When a star’s variety of hair styles is the real star of a movie, you know it’s a sign of trouble. So it is, unfortunately, with “The Matrix Resurrections,” which makes poignant use of hair cuts and color to mark the eighteen years separating the new film from the last installment in the “Matrix” trilogy. Little else in the new film is as moving. The action picks up where the last one left off. There, Neo (Keanu Reeves), having saved the last human city, the underground realm of Zion, died from the effort. In “Resurrections,” he returns to life—though he remains, at the start of the film, nonetheless spiritually dead. He’s a bored corporate video-game designer, living under his erstwhile mundane identity of Thomas Anderson, who’s famous for creating a trilogy of games called, yes, Matrix. Tom’s belief in the Matrix—i.e., in the deceptive façade known as reality, and in his own hidden identity as Neo—has led him to a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt. He’s in therapy now, with an analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) who’s helping him cope with his ostensible delusions. His meds? Blue pills.
The original “Matrix” is a peculiar movie. In it, the directors and screenwriters, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, displayed a sincere and rapt fascination with the philosophical implications of life as a simulation. As a result, the action scenes, though surprisingly few and brief, stand out for their visual and technical originality and for their dramatic import. (The film implicitly tweaks Descartes’s dictum: If I only think, who am I?) The first sequel, “Reloaded,” is the “Godfather: Part II” of sci-fi movies: the Wachowskis went far beyond the earnestness of the original, and vastly upped the ante on its technical advances and kinetic fantasies, to create a film that is both a raucously exaggerated comedy and an even more hyperbolically extravagant action film. But the technological command and the cleverness on display in the colossal fight scenes also undercut their dramatic significance, as do the over-the-top theatrics that tip into the facetious. Then, in the third film in the franchise, “The Matrix Revolutions,” the Wachowskis pulled way back. Seemingly taking the lead from the “Star Wars” prequels, which were then in progress, they turned their franchise into a subterranean space opera, foregrounding the elaborate world-building of the hidden city of Zion, with its intrigues and its clanking mechanical monsters. In place of the exuberance and delight of the first films, there is a slogging dutifulness, leading to a heroic conclusion that the Wachowskis hardly seemed passionate about, but which at least provides closure.
Fat chance. The prime inspiration of “Resurrections” is to wrap its own reason for being into the story. As if Tom weren’t miserable enough, his boss (Jonathan Groff) passes along an order from the parent company, Warner Bros.—the studio behind the Matrix films—to create a new sequel to his video games. They’ll make it with or without Tom, just as the studio was going to do the movie with or without the Wachowski sisters. Tom’s deeply personal trilogy being turned into a corporate cash cow pushes him back to the brink. Yet, at the same time, Tom catches the glimmer of an awakening. In a nearby café, the debonair Tom, with his long, dark locks and neat beard, has a chance encounter with a woman named Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), who resembles Neo’s beloved Trinity, his partner in battle and romance, who also died at the end of “Revolutions.” Just as Tom is beginning to believe that Trinity may still be alive, he also gets involved with a pair of young hackers named Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and Seq (Toby Onwumere), devoted Matrix gamers who never stopped believing that Neo was still alive. Their elaborate manipulations help him reconnect with Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne in the original trilogy, and by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II here), take a red pill, and go in search of Trinity.
Yet his efforts threaten the fragile and hard-won peace of the successor to Zion, the subterranean city of Io, which in the time since the last film (a period of sixty years, according to “Resurrections”) had been destroyed. Io’s ruler, Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith, returning from “Revolutions”), knows that the city’s survival—its advance over Zion—is to coöperate with the machines, bringing both peace and plenty. Neo’s decision to reignite dormant lines of division endangers the new underground haven. Nonetheless, his acolytes Bugs and Seq sign on to his mission no questions asked, and they lead all of Io’s young corps of officers to battle in the hope of recovering Trinity. In the process, Neo has to fight again with Agent Smith (played now by Groff in lieu of Hugo Weaving, who took the role in the trilogy), with Merovingian (Lambert Wilson, who returns), and with a brand-new adversary whose identity is a spoiler.
