lana Wachowski film, The Matrix Resurrections isn’t content exploring singular ideas; it elegantly builds layer upon layer of commentary that can be parsed almost indefinitely. If The Matrix is - and it is - transgender allegory, then perhaps Resurrections is about the subsistence of pain even after self-discovery. If The Matrix reveals the “noise” of consumerism pulled over one’s ears, then perhaps Resurrections is the ultimate rumination on creator vs. destroyer: what it means to create something so personal, only for it to be co-opted for mass consumption with different meanings attached. “They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us,” says Bugs at one point. The Wachowskis, famously, had difficulty securing budgets for anything that wasn’t a sequel to The Matrix. How do you choose to operate in such a system? As Nu-Morpheus reiterates time and time again in Resurrections: “That’s no choice at all.”
But not everyone will go into The Matrix Resurrections wanting - or expecting - its deconstructionist metafiction. And that’s okay, because it still delivers the trappings of tentpole sci-fi action: it’s still a Matrix movie. The action is clean and crisp when such acuity has become a luxury, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann-Moss - now two decades older and their performances infused with achingly tender undertones - game for whatever the machine world throws at them; but the film’s standout remains Jessica Henwick’s Bugs, a fleet and acrobatic presence that soars through some of the movie’s best action sequences. On a technical level, Resurrections riffs the chords of nostalgia without feeling recursive: John Toll and Daniele Massaccesi’s new painterly verve replaces the digital greens of The Matrix cinematographer Bill Pope, and Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer’s booming score peppers in the familiar motifs of Don Davis while creating something unique of their own. The Matrix Resurrections’ stylistic divorce from the original trilogy is perhaps the smartest choice it makes, hammering home its forward-thinking commentary. Sure, it never quite lives up to the legendary iconography of The Matrix, but what can?
The Matrix Resurrections is a swirling maelstrom of bold ideas and bold emotions. It’s loud, it’s angry, it’s messy, but most of all, it’s passionate filmmaking that we rarely see in the blockbuster space anymore. A delightful love story and a defiant blow to the very system it resides within, Resurrections is Lana Wachowski’s cinematic reclamation through the adage: “You can’t go home again.” Time to fly.
