THE MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS - Wake Up

Director: Lana Wachowski
Writers: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksander Hemon
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith
Runtime: 148 mins.
2021

The Matrix is what so much art strives for and so little accomplishes: iconic. The Wachowski sisters blended gun-fu, Hong Kong-style wirework, existentialist philosophy, anticapitalist realism, sci-fi apocalyptica, trans allegory, seething cynicism, and bleeding heart sentimentality into a tight package. The film's sickly green cyberpunk visual aesthetic dominated our collective imagination for years.

No surprise that The Matrix: Resurrections is worse in every way. The narrative is chunky and rambling. The 'real world' political stakes are unclear about what exactly has shifted for machine/human relations in the last 60 years. The recasting of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) features a decent performance hemmed in by lackluster writing, and the recasting of Agent Smith features decent writing hemmed in by a lackluster performance (Jonathan Groff tries to play up the smarm, but Hugo Weaving he is not). The city of Io feels like an empty knockoff of Zion. The script's technobabble combines with imperfect sound mixing to create a dizzying array of garbled phrases. Worst of all, the action is shoddy. You could chalk this up to an aging cast (Keanu spends much of the movie doing CGI hand blasts rather than kung-fu), but even the young actors' combat is edited to hell. Besides, Keanu certainly seems capable of skilled and beautiful action choreography right over there in the John Wick franchise.

Yet we must evaluate art on its own merits, rather than compare it to a checklist of our expectations. The Matrix: Resurrections is a poor Matrix sequel, because it focuses on being an unexpectedly rich Matrix reboot.

The Matrix fandom has spent the last week griping about their unfulfilled checklists. The real kicker is that Lana Wachowski (directing this franchise entry without her sister) has made a film that shares their affection and even many of their critiques. It also has the gall to suggest that perhaps this anger is entitled, misplaced. Wachowski has made an anti-reboot reboot, one that respects the legacy of this story while also showing how it can be twisted into something ugly. Resurrections is furious about the ways stories get corrupted and co-opted. "That's what the Matrix does," says Bugs (Jessica Henwick), Neo's enthusiastic young guide. "It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that's important to us."

The fantastically disorienting first act reveals that Neo has been resubsumed into the identity of Thomas Anderson, or perhaps he was Anderson all along. This Mr. Anderson is the world-famous developer of an iconic trilogy of Matrix video games. He is also suffering from the fallout of a psychotic break. We see his life in montage: he is pressured by his bosses to revisit the project that he said was finished, he tamps down panic attacks at work and at home, he sits at a cafe cultivating an inexplicable connection to a woman who we recognize as Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and he attends psychotherapy with his Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) to try to glue the wreckage of his life together. We see this in a phenomenal montage set to the excellent "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. This section of the film is by far the strongest. I was expecting a meta-critique about reboots, but I wasn't expecting it to be so aggressive. "Why use old code to make something new?" asks Bugs, who kicks off Resurrections by watching a remixed version of The Matrix's opening scene.

The Matrix has Neo in its grip once more, and its assault is two-pronged. On the one hand, the almighty profit margin requires him to disinter the corpse of his greatest work only to hear endless focus groups yammer on about what made the original marketably special (and especially marketable). On the other hand, he is bullied into believing that the parts of himself he poured into that story are 'just fiction,' and are a distraction from the daily grind of work.

I knew I was on the film's side when it came right out and name-dropped Warner Bros. as one of the obnoxious gadflies that neo-Neo must swat away. This is why it's such a mistake to think of the movie as a continuation of the previous films' story. Rather, The Matrix 4 is a movie about what it was like to make The Matrix 4. Rarely have I felt so viscerally attuned to a director's subjectivity as when Neo endures the painful drudgery of his obligatory artistic process.

It's all gesturing towards a torturous relationship with Expectation that most successful artists know very well. The film even goes out of its way to splice in clips from the original trilogy. A surface reading might say this indicates a stale reliance on nostalgia, but really it's the opposite. They are presented as repressed traumatic memories. Neo is plagued by these cuts. He tries to escape them only to get reeled back in. His melancholy air of defeat seems to say, How am I supposed to live up to this? Why must I repeat these cycles? If this is what you want, wouldn't you rather just be rewatching the original? These interstitial images come to climax in a tarnished movie theater. The first Matrix plays soundless on a shredded movie screen, projector beams partitioning the air. This haunting cathedral is where Neo must decide if he will play the game once more.

This scene overlays the old code onto the new to make something beautiful. In fact, the most objectively successful aspect of Resurrections is its cinematography. Even as the action falls short, the visual language is rich as ever. DPs Daniele Massaccesi and John Toll create images both intimate and poetic, like Neo coaching himself back into 'reality' by clawing at the texture of his jeans, or the yearning glances exchanged between him and a now family-laden Trinity. A standout sequence takes place on a Tokyo train, also the only action setpiece of the film I'd consider an out-and-out success. The colors are vibrant and the sense of motion is bracing as cramped quarter kung-fu gets buffeted by cherry blossom petals whirling through a massive hole blasted in the train's hull.

In another bid to infuriate the fans, this is the story of Neo's depression, not his dogged heroism. He is broken after being put back together too many times. His quest is not to save Trinity, but for Trinity to save him. It's a signature Wachowski move to couch existentialist angst within the context of a simple human connection. Neo needs Trinity to fly before he can again dream of doing so. I balked the first time I heard someone describe their relationship as a queer romance, but if 'two people wearing someone else's face experience an unthinkable connection despite one being attached to a traditional heterosexual family, and when that hidden yearning is finally expressed the husband descends into black-eyed rage' isn't a queer romance, I don't know what is.

There is something profound to be unpacked here about the nexus of nostalgia manufacturing, artistic responsibility, capitalist demand, our complicity in our own oppression, and the beguiling elation of confronting traumatic cycles head on. The very fact that I don't yet fully grasp the synthesis of these ideas is a testament to how bursting with meaning Wachowski's work is here, even as the execution is occasionally damp. I much prefer a film that challenges the audience and never ceases to be interesting, over yet another reboot that is technically slick but resigned to hitting the obligatory beats. We could so easily have gotten a The Force Awakens, but instead we got a The Last Jedi, for which I am so grateful, and for which so many others are so furious.

The Matrix: Resurrections is an impressive transgressive film expressly designed to challenge the regressive obsessives. It refuses to give you comfort food like Captain America wielding Thor's hammer. None of the truly successful reboots do.

3 / 5  BLOBS