The Matrix Resurrections review: angry, astonishing, and unmissable

[Ed. note: Minor spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections follow.]

The story is about Thomas. He is told the truth by Thomas. He is eager to experience it himself. According to the Gospel, he longs to see the wound flesh of Christ the Resurrected, and to feel what the nails are hammering into his hands. In his doubt, he becomes a myth, the first man to doubt the gospel, only to believe there is truth there when he’s standing in front of the gospel’s corporeal form.

The story can be retold in another way: Thomas Anderson is a talented programmer who lives an ordinary life and works at a small software company. He is not as he should be. He refuses to believe that he is being manipulated by the world. Messengers locate him. He takes a pill, and he wakes up in nightmares. There, he is connected to a computer from birth through death. From that point on, he can feel the pain in his flesh. This led him to believe that he was being jacked into the Matrix. Over the next 22 years, Mr. Anderson’s story in The MatrixThe myth becomes another, a newer one, which is then disseminated by the internet and relayed through different subcultures. Depending on which set of eyes it encountered, the story’s symbolism and themes took on new meanings, some thoughtful and enlightening, others strange and sinister.

Resurrections by The Matrix’ third version of this story: Once again, there is Keanu Reeves’ Thomas Anderson, a gifted programmer who suspects his world is wrong, somehow. People contact him again to verify his suspicions. He refuses to believe the claims again. For a little while, the story seems the same, to the point where it doesn’t seem worth telling. Yet the world it’s being told to — Our world, the one where we’ve returned to see a new film called The Matrix for the first time since 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions — is very different. Thomas is doubtful in 2021’s final days. It’s also ResurrectionsIt is important to understand its significance.

Lana Wachowski directs the play from a script she coauthored with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon. Resurrections by The MatrixThis is all about achieving the impossible. On a very basic level, it’s about the insurmountable and inherently cynical task of making a follow-up to the Matrix trilogy, one that breaks technical and narrative ground the way the first film did. On a thematic one, it’s an agitprop romance, one of the most effective mass media diagnoses of the current moment that finds countless things to be angry about, and proposes fighting them all with radical, reckless love. On top of all that, it is also a kick-ass work of sci-fi action — propulsive, gorgeous, and yet still intimate — that revisits the familiar to show audiences something very new.

You can reload, but you cannot repeat the previous one

Warner Bros. Pictures

Resurrections by The Matrix Echoing an old idea can make you soar. An intimacy with The MatrixIts sequels Reloaded: The MatrixAnd The Matrix RevolutionsThis is especially useful when you enter the new film. Wachowski and Mitchell begin by solving the first problem Hemon has to solve. Resurrections is extricating Thomas Anderson — better known as Neo — from his fate in Revolutions. Slowly, they reveal how Neo, seemingly deceased alongside his love and partner Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), may or may not have survived to once again become Thomas Anderson, a blank slate who has trouble telling what’s real and what is not.

Thomas Anderson was also a programmer. He is the creator of The Matrix: The most successful video game trilogy. The games can be compared to the Matrix movie trilogy. It is a story of Neo, who finds that he lives in a dream-world controlled by machines and is The One who is destined for humanity’s defeat.

Like Lana Wachowski, who co-created the Matrix films with her sibling Lilly decades ago, Thomas is asked to make a sequel to the Matrix trilogy, one that his parent company — also devilishly named Warner Bros. — will make with or without their input. Thomas is now attempting to complete his mission, but his reality soon takes on an M.C. Escheresque levels of circuitousness. Did he create the Matrix Trilogy? They did happen. Now he’s a Matrix prisoner. Tiffany (Carrie Anne Moss) is in this world alongside him. She strongly resembles the dead Trinity of his fiction. Wachowski layers these questions in disorienting montage with voyeuristic angles, presenting Thomas’ presumed reality with just enough remove to make the viewer uncomfortable, and cause them to doubt, as Thomas does.

The ability to cast the old films into real-world games is possible Resurrections by The MatrixIt serves as an incredibly heavy-handed repudiation of the IP-driven reboot culture. The future is increasingly seen through the franchise lenses, trapping people in dream worlds controlled by corporate executives, where they are constantly rewarded for their loyalty with new products. It is clear that video games have been chosen as the medium of choice. Resurrections by The Matrix’ satire is icing on the cake: an entire medium defined by the illusion of choice, a culture built around the falsehood that megacorporations care about what their customers think when they have the data to show that every outrage du jour will still result in the same record-breaking profits.

As one of Thomas’s colleagues bluntly puts it: “I’m a geek. I was raised by machines.”

System bugs

Murray Close/Warner Bros. Pictures

Opening act Resurrections by The MatrixIt is astonishingly confounding and a delightful way to create the unmooring reality of the original for an audience who has probably seen or felt it influence countless times. However, as it reproduces itself, it also differs. This, however, isn’t, Bugs (Jessica Henwick, hacker) early on, what we think it means.

