28 Dec The Matrix: Resurrections Review

Note: I will cover some spoilers, but I will leave them for the end and annotate that when they start.
BLUF: When the gas tank is empty, and the studio threatens to exploit your IP, you set a $190 million dumpster fire and laugh at any idiot that shows up. Apparently.

About a week before the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Warner Brothers release the original Matrix in IMAX for the first time; back in 1999, the only IMAX movies were documentaries in museums. I went, because The Matrix was, and is, a classic sci-fi film that transcended the genre and became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Seeing it in IMAX reminded me just how remarkable the film is, and how well it holds up, despite massive changes in the social and technological landscape in the intervening 22 years.

A couple months back, I revisited the two sequels when the trailer for the fourth movie was released, and while I was pleased to find them more enjoyable without the cacophony of public debate raging, I was also reminded that they were a hot mess. There is, perhaps, one genuinely good movie buried in the 4+ hours of Reloaded and Revolutions (both 2003), but tonally, editorially, and narratively they are a monumentally missed opportunity at greatness, and essentially sank the franchise for nearly 20 years.

And now, in 2021, we have The Matrix Resurrections. And my, how the world inside and outside the movie has changed.

The Matrix Resurrections tells the story of Neo/Thomas Anderson in the aftermath of his demise in Revolutions. He feels like something isn’t right with the world, and when he encounters people that claim to be able to free him from mental and physical enslavement, he must make a choice whether to continue with his clearly (even laughably?) depressing existence, or to elect to free his mind and body from the machines that hold him prisoner. If it sounds familiar, it’s because this movie is the shitty clouded mirror of The Matrix, after filtering it through hubris, laziness, and the inadequate hands of many enthusiastic artists who were led by the bafflingly disinterested Lana Wachowski, the remaining half of the Wachowski siblings of the original trilogy and its attendant video games, comic books, and anime series.

It is challenging to critique this movie without delving into spoilers. I’m structuring this review with “the good”, “the bad”, and “the ugly”, and I’ll save spoilers for the last category.

Here’s some of “the good” (spoiler-free):

Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss give terrific performances as Neo and Trinity, infusing a modicum of emotion into their roles of soul mates that, admittedly in all three previous films, were completely devoid of anything resembling “love”, “affection”, or “human emotion of any kind”. Reeves, in particular, has moments where he finally rises to Moss’s level of emoting…she has been carrying that entire acting burden throughout the previous entries. They were both clearly enjoying themselves and have benefited from the experience of two additional decades each of roles that have refined their respective acting skills. They were great! Some of the other characters were also well-performed by actors giving everything they had in service of a fan-beloved franchise; I particularly enjoyed Jessica Henwick as Bugs and Neil Patrick Harris as The Analyst. I also enjoyed the musical score. The cinematography of non-action scenes was also gorgeous, probably benefiting from multiple general advances in the state of the art.

To scratch the surface of “the bad” (again, spoiler-free):

Overall, this movie is an unfocused mess. The Matrix was a perfect balance of narrative, brilliant ideas, and incredible, ground-breaking action, all presented with an immense amount of subtle thought put into every aspect of the film. Not a single frame is wasted, and every moment is in service of Neo’s heroic arc. The Matrix Resurrections, however, fails in all three categories.

Narratively, the story is simple, but very poorly told. Once it was over, and I thought about the general narrative, I liked the idea of it, but the execution was stunningly inept, and reminded me that almost every movie the Wachowskis have made since The Matrix has the same problem (Jupiter Rising and Cloud Atlas, especially). I imagine it is a result of massively overthinking the basic story they want to tell. It is meant to seem clever but has lost all connective tissue to the core conceit, leaves the story coming across as appallingly pretentious.

Along similar lines, there are some intriguing ideas in Resurrections, but like Reloaded and Revolutions, they are half-baked and poorly presented. In addition, they take a particular approach (that I won’t touch on here, as it is a spoiler) that is a huge swing for the fences. But again, in the execution, it comes across as an incredible miss that, in my opinion, takes down the entire effort. I love clever ideas, but when it comes to breaking the fourth wall, or even leaning really hard into it, there is a razor’s edge of success, and this movie fails.

