“I know you said the story was over for you, but that’s the thing about stories… they never really end do they? We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told, just with different names, faces… I have to say I’m kind of excited. After all these years, to be going back to where it all started. Back to The Matrix!”
This is perhaps more or less what was said to Lana Wachowski when Warner Bros. initially approached her about continuing the Matrix franchise. According to her, every year since about 2015, she and sister Lilly were asked by the studio either to make a fourth movie or give their blessing for one, but they were never interested. Eventually that changed, at least for Lana, the sisters breaking up their filmmaking partnership for the first time in their careers (Lilly’s fine, she’s making a series for Showtime). Lana’s new idea for the film came in the aftermath of the deaths of her parents. Specifically she saw comfort in bringing back Neo and Trinity, characters who meant a great deal to her. And it says a lot about how much Warner Bros’ wanted this, that they let Lana make the movie that she did -a movie that not only flies in the face of what many audiences would expect from a Matrix sequel, but is opaquely critical of the apparatus that allowed it to be made in the first place.
The Matrix Resurrections is really the best kind of franchise sequel/reboot in that it rejects entirely the whims of the fans in favour of a story that is more emotionally honest. This is the movie that Lana Wachowski wanted to make, not the movie she designed for her audience’s approval. That audience has already been reacting badly to it, but it doesn’t change the fact the movie is better for her choices. Certainly it’s way more confident and thematically ambitious than the original two sequels as it reinvents its’ Matrix.
One of the earliest scenes we see in the film is a near identically shot recreation of the opening of the first movie, the Agents’ attempt to capture Trinity, but with different figures and while being watched by a third party -the freed human Bugs (Jessica Henwick -brightest of this films’ newcomers). Within minutes the film is already commenting on the earlier movie and cultural perceptions around it. This only gets more pronounced when we’re reintroduced to Keanu Reeves’ Neo -once again under the identity of Thomas Anderson, reintegrated into the Matrix, where he is renowned as the creator of an acclaimed video game called The Matrix; a game which came out in 1999 and spawned a film franchise by Warner Bros.
Through this highly self-aware meta device, Wachowski is able to directly address a whole host of things including her feelings on the Hollywood machine, the creatively taxing exercise of producing reboots and sequels, and the cultural impact of The Matrix itself as a series. There’s one talk about misappropriating stories meant to be meaningful and inspiring, rendering them shallow or weaponized -Wachowski’s rebuttal to the far-right hijacking of the “red pill” concept. And more blunt is a montage depicting the development of a new Matrix storyline that touches brilliantly and without subtlety on the reputation of The Matrix as an “intellectual” action movie; and which sees a bunch of nerds debate what it’s actually about or what its’ metaphors are for. This walks the tightrope well of veering into a kind of self-indulgence; Wachowski does keep it for as sharp as it is, contained, primarily through how successfully she conveys the purpose of this reality for Neo. It makes a lot of sense that to prevent him from breaking free again, the machines would re-contextualize his memories into the products of an imagination, and they would put him in therapy to deal with any lingering questions about the nature of his reality. It’s a brilliant sinister gaslighting technique, and a good excuse for what’s essentially Lana Wachowski venting -and venting critically on something audiences should be listening to. It’s been pointed out the timeliness of this movie coming within a week of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which has a distinctly opposing philosophy regarding franchise and reboot culture.
This however is largely confined to the first act, and it’s not long before the film does resemble a Matrix movie, though with far less stoicism and banal plotting than the previous sequels. Indeed there’s a lot of humanity in this movie as it trades in a grand existential central theme for an intimate one that is almost as powerful. Essentially the movie is all about the relationship between Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss likewise reprising her role, and it’s good to see her). Each must be freed and each needs the other -Wachowski believes very strongly in their romance and does a lot to convince the audience to be too. Trinity exists in this fabricated world as Tiffany, a married mother of two who is drawn to Neo in the same unexplainable way he is to her (in one of the best choices that reads so many ways, her husband Chad is played by Chad Stahelski, Reeves’ stunt double on the previous movies and director of the John Wick series). And what makes the journey to free her specifically so resonant isn’t so much the love story as the subtext around it: her being trapped within this systemically ordained identity she had no choice in -that transgender metaphor of the first movie just as potent in the central drive of this one.
This is in stead of the weighty philosophy of the earlier films about freedom and causality and choice, but The Matrix Resurrections feels no less stimulating. And the action is there too, if not quite as showy as in previous movies and with less interest in the protagonists (certainly Neo) using weapons other than martial arts. There’s a warehouse fight between human rebels and old programs desperate for a return to the old Matrix (get it?), but the stronger one isn’t until the climax, though even it doesn’t rely on much of the former techniques -the action overall is subverted in this film, while the visuals take on greater prominence. There’s no sickly green aesthetic to this Matrix, though it’s quite vibrant in other ways and very nicely shot. The effects are interesting too, particularly how the movie re-articulates that trademark “bullet time”. And there are several other exciting ways the movie plays around with the contours of its’ world, mirror effects and the like.
And Reeves, once a punching bag for supposed bad acting, is one of the biggest performance highlights. He’s playing a very different Neo in this film, though a welcome one, one ground down by being so long in the Matrix, with new anxieties and neuroses. His being The One is barely commented on and wholly unimportant, and he’s a much more chill, interesting, fallible character who ultimately isn’t even the story’s centrepiece. A curious facet of this world is the union between humans and some machines, allowing for Yahya Abdul-Mateen II to play an ally program based on Morpheus as a central supporting role. Alas, for being the coolest character, he feels under-used by the end -the unfortunate trend of these sequels towards Morpheus. Jonathan Groff and Neil Patrick Harris play other programs, both quite interesting in their identities and how they function in relation to Neo. They make for fun personalities.
That isn’t much the case during a stretch in the middle outside the Matrix that fails to cultivate engaging human characters or plotting (these movies have never been able to make Zion, or its’ new form Io, very compelling). And for what I’ve heard about this film being so bold in its storytelling and thematic ambitions on par with the like of The Last Jedi, all I can say is it still feels pretty Matrix-y (complete with recurring clips to remind you of the other movies), and isn’t so curious as it might be in interrogating its’ internal past.
And yet it is intrepid in a way that most modern blockbusters aren’t allowed to be. I nearly forgot until the credits that it’s co-written by David Mitchell, one of my favourite modern novelists whom the Wachowskis have partnered with in recent years. I can certainly detect his touch in some of the character of this movie -but it is Lana’s artistic vision ultimately, and a valuable one at that. She ends the film with a scene that is another metaphor, as applicable to cis-normative society on a whole as it is to Hollywood once again: a figure of power who insists they know what the people want and what the people want other people to be. Wachowski’s rebuke of this is powerful, thrilling, and uplifting. She speaks the truth, and those systems she echoes in this film ought to listen.
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