We’ve been here before: a decrepit building on a rain-slicked street in a shadow-saturated metropolis. Men with guns approach a room, knock down the door, and train their sights on a woman dressed head to toe in black leather. But while we expect her to leap balletically in the air, the camera tracking around her in a surreal 180-degree arc before she kicks one of her opponents against the wall, it doesn’t happen. No leap, no mid-air kick, no “bullet time.” It’s not even, as we now realize when she turns her face to camera, the same woman—Carrie-Anne Moss’s iconic hacker Trinity—as before.
In a hidden corner of the room, a different woman watches this scene unfold. “Maybe this isn’t the story we think it is,” says Bugs (Jessica Henwick), her punkish demeanor and devotional tone not so far from that of a fangirl at Comic-Con. She’s one of the prominent new characters in Lana Wachowski’s sublimely meta and melodramatic The Matrix Resurrections, an unplanned-for sequel to a science-fiction trilogy that, if you subscribe to the official narrative, began with a bang in 1999 with The Matrix and concluded with a whimper with the back-to-back release of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions in 2003.
For this critic, the first Matrix—in which much of humanity is imprisoned in a virtual otherworld by sentient machines—is very much a star pupil of the shallow school of mega-mogul producer Joel Silver. It’s a blockbuster with delusions of subversive grandeur, doing nothing that Alex Proyas’s Dark City and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, to name two concurrently released examples, didn’t do better. And it had some pernicious effects on the culture, paving the way for a number of weightless, CGI-heavy Hollywood spectacles, while inspiring—via its trench-coated, gun-toting, red-pill-ingesting heroes—everyone from asshole Twitter confrères Ivanka Trump and Elon Musk to real-life murderer Joshua Cooke, whose unnerving story was a key thread in Rodney Ascher’s recent A Glitch in the Matrix.
Admittedly, the first film is also a sacred text for many in the trans community, given the rebirth of Keanu Reeves’s disaffected Thomas Anderson as messianic savior of humanity Neo, who’s often deadnamed as “Mr. Anderson” by Hugo Weaving’s supercilious, sunglasses-sporting Agent Smith. There’s still something very teenage-like about that initial entry in the series, particularly how it uses Neo and Trinity’s adolescent, barely expressed love for each other as a deux ex machina. Yet the worldwide success of the first Matrix gave its creators, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, carte blanche for the first two sequels, both of which complicate the story’s world in a number of thematically and sensuously adult ways.
The second film’s much-derided group-grope rave sequence is a genuinely erotic refutation of the first film’s tech-fetishist sterility, while its multiple over-the-top action set pieces—notably an insanely prolonged pursue-and-destroy freeway chase—giddily expand upon the possibilities of both martial-arts and muscle-car cinema. Revolutions is no less bracing, given the way that its anime-inspired sturm und drang builds to a daringly neo-Christian/New Age anticlimax in which neither man nor machine entirely triumphs.
Neo and Trinity’s sacrificial gestures at the end of Revolutions provide the narrative basis for Resurrections (directed by Lana alone, and co-written by her with David Mitchell and Aleksandr Hemon), though much of the film’s first section is given over to appealingly goofy contortions of the New Nightmare variety. That opening scene proves to be a virtual “mod” created by Reeves’s Thomas, who’s now a much-lauded San Francisco game designer.
Thomas is the genius behind the Matrix series, a video game trilogy that upended the industry. And the corporate overlords at Warner Bros., as his pompous boss (Jonathan Groff) relays, want more, more, more. Anderson has also been having triggering visions of a world beyond his world, though his beta-male menace of an analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) assures him that it’s all in his head and pushes him to take his blue-colored medicine. Then there’s the pretty lady, Tiffany (Moss), who he always sees at the local coffeeshop. Haven’t they’ve met before?
Of course they have, and the cunning narrative arc of Resurrections is one of renewal in the face of rebooting. The film is well and winkingly aware of its status as a money-making property, a sequel that didn’t need to be made. And it posits that soulless motivation as a philosophical roadblock (one of many) for Neo and Trinity to overcome—with a little help from their fans. Not since Mary Martin’s Peter Pan implored a generation of young Americans to clap for a near-death Tinkerbell has there been a production with quite this level of fourth-wall-breaking earnestness. Henwick’s Bugs is the fulcrum of a new generation of humans—several of them played, in another delightfully self-referential touch, by cast members from the Wachowskis’ underappreciated Netflix series Sense8—who grew up on the adventures of Neo and Trinity, and now see an opportunity to reunite their heroes.
Familiar faces pop up in new forms. There’s a more dandyish Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an older and wizened Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith, buried beneath Cloud Atlas-levels of pancake), and a feral Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), whose unhinged rants and raves are a riot. Scenes from the three prior movies are interspersed throughout, most powerfully when Thomas/Neo is led through a torn movie theater screen into a hastily reconstructed set from the first Matrix. That sequence is a kind of populist riff on David Lynch’s Inland Empire, and there’s more than a bit of Twin Peaks’s Big Ed and Norma to Neo and Trinity, their faces weathered, the hair at their temples sexily gone gray, their rapport so endearingly natural that there’s never a moment where you doubt their starry-eyed fondness for each other.
Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes. The absence of fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping is deeply felt whenever Resurrections goes in for close hand-to-hand combat—moments that recall the cut-to-shreds chaos cinema of Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott. Wachowski and cinematographers John Toll and Daniele Massaccesi are more evocatively adept at tableaux, particularly during the climax as Neo and Trinity navigate everything from an ocean of cops to a mindless swarm of Matrix denizens who suicidally divebomb from skyscrapers.
Love unsurprisingly conquers all, and there’s something transcendent about the film’s final moments, in which the heady jargon that’s been an expositional staple of the series suddenly segues into light-hearted screwball banter about remaking the world and painting rainbows in the sky. It’s doubtful this heart-on-sleeve optimism, expressed by two people well into middle age, will appeal to those who treat the first Matrix’s rage-against-the-machine superficiality as holy writ. For everyone else, your soul, like Neo and Trinity, might just take flight.
Image/Sound
Warner’s 4K disc perfectly renders the deliberate inconsistencies in the film’s visuals, from the muted colors and sharp detail of early scenes to the woozy shimmer of the updated bullet time effect. Underlit scenes retain their clarity, and splashes of color are further enhanced by Dolby Vision. The Dolby Atmos track is predictably thunderous, maximizing channel distribution to keep the subtler sound effects (the hum of ship engines, overheard chatter on crowded streets) audible amid the more boisterous roar of explosions and gunfire.
Extras
The accompanying Blu-ray copy of the film contains the film’s extras: a series of brief documentaries on various aspects of the production, from Keanu Reeves’s training regimen to nostalgic recollections of the franchise from Lana Wachowski and the returning stars. Nothing is overly informative save for some specific scene breakdowns that illustrate the care that Wachowski and her crew took in updating the aesthetic and thematic aims of the franchise.
Overall
Lana Wachowski’s Matrix Resurrections is the most personal, vision-driven blockbuster of its era, and Warner’s 4K disc maximizes its unorthodox beauty.
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