Lastly, the action in this movie was a colossal disappointment in two ways: first, it was shockingly pedestrian, with absolutely nothing ground-breaking, interesting, or even engaging. The Matrix taught me that action is successful within the context of the narrative (and when it contains unprecedented visual effects); Reloaded taught me that action without context is fun to watch when you can skip the other 85% of the movie; Revolutions taught me that too much all-CGI action, regardless of context, is mind-numbingly dull. Now, Resurrections has taught me that other action movies have progressed and evolved so much that Lana Wachowski had absolutely no interest in doing anything interesting at all. Second, the fight scenes devolve into Bourne Identity-level quick-cut editing—a technique that is diametrically opposed to what made the original trilogy fight scenes great, when you could see everything that was happening. Resurrections features tight shots, frequent cuts, and excess camera movement, rendering the fights disorienting, as well as visually and intellectually disengaging.

Also, the movie spent wayyyy too much time in the first act setting up Reeves’ character, Thomas Anderson, and where he is at this point, which is important since Neo and Trinity died at the end of Revolutions. Yeah, we want to know what’s going on, and how he’s alive, but between the fundamental conceit of the story and the excess screen time devoted to exposition dumping during the first third of the movie, I was checked out long before real answers started emerging.

The editing of the film was awful.

Some of the characters, and their self-referential lines and scenes, were just awful.

But worst of all, this movie attempted the same thing as The Force Awakens: it is a loose remake/reboot of the original film. But unlike The Force Awakens, I hated this movie because Resurrections not only over-refenced the first movie, but it also both recreated a LOT of scenes from the original, and literally showed clips from the original trilogy…
FREQUENTLY…
THROGHOUT THE ENTIRE MOVIE.

This was done contextually and non-contextually, which was both confusing and terrible. When The Force Awakens came out, my review noted that while I loved it, that was with an asterisk: I reserved the right to evolve my opinion based on what was done with the odd mixture of old and new ideas in its sequels. Unfortunately, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker greatly diminished my love of The Force Awakens, because it turns out that every interesting idea was worthlessly tossed aside. This applies tenfold with Resurrections; except I don’t even care to see another Matrix movie. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, my standard response over the last 18 years stands: there is only one Matrix film: it is perfect, did not need sequels, and doesn’t have sequels. This is still true. The well is dry, and like the Jurassic Park franchise, there is only one good film, and everything else is a cash-grab exploiting nostalgia from a legitimately great original film.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Now, “the ugly” (!!WITH SPOILERS!!):
The Matrix Resurrections has an early scene in which Reeves’ Thomas Anderson, a video game developer in the throes of a clinically depressed mid-life crisis, is informed by his boss, a recast but obvious Agent Smith, that (and I’m slightly paraphrasing but capturing the exact sentiment of the movie itself) Warner Brothers wants a new Matrix, and they are going ahead with it whether the original creators want to be part of it or not. This is followed by multiple scenes of fucking corporate nerds debating what made “The Matrix” so good, what people want from a new one, and what (if anything) they should ramp up or exclude to please the audience.

Yeah, this was some borderline, if not all-in, fourth wall breaking. The only reservation I could conjure was that it references a video game series created by Thomas Anderson, not the movies in our real world. In Resurrections, the original Matrix trilogy was a series of video games that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality so much that Anderson has suffered a psychiatric break from reality and struggles to identify the world of the video games he created and the real world he lives in within the movie we, the audience, are watching. This is the scenario Wachowski created for the resurrected Neo to be plugged back into the titular matrix to experience in kicking off the events of the film.

The audacity of this narrative choice is breathtaking, and there might be a way to make this work, but it does NOT work in Resurrections. The biggest reason for this is that Resurrections frequently flashes to scenes from the original trilogy, and occasionally flat-out recreates some scenes from The Matrix, with only slight changes that are never given reason or context. This has the dual effect of not only reminding the audience that the original film was far superior, but also insulting the audience, who Wachowski and her editors seem to think are not smart enough to remember any imagery or symbolic visual callbacks to the original trilogy. The entire film feels like the worst kind of insolent fan service; like a movie made by a rich super-fan of the original series that splashed out the money to hire much of the original cast and crew to perform in a fan-fic movie with a devastatingly terrible script.

But then again, maybe Wachowski did this on purpose, having been informed by the real-world movie studio Warner Brothers that they were going to move forward with the Matrix IP with or without the Wachowskis. It is easier for me to believe this was a monumental middle finger from Wachowski to the studio than to believe that this was an earnest attempt at continuing the story of a beloved franchise; though I would argue that only the original film is actually beloved.

The action scenes in Resurrections are incredibly flaccid, with Neo doing nothing more than force-pushing stuff all the time. Despite directly referencing ‘bullet-time’, there is only one real bullet-time sequence and it’s a remake of Trinity’s opening scene from The Matrix, inexplicably replacing Trinity with a look-alike actor. Although CGI has made obvious advances since the original trilogy, there is nothing new brought to the table here. And in an age when Marvel released a Spider-Man/Doctor Strange movie a few weeks ago that explores the concept of the multiverse with literally mind-bending visuals, Resurrections does absolutely nothing remarkable at all with any of its visuals—everything is a reskinned version of something we saw 18-22 years ago.

I did not care for hardly any of the characters in this movie. Neo and Trinity, as portrayed by Reeves and Moss, give excellent character performances outside the action scenes; even showing genuine affection for each other, which is actually a step up from their emotionally flatlined connection from all three original films. But while this is enjoyable, it
also has a very negative side-effect: it highlights how lost and useless almost every other character in the movie remains, as they flounder around with almost nothing meaningful to do. Morpheus kinda returns, but it’s poorly explained and at no point does Neo even ask what happened to the original Morpheus, who we are informed “died”. That’s it…no additional detail. There is no explanation for why Hugo Weaving is absent, leading me to a conclusion that may explain some of the other failures of the film:

Maybe COVID-19 made travel and appearances in this movie by Weaving and Laurence Fishbourne impossible. Maybe COVID screwed up a lot of things in making this movie, including filming fight scenes like a crappy weekly TV series from the 80s. You can put all the gloss on the visuals you want, but if the cinematography is too tight, and the editing too frenetic, then the fight scenes (even the ones recreated from previous films) will look and feel worse on every level. And maybe that’s a COVID restriction or something. I don’t know. But what I do know is that almost nothing in this movie resonated with me, and it felt exactly like the film literally proclaims multiple times: like an ego-fueled sequel devoid of value.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on The Matrix Resurrections. Like Reloaded and Revolutions, it has a few interesting ideas that are half-baked, poorly executed, and left me mostly feeling empty. The Matrix was one of the first movies that I saw in the theater and left with a million ideas of how to interpret it and where the story could go next (if that was even necessary–spoiler alert: it wasn’t and isn’t). I remember talking to friends for hours about the movie, and its narrative possibilities and potential moving forward. When Reloaded and Revolutions came out, I found that many of the ideas and theories my friends and I came up with were far more interesting than anything in the official sequels. Now, that same
feeling has settled on me again, except this time, Wachowski & Co. knew that they had no good ideas, but knowingly throw that in the face of the audience and seem to make fun of them for even showing up.

I won’t do that again. There is only one Matrix movie. It is perfect and has no sequels.

Pros:
 Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss are solid
 It’s available on HBO Max, so you don’t have to financially support this cinematic abomination
Cons:
 Core fourth-wall breaking conceit was knowingly risky, and failed completely
 Boring-as-shit action scenes
 Dull narrative poorly told
 Truly abominable after-credits scene

Rating: 1/5
This movie is hard to view as anything other than the financial exploitation of The Matrix, with the added twist of directly
insulting what is left of the audience. I hope Wachowski was able to make that mortgage payment…

Review by Jim Washburn