The white rabbit keeps hopping along in The Matrix Resurrections, the trippy, stimulating, overcaffeinated sequel from Lana Wachowski. It’s a dizzying movie, coursing with energy and teeming with ideas. It’s also kind of a mess; it struggles to wrangle its colliding philosophies into a coherent narrative, and it lacks the spirited visual imagination of its predecessors. But even if it’s a mess, it is very much somebody’s mess. Much like with her prior feature, Jupiter Ascending, which Wachowski made with her sister Lilly, the mistakes of The Matrix Resurrections are errors of commission; they are the consequences of an artist desperately trying to channel her fusillade of thoughts and emotions onto the screen. The blunders on display here are at least failures of personality rather than anonymity.
Speaking of personality: What makes us who we are? That was just one of countless questions posed and pondered by the first Matrix, the crown jewel of the cinematic treasure trove that was 1999. A bolt from the green-tinted blue, it was an electrifying fusion of brains and brawn that made a sizable swath of viewers question their own existence (not that I have anyone in mind), even as it attacked their nerve centers with eye-popping effects and kinetic fight scenes. The ensuing episodes, Reloaded and Revolutions, were less intellectually mind-scraping but were nevertheless heroic achievements in their own right; the jaw-dropping freeway chase in Reloaded remains the gold standard in contemporary action filmmaking, and it’s just one of a dozen-odd invigorating set pieces spread across the two sequels. So the standard challenge which attends any attempt at resuscitating a moribund franchise—the need to revivify a long-dormant universe in a way that both integrates the prior installments and upstages them—is especially perilous in this case.
Wachowski embraces this predicament with considerable, nigh-fanatical zeal, and while the results are uneven—The Matrix Resurrections starts out as awkward pastiche, quickly morphs into fascinating reinvention, and ultimately settles into high-octane routine—they are rarely uninteresting. That’s partly thanks to the ingenuity of the Matrix itself; more than simply dystopian, the concept of life as a rigorously programmed, machine-controlled construct of reality is a fertile breeding ground for creative experimentation. But it’s also thanks to the dexterity with which Wachowski threads a very delicate needle, pinpointing an intriguing, underdeveloped area between service and surprise.
Fan fulfillment is the name of the game in modern blockbuster filmmaking, which may explain why the perfectly enjoyable, ideologically troubling Spider-Man: No Way Home is currently smashing box-office records. But where No Way Home was decidedly a movie for fans, Resurrections is a movie about fans. Most of its characters are fluent in the events of the original trilogy (there’s even a job title called Neo-ologist), which have now been repurposed into a role-playing videogame authored by none other than Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), that disenchanted software engineer who went on a messianic journey all those years ago. Turns out, his world-saving exploits were just an incredibly detailed dream, one that he’s funneled into commercial success at a corporation called Deus Machina, all while fighting that persistent splinter in his mind.
This is, of course, bullshit (bullshit!), though the particulars of Resurrections’ plot take some time to unravel (to the extent they were ever raveled in the first place). The opening scene, which reconstructs that famous, camera-pivoting introduction in which the leather-clad Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) beat the hell out of some woefully overmatched Chicago cops, carries a troubling specter of fidelity, suggesting that Wachowski remains too severely in thrall to her and her sister’s original masterpiece to inject it with new life. Thankfully, this spectre of slavishness is a feint, and the film’s primary story—which involves a different crew of intrepid humans led by Bugs (Jessica Henwick) trying to free Thomas (better known as Neo) from the Matrix, where he’s been unknowingly imprisoned once again—is more slippery and strange.
Which isn’t to say it’s wholly novel. Resurrections may not strictly be a product of fan service, but it’s certainly a fans-only affair, constantly splicing in archival footage from the initial trilogy and calling back memorable lines and images. Yet rather than stocking the picture with winking easter eggs as an easy gift to her viewers, Wachowski instead bakes the franchise’s lore into the fabric of the new movie itself. So when Morpheus, the erstwhile zen warrior formerly played by Laurence Fishburne who’s now a synthetic human-machine hybrid (and is now portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in an array of gorgeously flamboyant suits), (re)introduces himself to Neo, he uses the same line of dialogue as in their first meeting, then comments on how it’s a direct quotation. Later, as he and Bugs attempt to extract Neo through one of those quicksilver mirrors (between this and Candyman, it’s been a rough year for Abdul-Mateen characters staring into the looking glass), footage of Fishburne’s incarnation plays on a wall screen, functioning as a flashback for viewer and character alike.
This is treacherous terrain; push the self-referential shtick too far, and you tumble into a canyon of meta homage. But Wachowski makes it work through a canny combination of playfulness and sincerity. Resurrections seems entirely aware of its own potential for redundancy, which accounts for why one of Thomas’ colleagues (a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Christina Ricci) tasks him with making a cash-grabbing sequel to his popular game, then cheerfully reminds him that the ethos underlying this mercenary enterprise is rooted in two key words: “originality” and “fresh”. Zing! Yet while there’s certainly an element of recursion at work here—a sense of tunneling ever deeper into a rabbit hole of programmatic loops and vertiginous repetition—Wachowski is also plainly taking things seriously. The themes that animated the original trilogy—the value of personal choice, the peril of blind conformity, the (yes) indomitable power of love—are all still in force here, along with a healthy new focus on gender and queerness; it’s not for nothing that the new RPG which Thomas has been developing post-Matrix is called Binary.