Bugs is our window into what’s new in ResurrectionsA young, determined woman who is dedicated to discovering the Neo her generation has only heard about as myth. This zealousness puts her in serious trouble with her elders. Humanity has made a small, but prosperous post-apocalyptic living, thanks to the uneasy agreement between man and machine, which Neo brokered at its conclusion of the first trilogy. By constantly hacking into the Matrix to find Neo, Bugs threatens that peace — yet it’s a risk that Bugs and her ragtag crew (which includes a phenomenal Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a role that’s not quite who viewers think he is) feel is worth taking. Because, despite all the efforts to liberate humanity from machine slavery, the Matrix is home to a large portion of humanity. It is impossible to let go of your dream world because the reality is actually real.

The hope that Neo will be rescued is just half the story. Wachowski turns in a stunning turn halfway through Resurrections by The MatrixOne that highlights a central shift in individual freedom towards human connection. The Resistance discovers it is possible to liberate Trinity once again, though by using means that have never been attempted before. It’s a mission that isn’t likely to succeed, but in this strange new future, it’s the only one worth living and dying for. It is a pivot to the mission of saving the hypothetical Trinity. ResurrectionsThis film takes the message of the original movie one step further. It’s not enough to free your mind; in fact, it’s worthless if you don’t unplug in the interest of connecting and loving those around you.

Warner Bros. Pictures

It can be converted from a back-half gear to something more simple, or it will whip. It’s The MatrixIt is a film about heists. Due to this genre pivot Resurrections’ action takes on a different flavor from that of its predecessors. While weighty, satisfying martial arts standoffs are still in play, they’re not the centerpiece, as “Thomas” and “Tiffany” are the heart of the film, played by actors 20 years older and a little more limited in their choreography. Instead, Resurrections by The MatrixBeautiful widescreen set pieces, large brawls, visual effects, and stunning sets of scenes are just a few examples of the amazing work that Wachowski does. Wachowski and her co-writers split the action as Bugs and her crew — who don’t get enough screen time but all make a terrific impression — race to find where their heroes may be hidden in the real world, and “Thomas” tries to get “Tiffany” to remember the love they once shared. All of the heady philosophy that these movies are known for is put into direct action, as the machines show off the ways they’ve changed the Matrix in an effort to not just keep a Neo from rescuing a Trinity, but to imprison him again.

You can follow this pattern throughout. Resurrections by The MatrixIt is a film about big emotions that has been beautifully made and it feels lighter than the previous films. Its score, by Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer, reprises iconic motifs from original Matrix composer Don Davis’ work while introducing shimmery, recursive sequencing, a sonic echo to go with the visual one. While legendary cinematographer Bill Pope is also among the talent that doesn’t return this time around, the team of Daniele Massaccesi and John Toll bring a more painterly approach to Resurrections. Warm colors invade scenes from both the Matrix and the real world; the latter looks more vibrant than ever without the blue hues that characterized it in the original trilogy, while its digital counterpart has now changed to the point where it’s painfully idyllic, a world of bright colors and sunlight that is difficult to leave.

Embodying those changes is Jonathan Groff as a reawakened Smith, Neo’s dark opposite within the Matrix. Groff steps in to fill the role of Hugo Weaving. Resurrections by The Matrix personified: He nails a character so iconic that recasting it feels like hubris, yet also finds new shades to bring to an antagonistic role in a world where villains only appear human, when in fact they’re often ideas. These ideas can be So It is difficult to wage war on.

Systeme of Control

Warner Bros. Pictures

The Matrix movies of the past are all about the lies that we believe, but the Matrix 2 is about the lies we make up. In spite of its questions, 1999’s The MatrixThe notion of objective truth is fundamental to the belief that it exists, and that everyone would like to know. On the cusp of 2022, objective truth is no longer agreed upon, as pundits, politicians, and tech magnates each present their vision of what’s real, and aggressively market it to the masses. The current crisis is what you make it. Only you have to decide which side of the conflict to fight: us or them.

“If we don’t know what’s real,” one character asks Neo, “how do we resist?”

Lana Wachowski returns to the world she made with her sibling and makes a final argument. She may not have the last word. Resurrections by The MatrixA bouquet of flowers, thrown with all the violence of a Molotov cocktail. The will to win is balanced by the desire to show compassion. It is because feelings, which are the oppressive constructs of humanity that are in the Matrix Note, are far easier to control than factual information. Feelings are what make us sway. What if Neo comes back with a different story? To rise above culture war, a new myth

It doesn’t have to be a bold one. It can even be one you’ve heard before. About a man named Thomas who can’t shake the idea that there’s something wrong with the world around him, that he feels disconnected from others in a way that he was never meant to be. And when others finally tell him that he’s living in an illusion, he doesn’t quite believe them — not until he sees something, someone, for himself that reminds him of what, exactly, he is missing: that he used to be in love.

Resurrections by The Matrix December 22nd, in theaters and HBO Max