The Matrix Resurrections Review (Patreon)

Wrote this for The Stony Brook Press, where it'll appear soon, ideally in a more polished form. I kinda pounded this out after rewatching the movie, so apologies for any messiness or lack of discipline.

As the film industry is ravaged by a glut of corporate monopolies and homogenous sequel machines, one of its few truly radical filmmakers has stormed back into the mainstream and demanded the industry’s attention with her latest movie. Lana Wachowski, now a solo director, redefines what blockbusters can do with The Matrix Resurrections, her barnstorming return to the franchise she and her sister Lilly created over two decades ago. In an era of unrepentantly nostalgic blockbuster filmmaking, The Matrix Resurrections shows that sequels can be thrilling while dialoguing with their pasts, showing an exhilarating but meditative reflection on aging, trauma, repression, and self-liberation.

Directing solo after her sister’s late-career turn to working on queer indie media, Lana Wachowski shares a co-writing credit with Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell (whose novel the Wachowskis adapted in 2012) and novelist Aleksander Hemon. The two novelists’ contribution likely contributes to a more cleanly structured Matrix, a change from the original films’ exuberant messiness while retaining their madcap refusal to hold back. 

Lana Wachowski’s ruthless self-indulgence, present in her and her sister’s classic directorial debut in 1996’s Bound all the way to 2015’s gloriously silly Jupiter Ascending, is alive in Resurrections, yet with more restraint than previous Matrix films. There are glimpses of the series’ iconic digital rain and red pills, and Resurrections incessantly telegraphs its Matrixness to its audience, but the movie flamboyantly refuses to simply retread old ground, announcing its intentions with lines like “this cannot be another reboot, retread.”

Resurrections invites its audience to reflect on their relationships with stories. From an early montage showcasing how characters analyze The Matrix as a text to Neil Patrick Harris’ character The Analyst, protagonist Neo’s therapist, baldly saying “it’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one [in your head]”, the movie blatantly acknowledges The Matrix’s status as a formative text, how it’s been read in the years since, and how it intends to proceed now.

Blue-haired hacker Bugs (played brilliantly by Jessica Henwick) serves as the audience viewpoint character, observing The Matrix and understanding that something is wrong with the text and the world. It’s her adoration of Matrix protagonist Neo that enables his return to the series. An intrinsically 2021 sci-fi protagonist, Bugs gives the audience a meta-voice and guides The Matrix back to its audience. Her consent as a viewer and a character allows the series to return.

Resurrections is largely about invitation and the act of watching: inviting the audience to reflect on its predecessors’ legacy, to consider how aging shapes people and fiction, and the trauma at the heart of storytelling. The climax hinges on Trinity and Neo facing an invitation to the future, rejecting one reality in place of another. It embraces the idea that fiction can be a prison, where people lock their desires and trauma, and a way to liberate one’s mind. In the movie’s own words: “Are memories turned into fiction any less real?”

Doubtless this is why many fans have railed against Resurrections. Life has moved on in the real world and in the Matrix. The film’s leisurely paced slow second act shows how characters’ failures to negotiate with reality in Reloaded and Revolutions failed them, consistent with those movies’ themes. Jada Pinkett Smith’s return as Niobe, now leading the machine world, shows how transformed people lived in transformed worlds. This kind of nuance doesn’t accommodate nostalgia. 

Resurrections’ meditation on age necessarily turns joyful with Keanu Reeves’ and Carrie-Anne Moss’s return to their characters. The fact they’ve aged like the finest wines the Merovingian can afford is happy enough, but that Reeves and Moss are having so much fun is sufficient to carry the movie. Wisely, Resurrections centers Neo and Trinity’s relationship, using the passage of time as a dramatic engine for the two. How do these relationships change over time?, it asks.

Desire remains. Distance increases. That Lana Wachowski made this movie while healing from her parents’ deaths is no secret; her anecdote about the story coming to her fully formed one night while she grieved guides the film. “I couldn’t have my mom and dad… yet suddenly, I had Neo and Trinity,” as she’s said. The movie is called Resurrections, after all. It’s art as healing wish fulfillment: losing a relationship, gaining a new one and learning new lessons.

Silent, unattainable desire is often part of queer people’s desires, particularly those of trans people. Sometimes it’s gazing across a room at someone but fear of interacting because of stigma. Sometimes you see somebody and want to be them. You look in the mirror and see a person who’s not you. Even within queer relationships, there’s shame and trauma to overcome. That we have any visibility is a wonder to us some days.

Lana Wachowski, now the only major trans filmmaker in Hollywood, rejects making Resurrections an overt trans allegory (The Matrix never seemed consciously trans so much as two trans filmmakers’ pre-coming out work, which has trans resonances like anything does). Resurrections instead invites trans readings by acknowledging them and being thematically quite clear. Scenes which glimpse how Neo is seen by everybody in The Matrix exist while Neo’s own image of himself is what appears in all his screentime depict dysphoria in a particularly cinematic way. (And this is without getting into the extremely trans motifs of face-changing, blue pills, and mirrors.)

And Wachowski’s use of silence captures the sense of space, time, and aging. Under co-cinematographer John Toll’s influence, Wachowski has embraced natural light in shooting scenes, often rearranging shots to capture a moment’s authentic lighting. Idiosyncratically, Resurrections was scored before it was shot, enabling the movie to be cut to its music, creating spontaneity and an intrinsic debt to the passage of time.

The Matrix Resurrections owns its moment. It embraces the passage of time and falls into line alongside the feminist science fiction of its era while dialoguing with its source material. It assesses the landscape of cinema and science fiction and goes “here’s my role here.” The movie rebukes the alt-right’s appropriation of the red pill with queer and racially diverse filmmaking. And it rebukes the insulting notion that a sequel should be anything less than a challenge to its own source material. It is one of the finest blockbusters in years, queer as hell, and by God, I hope Lana Wachowski makes something weird and radical that’s nothing like it.