The Matrix Resurrections Movie Review

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

Watch the trailer
Written by: Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon (written by), Lilly Wachowski & Lana Wachowski (based on characters created by)
Directed by: Lana Wachowski
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Christina Ricci
Rated: R

Plot
Return to a world of two realities where one is everyday life and the other is what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more.

Verdict
If you had never seen the trilogy this would be pointless. Having seen the trilogy this is almost as pointless. It boils down to the humans must wake up Neo to give this movie a semblance of a plot. Neo must wake up Trinity because he lovers her. Past that there is nothing. It's hinted that the General doesn't care about waking up humans and instead wants to foster life in the real world. If the characters in the movie didn't wake up Neo, it doesn't seem like there would be much change. Neo defeated The Matrix twenty years ago and humans still wanted to be enslaved. This movie is like the recent run of reunion shows where we revisit the cast of a popular television show decades later. It exists to reminisce in the past, that's all this does. The glaring problem is that there's no problem, no issue to solve. Neo doesn't need to save humanity. Here he just needs to provide plot for a movie.
Skip it.

Review
Eighteen years later we return to The Matrix with the fourth movie. The movie series had a definitive ending in 2003, so I was curious if this would explore the world further with new characters,  but Neo is the focus which is surprising story wise but understandable for production and marketing.

This begins a lot like The Matrix with phone calls, code, and scrolling green text. There are big references to the first movie. From there it generates a lot of questions. Are we in a simulation, an alternate reality, or something completely different. Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is a famed video game designer that created The Matrix series of games that are exactly like the previous movies. There's a meta-narrative about Warner Bros. forcing a sequel to the video game, which coincides with this movie, and the creative team pondering how you one up bullet time. This has some fun with it as the video game is a stand-in for the film franchise. I do wonder in real life if the movie studio pushed for another movie or if the Wachowski(s) wanted to revisit the world. This one treads a lot of the same ground as the first movie without doing much differently.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Keanu Reeves play Morpheus, Bugs, Neo

There are a lot of callbacks to the first movie, at times playing scenes from the first movie with this one. There's been quite a few movies recently relying on nostalgia, recently Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Spider-Man: No Way Home. That kind of gimmick always leads to a feeling of fan-service. This movie especially feels superfluous. At half way in, I'm still not sure of the goal. I definitely don't know how Neo survived, why the machines hid him despite some kind of truce, or what his purpose is in this movie. His purpose was a lingering question that never got answered and a reason this movie has no drive.

This movie also really wants to capture the style of the first movie, but it never feels more than dress-up. I think it's because the costumes veer into just a bit too gaudy. This movie really wants to go for cool gunplay, but always goes into bigger and more guns, more people instead of really focusing on details. Instead it's quantity over quality.

Carrie-Ann Moss and Keanu Reeves play Trinity and Neo

This movie does eventually answers nearly all of my questions other than what Neo's purpose is in this film. Granted some of the answers really stretch believability. I was unclear on how much time had passed until the movie outright states it, and whether we were seeing a mini-matrix or the one from the previous movies. This isn't devoid of ideas, but it does borrow so much from the first movie like scenes, shots, sounds, and concepts. Secondary characters from the previous movies always feel forced.

At the end of this movie I still wondered why they even woke Neo up. They don't have anything for him to do, There's never a goal. In 1999 this franchise trafficked in the philosophy that we are all drones mindlessly working in a simulation and that to wake up was to really experience life. Unfortunately that life was post-apocalyptic, but the truth was more important than the lie. Our global experiences were hollow, a dream. That resonated. The longing for something more that many of us felt was inherent for a reason. The movie transcended the fourth wall. This new movie doesn't consider what it means to be alive in the same way. It's not a critique of society. This a cast reunion special in movie form.