The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
dir. Lana Wachowski
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Warner Bros. Pictures
If the original Matrix trilogy is about revelation and discovering your true purpose, The Matrix Resurrections is about the malaise of middle-age, of knowing you still have something to offer the world even though you’ve forgotten what the vitality of youth feels like. It also explores the idea that humanity will only reach its true potential when we build and nurture a pluralistic society. There’s also the idea that our love for one another gives us our true power; it motivates us to be our best selves.
The Matrix Resurrections is all that and much more. It possesses all of the hallmarks I’ve come to expect from any fantastical tale crafted by the Wachowski sisters, although one of the sisters, Lilly, wasn’t involved in this fourth installment of the Matrix franchise. Resurrections is raucously larger-than-life and messy in that uniquely human way that comes when our passions, emotions, and intellect swirl together.
In Lilly’s absence, Lana Wachowski cowrote Resurrections with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon. Both Mitchell and Hemon are primarily known for their work as authors. Mitchell penned the novel Cloud Atlas, which served as the source material for the underseen and chronically underappreciated 2012 film adaptation by both Wachowski sisters.
The three cowriters of Resurrections poke fun at the fact that the original Matrix trilogy acted as a tabula rasa upon which critics, philosophers, and audiences could project any number of deeper meanings. (Which is precisely what I’ve done above in describing this new installment.) They’re able to fit in this self-deprecating jab – or is it the rest of us that Lana Wachowski is light-heartedly poking fun at? – by, in part, structuring Resurrections as a deeply meta commentary on itself.
Thomas Anderson, who we all know as Neo, is living a life of quiet desperation. He runs the creative side of a video game company and is the lead programmer on the company’s hit game, Binary. Like much of the work from the Wachowski sisters, who are both trans women, The Matrix Resurrections gleefully destroys the idea that the complexity of human instinct and behavior can be categorized into a simple binary.
As a reflection of the real world, the worlds that the Wachowski sisters create embrace the slippery sliding scale upon which human gender, sexuality, and identity exists. This is nowhere more apparent than in Sense8, their groundbreaking series for Netflix.
Thomas Anderson’s company is a success – due in part to the acumen of his partner, Smith, who runs the business side of things – and Binary is a hit. It pales in comparison, though, to the past glory of Anderson’s masterpiece, a trilogy of video games called The Matrix. Throughout Resurrections, we see clips from the original Matrix films, but framed as cutscenes from, within the world of this movie, the Matrix video games.
Thomas was inspired in his work on the revolutionary Matrix games by his dreams. Only he can’t shake the feeling that these dreams feel more like hazy memories, especially when Thomas sees them rendered via the games. He’s also infatuated with a suburban mom named Tiffany who frequents his favorite coffee shop. He used Tiffany as an inspiration for Trinity, the female hero of the Matrix games.
One of the most satisfying recurring motifs of Resurrections plays on the idea in film theory known as oneiricism, which holds that movies have a dream-like quality. Upon my own reflection of seeing Resurrections one-and-a-quarter times – fittingly, I fell asleep during my second viewing (It was late! I was tired!) – the whole thing seems like a dream to me.
As a side project, Mr. Anderson has created and is running what is known as a modal. Using the code of his game Binary, the experiment modal is quarantined from any networks. Only Thomas can access it. He thinks he’s only running a test, but what Thomas has done, perhaps subconsciously, is to create an environment for programs to evolve.
He’s placed an Agent Smith – the antagonist from the original Matrix trilogy (the movies here in the real world, the video games within the world of Resurrections) – into his modal, but with a (subconscious) twist. This Agent Smith is really a new iteration of Morpheus, the freedom fighter who awakens Neo’s true potential in the original trilogy.
Lana Wachowski is exploring the idea of trans identities by making Morpheus almost a new character. Not only is he initially an iteration of Agent Smith, but, after he goes through his own awakening, in which he learns he’s a computer program within a simulation, he becomes some wonderous mixture of human and program.
Our society is in the (admitted) infancy of accepting transgender identities. Considering the possibilities of trans-humanism – the idea that we can improve ourselves by merging with technology – seems like the next frontier.
(We have to ensure, though, that the worst instincts of capitalism don’t contaminate this new frontier. Most likely, we’ll need to move beyond capitalism altogether if we want to advance as a species. Like a character says in Resurrections, “Nothing breeds violence like scarcity”, and we’ve overcome almost all forms of scarcity that capitalism doesn’t artificially impose.)
When a freedom fighter named Bugs, who is not unlike the original Morpheus, discovers and hacks into Thomas’s modal, she convinces Morpheus to join her in freeing Thomas’s mind and helping him rediscover his true identity as Neo.
And that’s only the first act of Matrix Resurrections.
I’ll admit that the weakest thing about Resurrections is that it suffers from the same thing that plagued Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That movie’s plot was basically a retread of Star Wars: A New Hope. Much of Resurrections is concerned with waking Neo up to the fact that he is The One, exactly like the first Matrix picture.
There are, though, enough new and exciting ideas within this fourth installment to make it more than simply a retread.
One of those is that Resurrections corrects a flaw that film critics and Matrix fans have woken up to in the intervening years since the 1999 release of The Matrix. In that film, Neo is The One, but Trinity makes almost everything he does possible. Resurrections still relies on Neo being the protagonist – due to Wachowski’s fidelity to her source material – but Trinity finally gets her due, albeit in the last act. Both Neo and the movie finally recognize that The One is really The Two. The love that Neo and Trinity share make them both more powerful than either could ever be alone.
That point is made in the centerpiece scene of the film. As Thomas, Neo sees a therapist to work on his depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide. When Neo accepts his fate as The One, his therapist reemerges with unexpected information.
The scene is probably the clunkiest of the movie. It’s essentially a five-minute exposition dump to both Neo and the audience. Although not very artful in its execution, the scene raises the idea that Neo and Trinity are more powerful for the machines – they help generate more energy within the matrix for their cybernetic overlords – when they are kept just out of reach from one another.
Fear and hope are the most powerful of human emotions, the therapist explains, and the administrator of the matrix has discovered that the anxiety and frustration that comes from keeping the two apart generates more of what the machines want – energy for themselves. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the way our current media landscape thrives on outrage and stoking anger and grievance for profit.
There’s also a beautiful metaphor in the plot point that the freedom fighters outside of the matrix have made common cause with some of the machines, which work with the humans to overthrow the tyrannical matrix system. When those in control of systems of power wake up to the mistreatment and marginalization of the powerless, and, more importantly, do something to help, something like true equality becomes possible.
Aside from all the metaphors and philosophizing, The Matrix Resurrections is as fun of a ride as the original film. It’s satisfying to see Neo and Trinity ripping things up on screen again. A lot of that has to do with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles. Reeves gives a melancholy and, at times, downright hopeless performance early on as Thomas/Neo.
His malaise speaks to the malaise we’ve all been living through for the past 18 months, despite the screenplay having been written before our COVID troubles even surfaced. Moss doesn’t get to shine until relatively late in the movie, but once she does, it’s like old times. One character observes during the movie that nothing soothes anxiety like nostalgia. While there is nostalgia within the familiar characters of Neo and Trinity and the faces of Reeves and Moss in those roles, there is also enough new here to make it an exciting experience.
Case in point: it’s hard not to be disappointed that Laurence Fishburne is MIA as Morpheus, but it’s a thrill and delight to see Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a new, younger iteration of the character. Abdul-Mateen walks a very fine line of paying homage to Fishburne’s iconic original performance while also putting his own stamp on the role.
Rounding out the cast are tightly wound performances from Jonathan Groff as Thomas/Neo’s business partner Smith and Neil Patrick Harris as his therapist, both characters with hidden agendas. Jessica Henwick is mysterious and cyberpunk cool as Bugs. It’s a joy to see Jada Pinkett Smith back as Niobe, although not as you’d expect to see her.
The visual effects sandbox that these actors play in is exciting, even if the CGI isn’t as mind blowing as the original Matrix film. There is an effect, featured heavily in the exposition dump scene I described above, that acts as the reverse bullet time, the ground breaking effect from the first movie. Maybe I’ve become jaded by the digital effects advances made in the last 20 years, but, as good as it looks, nothing in Resurrections feels as unprecedented as the introduction of bullet time in The Matrix did.
A few nitpicks aside, The Matrix Resurrections is a fun and exciting ride that also has something to say about our modern world and the possibilities for transcending our current societal limitations. If this is the end of the franchise – and it might be; the word “bomb” was thrown around in headlines after Resurrections failed to meet box office expectations on its opening weekend – it’s a fitting way to send off these iconic characters and a franchise that revolutionized the sci-fi genre and big-budget action spectacles.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Lana Wachowski’s update of her and her sister’s iconic tale is as fun as the original. What makes it so fascinating are the ideas held within it. The movie encourages you to use your brain instead of switching it off while you’re watching it.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer’s score is electric. Both contributed to the soundtrack for Sense8, and their work here reflects the grandiose idiosyncrasies of the music on that series while retaining Don Davis’s original themes and leitmotifs of the first film.
- I love the fact that within the movie, the Warner Brothers game division produced the Matrix game trilogy, and now they want Thomas to make another sequel. It’s a sly jab at the oligopoly that the entertainment industry has become (and always has been, to a certain extent). It’s been reported that Warner Bros. was prepared to do another Matrix movie, even if neither Wachowski was on board for it.
- Shout out to The Merovingian making an ignominious return to the franchise!
- Why is Christina Ricci in this? I love her, she’s great, but she gets, if memory serves, exactly one scene, and is given nothing to do.
- Walking the thin line between spoilers and no spoilers, there were a few elements of the movie that I didn’t want to get into. Hit me up if you’ve seen Resurrections and we can talk!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this in Nashville with Rae and one of her cousins while there visiting her family for the holidays. Could have watched it on HBO Max (that’s how I was watching it the second time, when I fell asleep), but a new Matrix movie demands to be seen on the big screen.