| Director(s) | Lana Wachowski |
| Principal Cast | Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson / Neo Carrie-Anne Moss as Tiffany / Trinity Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus Jessica Henwick as Bugs Jonathan Groff as Smith |
| Release Date | 2021 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 148 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
NOTE: There are light spoilers regarding the first act of the film. These spoilers are present in the second wave of trailers for the film, but if you are someone who’s trying to avoid any of the story’s twists, come back to this review after you’ve seen the movie.
NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
The screen is filled with sprawling green code. This is a set-up we’re familiar with. There’s few things that are synonymous with the franchise as the code which makes up the virtual worlds denizens inhabit. Bugs (Jessica Henwick) comments that the code segment she’s looking at is a modal, a sandbox environment where explicit code changes can be tested without compromising the main system, which is self-repeating – an anomaly in the system. She talks to her partner, Sequoia (Toby Onwumere) about the secrets the code could hide before jumping into the sequence of bits.
She appears in the background of a scene and suddenly it becomes clear; we’re back in The Matrix. More precisely, we’re watching the start of the first film where Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) finds herself accosted by police officers during her investigation into Neo’s location. Bugs watches the scene from the background; it’s obvious that this moment is one she knows about as she comments that Trinity is about to kick ass. However, the scene does not play out as Bugs or ourselves predicts.
Instead of seeing our Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) enter in like expected, we are introduced to his double of sorts, a new Agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who sets the events in disarray. The script goes off the rails. Trinity gets chased down by the agents and Bugs is pulled into the simulation. Now the other players are aware of her, so she’s forced to switch from passive observer to active participant. She makes her escape from the agents and seemingly evades their tracks, making her way to what appears to be Thomas Anderson’s desk (Neo’s original name) where she runs into the new Agent.
Like Smith in the original film, this Agent exhibits a difference in perception, choosing to investigate the next location of his target instead of chasing aimlessly behind them. However, this Agent isn’t seeking to kill Bugs and instead begins a dialogue with her. They both confess that their perception of the world has been altered; they’ve both gone through experiences where the code of the world revealed itself to them, shattering their expectations of what is and is not real. They believe that these experiences are linked to Neo/Thomas, whose presence they can feel even if they can’t trace. Suddenly Bugs realizes that the Agent is none other than a representation of Morpheus, the man who first revealed the truth of “the Matrix” to Neo in the first film. But the duo is unable to figure out why Morpheus of all people has been coded as an agent in a never ending-loop chronicling Trinity’s discovery of Neo. Why indeed.
Their attempts to escape the modal fades into lines of code on another screen. This time the user can be seen and its none other Thomas Anderson, except this time he’s not the subject of the Matrix. He is its creator. The modal on his screen is revealed to be old code from his hit series of video games “The Matrix.” He’s the lead designer of the trilogy of games which depict the journeys of Neo, a renegade who fights machines and Agents in a computer-generated world. Instead of revealing the mysteries behind the code, this Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is responsible for the code itself.
The flip in perspective calls into question the entire nature of the franchise up to the moment. Are Bugs and Morpheus real or are they just scripts created by Thomas? Is the Matrix trilogy “real” or was it just a fabrication on the part of a coder who started to lose the ability to distinguish between his fictional world and the reality around him? The cracks between what is and is not happening and who is charge of who become blurred as Thomas goes through his work day. He’s haunted by visions – scenes ripped from the trilogy – but their presence isn’t comforting because their status as markers of truth is wholly based on context.
As Thomas learns from his therapist (Neil Patrick Harris), these visions could be an after-effect of delusional self-insertions. Artists often take from events, characters, and the like from their lives and use them as the basis for stories and ideas. The therapist argues that Thomas has done much the same with the Matrix videogames; unfortunately, because of his susceptibility to delusion, he’s reversed the inspiration process; instead of letting the game take cues from his life, his life is taking cues from the games. For example, the character Neo projects a hostility to Agent Smith. Because Thomas sees himself as Neo, a natural self-insert, he takes that hostility and applies it to the antagonistic force in his life, his boss Smith (Jonathan Groff). Unfortunately, these problems are only exacerbated when this same Smith reveals that the gaming company’s parent company, Warner Brothers, has demanded a sequel to the hit-trilogy; far from being free of the “Matrix’s” influence, Thomas finds himself in right back within its domains.
This is just the tip of the meta-rabbit hole that Resurrections offers to give any viewer willing to take its trip with an open mind. Far from being more of the same or a mere repetition, director Lana Wachowski’s return to the world of the “Matrix” is content with nothing less than pushing the boundaries on what the franchise is capable of. Franchise mainstays like the precisely choreographed gun-fu action set-pieces by Yuen Woo-ping or ever-present green tint in the lighting and production design are gone as this latest entry chooses to lean, more so than any of the previous entries, into its Alice in Wonderland influences. Like Alice, Neo finds himself caught in a world that constantly pulls the rug out from under him and is desperate to find a jumping-off point that will allow him to determine who he is, to determine what his reality means, to figure out how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
The structure of the film exemplifies this energy as its first act starts as an analysis of the franchise itself from an external point of view. As Thomas develops the 4th sequel to his franchise, he’s forced into meetings with people who seek to breakdown what made the franchise popular. Is it the bullet time sequences, the themes of trans liberation, the mind melting storyline, or something else entirely that energizes and makes the Matrix tick as it does? These discussions aren’t meta for the sake of being meta; they’re meant to invite us into the conversation and get us to think about what the film entails.
There’s a comedic underbite in the meta-elements that makes us aware that the drive to capitalize on nostalgia is a method of placation, a form of hypnotism by which subjects are lulled into a state of complacency by being. It’s apparent that Lana is not interested in doing a rehash of the franchise’s greatest hits, so when the homages start to kick in, the immediate response is to question them. In this sense, Resurrections is the equivalent to being shown what seems to be a completed puzzle and a bag of puzzle pieces and being told to complete the full picture.
Given its set-up, it’s understandable why the film’s reception has been so polarizing. It’s not a sequel in a traditional sense and refuses to give the audience what they think they want. Like Thomas, many might themselves frustrated with Resurrections because they yearn for the comfort and stylings of what came before even as the film suggests that repetition of the same material ad infinitum only creates stagnation that resembles progress when its anything but. The traditional sequel would aim to be closer to Spider-Man: No Way Home, slyly putting call-backs to previous installments and using those moments to build up to a conducive story that serves as a continuation of what came before. Resurrections unapologetically rejects such an approach in favor of a leap of faith that upends everything that came before and puts it all back together in a way that allows us to re-imagine the franchise in wholly new ways.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | In an entertainment climate filled with soft-reboots and rethreads of beloved story beats, its refreshing to see a sequel to such an enshrined franchise get so thoroughly broken down and reformulated in a film with as much passion and emotional heft. While The Matrix Resurrections might disappoint fans looking for a re-run of the franchise’s greatest hits like the crisp gun-fu action set-pieces, it should more than satisfy those who enjoy the philosophical possibilities inherent to the world. |
| Rating | 9.4/10 |
| Grade | A |
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .