The Matrix Resurrections - Movie Review

Critics Score - 4 of 10

General Audience Score - 6 of 10

Movie nostalgia is an interesting thing. We can recall a movie from our youth or another formative time, be it Jurassic Park, Star Wars or Snow White and it’s almost like a form of time travel occurs. Our minds make connections to the past, how we felt, the things we experienced, the joys and sorrows, they come back and we experience something again but in a different and new way. The Matrix Resurrections just dropped on HBO Max, just in time for Christmas 2021, and it doesn’t decide to reinvent the wheel, like Star Wars The Force Awakens did with that franchise, which can be a good thing. But Resurrections steers so hard into our love for the originals, it creates more problems for itself than it can solve. While it’s admittedly fun to watch Reeves and Moss back in the saddle doing Matrixy things, the film gets extremely meta. There are discussions of Warner Brothers making the Matrix 4, conversations about bullet time, the film even references how much it’s using nostalgia, it is so self-aware it’s annoying. So many clips from the original films, so many clips. In the future, those wishing for some good old fashioned Matrix nostalgia will get far more satisfaction going back to and rewatching the original Matrix films than resurrecting The Matrix Resurrections. 

SYNOPSIS - The fourth installment of The Matrix predictably starts with a recreation of sorts of the original film, because why not? Cops storm in on a young leather clad woman and a fight ensues, only this time a blue haired newcomer Bugs (Jessica Henwick) looks on and provides us with commentary on what’s happening. The agents chase the alternate Trinity and subsequently Bugs, but then an agent named Morpheus pulls her to safely into a room designed to look approximately 65% like what Thomas Anderson’s computer hacking room did. Eventually Bugs and Morpheus end up getting chased out a window and while falling the camera pulls backs into Matrix code and we find ourselves in the computer screen of game designer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves). But when the designer of the hit Matrix game goes out for coffee and bumps into Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss) with her two kids and husband, he starts to question his reality . . . again.

After all the bullets have been stopped and Trinity and Neo sail off into the sunset on their yacht, we’ve taken a nice long trip down nostalgia lane, then backed up the entire length of the drive and repeated it all two or three times. The screenplay and direction from Lana Wachowski are both big problems here, she doesn’t set out to create something new, she sets out to rehash the original films and relies heavily on nostalgia for them to sell the convoluted premise for this one. The Matrix films are known for superb action and fight sequences but these weren’t crisp or coherent, the poor editing was most evident during these scenes making it difficult to follow what was happening exactly. Subconsciously you know your watching a fight sequence and you mentally give the film credit for it, but they were a mess. Numerous references to the red and blue pills, Neo trying to fly but he can’t, the little girl Savi from the train station and the Merovingian showing up, these make for momentary amusements, they don’t make the film “cool” or even good. When nostalgia becomes the centerpiece or backbone of a movie, the reason for something’s inclusion becomes an excuse for it’s inclusion.

SUMMARY - There’s nothing inherently wrong with a film being based on nostalgia, being meta or self-aware, plenty of films have exploited these aspects, woven them into their filmmaking and produced perfectly decent movies. But there’s a point where enough is enough. Unlike Lazarus, Trinity and Neo didn’t deserve these Resurrections in this latest installment of The Matrix.