Nostalgia naysayers are often quick to trash remakes, reboots, or long-lead sequels. They call them blatant cash grabs or cheap tentpole vehicles solely meant to play into decades-old excitement. Statements like those can be easy to dismiss but, unfortunately, fans who were skeptical of another Matrix sequel are proven right when it comes to The Matrix Resurrections.
There are good parts, of course. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss returning as Neo and Trinity is a dream come true, and the new players make delightful additions to the cast. Jonathan Groff eats up every scene he’s in as Smith, and Jessica Henwick’s Bugs might actually be the best part of Resurrections. And the weird version of Morpheus portrayed here probably wouldn’t even begin to work if it were anyone other than Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the cartoonish suits.
The movie starts like The Matrix (1999) and just as you are wondering if the déjà vu is because of a glitch in the matrix, you realise you are watching a different-looking Trinity take down all those people foolish enough to cross her. You are watching with blue-haired Bug (Jessica Henwick), who has a white rabbit tattoo. Bug is talking to Seq (Toby Onwumere) over a headset. She is telling him there is something wrong here and Seq is telling her to leave immediately as it could be a trap.
Cut to Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) a successful designer of a game called... wait for it, tada, The Matrix! Cue for scenes from the trilogy, which have all found their way into the game. Anderson, however is troubled by dreams and a difficulty to distinguish between it and reality — we have all suffered similarly in a month of blursdays in the pandemic.
His therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) tries to make sense of his increasingly bewildering world. There is also Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss) who looks a lot like Trinity from the game and has a fondness for bikes, including Trinity’s Ducati. Anderson is drawn towards Tiffany without knowing why.
By the time Anderson’s partner, Smith (Jonathan Groff) suggests a sequel to the game because the funding company, Warner Bros, (come on!) wants it, we have a tic thanks to winking continually and a bruised side from all the nudges.
Everything about The Matrix Resurrections (incidentally, the title is more on point than you realise) feels the same without that Philip K Dick sense of little, disorientating differences. Everyone who felt The Matrix freed their mind might welcome The Matrix Resurrections as an old friend; it offers comfort but does not challenge like the original did.
The bullet time, fights and flight are all slick and professional as expected; we miss Cypher and his discourse on simulated steak though. Incidentally, the climactic battle is fought in a coffee shop called Simulatte (cute no?).
Priyanka Chopra Jonas is a grown-up Sati, who Neo met in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) and makes cryptic comments including, “The most important choice in Neo’s life isn’t his to make.” The years have not been kind to Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe.
Maybe there was no need to go down the rabbit hole again, but it was nice to hear Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’…
The Matrix Resurrections is currently running in theatres.
The Matrix Resurrections is the kind of film that will go down in cult history because it is so laughably bad. Truthfully, I can’t even say it’s unenjoyable because I spent so much of its overly long runtime giggling over how jaw-droppingly misguided the majority of it is. And, even with how rough it is, folks looking for that nostalgia will get exactly what they’re looking for. Granted, it’s exciting to see Neo and Trinity again, and the new players are exciting additions to a complicated canon. At the same time, so many good ideas (and the visual effects) are met with truly shoddy execution and an unbearable desire to be constantly meta that the best summary available is “Less than the sum of its parts.”