An air of nostalgia is present from the start of “Resurrections,” when Tom uses new software to write a version of Trinity’s first big battle from the original “Matrix” into his video game. Hints and winks at that first installment crop up throughout, as if straining to recapture not merely the successes of the trilogy but the sense of astonishment that the first film unleashed. The heavy-handed script seemingly even admits and dramatizes its own sentimentality: when Morpheus reappears, he shows Neo scenes from the trilogy on an old-fashioned TV set that wouldn’t have been out of place in “Being the Ricardos,” while explaining, “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.” Half the script seems crafted to account for the fact that familiar characters are being played by new actors and for other inconsistencies between the trilogy and the new sequel—including references to an altered “digital self-image” that retcons “Revolutions” and the catchiest of them, the “exomorphic particle codex,” that brings back a Fishburne simulacrum, alongside Abdul-Mateen, by way of “paramagnetic oscillation.” (I tried it at home; it works.)
Just as “Revolutions” built out Zion at length but with what appeared to be little enthusiasm, “Resurrections” turns sludgily scriptbound as it outlines Io’s new era of peace and prosperity. Lucas’s “Star Wars” prequels courted controversy and hostility from nostalgists, but they succeeded artistically through a combination of astonishing new special effects and through Lucas’s extremely earnest and detailed interest in the political stakes and principles of the universe that he created (an interest that he explored by way of florid and intricate rhetoric). In “Resurrections,” Lana Wachowski and her co-screenwriters, David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, follow a more traditional formula: when inspiration is lacking, replace it with spectacle. The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve. There’s one notable exception, near the end, involving an extraordinary and pain-racked action conceit—weaponized suicides of a grotesque sort—but it is introduced hastily and then whisked away as a mere plot point. One of the worst aspects of the trilogy was its indiscriminate use of gun battles, and they return in “Resurrections.” Two justly famous visual tropes, the slowing-down of bullets in flight and the force field with which Neo wards them off, return, too, with a couple of minor new touches that suggest technical advances more than artistic ones.
As the title suggests, “Resurrections” leans hard into the trilogy’s notion of the power of faith. In the original film, the crucial turn of Neo’s initiation was learning, from a child who bent a spoon with his mind, that the secret is, “There is no spoon.” Neo discovered that, if he believes he can fly, he can fly. But what, in that case, prevented him from merely believing his enemies away? Perhaps faith has limits, though the series never defines them. In “Resurrections,” this tenuous premise is taken further, through (avoiding spoilers) the plotline involving Tom’s therapy, which, in the absence of love and faith, proves to be worse than futile.
Lana Wachowski and her sister Lilly, who co-directed the original trilogy with her, came out as trans women after making the Matrix trilogy. (Lana discussed her coming-out experience in a New Yorker Profile, in 2012, by Hemon.) Astute viewers have spoken of the original “Matrix” as an allegorical dramatization, as the filmmakers intended, of resistance to gender conventions. It’s a mark of the misery that Tom endures in “Resurrections” that the game he’s working on unhappily is called “Binary.” Queer subtexts of “Resurrections” have been talked about ever since the trailer dropped, in September, revealing the casting of openly queer actors in major roles. Something happens when Neo and Trinity find each other again. (You thought they wouldn’t?) Without any explicit sexual references, their reunion opens a vertiginous space of identity, psychology, and history, in a fleeting moment: not only does their hair turn somewhat gray but they have identical, close-to-the-scalp cuts. They resemble each other; each one has become a sort of tabula rasa for self-re-creation, a mode of transformation that acknowledges the passing of time and that they’ll undertake together, with the sustaining strength of mutual recognition, mutual understanding. The movie took nearly two and a half hours to reach that powerful moment. If only the journey had been as exciting as the destination.
