Lana Wachowski

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. Read More