The opening act of Resurrections finds Wachowski operating at her heady, trippy best. She mines Thomas’ misgivings about the nature of his reality with a brilliant blend of paranoia, danger, and humor. A fragile and sensitive soul, Thomas is supported (i.e., opposed) by a pair of smiling snake charmers: his business partner, Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff), who plies him with condescension while steadily steering him toward a metaphysical abyss, and his therapist (Neil Patrick Harris), who flatters his intelligence even as he snuffs out any spark of resistance via the prescription of pills whose color you can surely guess. (You may also get the nagging feeling that you’ve seen his black cat somewhere before.) When Thomas isn’t gulping down his meds or staring at his screens, he sips coffee at a café called (wait for it) Simulatte, where he strikes up tentative conversations with Tiffany, a beautiful woman who looks an awful lot like the Trinity character from his game. (In a sly piece of stunt casting, Tiffany’s unctuous husband is played by John Wick director Chad Stahelski.) It’s easy to sympathize with him by the time he rushes into a bathroom and encounters Morpheus offering him a red capsule, at which point Thomas—in a sublime piece of Reevesian panic—freaks the fuck out.
Wachowski’s filmmaking in this stretch is immersive and inspired, in particular a montage set to an orchestral version of “White Rabbit” that reveals Thomas gradually questioning the authenticity of his surroundings while his staff brainstorms concepts for the new game. Yet once Bugs and her crew—a fairly blank slate of helpers which doubles as a veritable reunion for the cast of Sense8, the wildly ambitious Netflix series the Wachowskis conceived with J. Michael Straczynski—successfully unplug Thomas from the Matrix and restore his rightful identity as Neo, Resurrections’ scale grows larger, at which point its ambitions become somewhat smaller. The movie’s central conflict—between hiding, scavenging humans and deadly, remorseless machines—isn’t quite the same as that in the original framework, but it isn’t exactly dissimilar, either. Zion, the former last bastion of our species’ civilization, has been replaced by Io, an impressively rendered underground cityscape that confirms Wachowski’s talent for working in grand dimensions (the film feels nearly as huge as Dune) but which nevertheless feels a bit like Zion 2.0, an impression reinforced by the emergence of its gravelly governor, Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith, burdened under heavy old-age makeup). Before long, the scent of discovery has curdled into the stench of familiarity.
This by no means cripples the pleasures of Resurrections, though it does dampen its cathartic thrill. The screenplay, which Wachowski co-wrote with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, unloads reams of exposition while slowly unwinding itself as a piece of earnest melodrama. At heart, the movie is a love story, with its polarity inverted from the first feature; whereas that film found Trinity striving to liberate Neo from the computerized clutches of the Matrix, here he must unshackle her from her manufactured reality, with humanity’s future again hanging in the balance. It’s a little dopey but also legitimately sweet, and in their scenes together, Reeves and Moss leverage their shared history within this truly cinematic universe, creating a mutual ache whose throb seems to reverberate beyond the screen.
Of course, this is still a Matrix movie, which means it’s a red-blooded action extravaganza as well as an edgy piece of cyberpunk philosophy. And it’s on this level, I’m dispirited to report, where Resurrections really falters. It isn’t as though the many sequences of computer-assisted mayhem are bad, precisely; they manage to unfold with suitable speed and vigor. But they nonetheless have a frustratingly plastic quality, a jumbled sense of smash-and-grab chaos that’s indistinguishable from the extant glut of overedited blockbusters. The action in the original trilogy, with its dazzling camera moves and astonishing wirework, was somehow both inventive and visceral; the set pieces were giddily impossible yet also possessed tangible weight. The scenes of carnage here are undeniably busy (the cinematographers are Daniele Massaccesi and the great John Toll, replacing the equally great Bill Pope), but they exhibit neither the operatic flair nor the concrete oomph of their predecessors.
“I still know kung fu,” Neo declares, but at age 57, Reeves lacks the acrobatic élan he once flaunted, and while he still brings a gruff, grounded quality to the John Wick pictures, that doesn’t mesh with the heightened surreality of the Matrix universe. Perhaps recognizing this, Wachowski overcompensates by essentially turning Neo into a Jedi who can wield force fields to thwart his enemies; it results in some cool images but deprives the movie of the necessary physicality. The villains are similarly lackluster, in particular Smith; Groff enjoys himself, but his smarmy superiority can’t hope to match Hugo Weaving’s chilling menace. Harris fares better; the sequence where he literally pauses time to threaten an unsuspecting Trinity as a helpless Neo looks on thrums with genuine malice, even as it subverts the franchise’s typical reliance on go-go motion.
That The Matrix Resurrections stumbles as a piece of kinetic entertainment is disappointing, but it doesn’t nullify the film’s intellectual curiosity, nor does it diminish its restless creative spirit. Sure, it’s a Hollywood sequel, but while it’s undoubtedly been designed to make money, its existence doesn’t feel arbitrary or crude. This is the work of a flawed but committed visionary—the result of Wachowski thrashing around in her digital sandbox, putting her big brain into action. Every studio picture should aspire to its level of directorial authorship.
Besides, that Resurrections isn’t fully persuasive might actually be something of a relief. After all, the first Matrix shook me so deeply, I no longer knew what was real. Following this sequel, I’m no longer troubled by the possibility that something might be amiss in my own world. Machines aren’t controlling me, I’m the master of my own fate, and this is only a movie. I’m completely confident in this.
I mean… I’m, like, 95% sure.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.