The Matrix Resurrections 2021

Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.

If anything, Hollywood has boiled that concept down to a science over the past few years, as this film is basically a summary of everything that’s wrong with the industry in a neat, 148 minute package.
It thinks it’s meta and self-aware by pointing out how cynical and cheap franchise filmmaking is.
That might sound similar set-up as 22 Jump Street, but this film proceeds to be cheap and cynical itself without saying anything substantial beyond its own set up, so it embraces what it’s trying to criticize.
Everything in this movie is structured as an excuse to show stuff you’ve seen before, there are little to no original concepts or ideas that push the franchise in an interesting direction.
It’s mostly a rehash of the first film (mixed with some stuff from Reloaded and Revolutions in the second half), except the action isn’t nearly as good, it’s more predictable and convenient, the performances are nowhere near as memorable (that’s what you get from replacing your 2 best actors), it looks uglier and more synthetic, the pacing isn’t as tight, and it’s a lot more dull because of how much it overexplains itself.
It also ditches the cyberpunk aesthetic, and replaces it with something a lot more bland and boring, stripping the franchise from a lot of its personality.
It’s honestly quite an accomplishment when you think about it: the original is one of the best, most successful, big budget films ever made that still maintained a strong artistic and alternative impulse.
This, on the other hand, couldn’t be any more lowest common denominator if it tried to.
It’s a parody of itself and modern blockbuster filmmaking.
I suppose that was Lana Wachowski’s goal to some extent, but it isn’t very compelling to watch.

3/10

While some will undoubtedly criticize the perhaps overly meta set-up that accounts for the first 30 minutes of this film, relative to the rest of the movie, that portion was actually my favorite part and I can't help but wish they had just gone all in on the idea. The story of a game designer who is losing his grip on reality felt fresh and unique. The rest of the movie... not so much. At the conclusion of the original trilogy, the Matrix lore was already an incomprehensible mess, but skipping ahead 60 years and dropping a whole new collection of buzzwords and exposition dumps only made things worse. All the more reason to cut ties with all of that baggage and tell some new story in which the Matrix is simply a series of videos games created by a troubled mind. Alas, that's not the movie we got, and after those first 30 minutes the film turns into an unsuccessful rehash of various elements of previous Matrix films. To make matters worse, the action is also not up to par. Even just finishing the movie minutes ago, I'm having a hard time thinking back to any memorable set pieces or sequences.

Luckily, things aren't all bad. The cast are pretty much universally solid, including both new and returning characters/actors. Jonathan Groff leans into his role as the new Agent Smith, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II sells his version of Morpheus, and Neil Patrick Harris delivers some fun monologues as the Analyst. Unfortunately, great acting can only take you so far, enough to sell hammy dialogue or even save individual scenes, but not enough to save the overall plot.

I did not expect much, and that's what I got. Neo and Trinity were mostly great, everything else was just horrible

The story was mostly ok, nothing special. Too many flashbacks.
The effects are worse than in the first Matrix from 22 years ago
The fight choreography is just bad, no feeling of impact anywhere
The crew feels like a bunch of drama students in matrix cosplay
Morpheus was changed into a joke, the character was completely destroyed
Smith is very creepy, the whole essence of the character is gone
The Analyst is totally miscast.
You would fear the agents in other movies, here they mean nothing.

The movie could have been easily cut down to 90 minutes without losing anything. Just bloated
The movie lacks style. When you see a scene from the Matrix or even the sequels, you can see and feel the overflowing of style.
There is nothing like that here. They lost it completely.

I feel like behind the first Matrix, there was a vision. Vision to make something new, unique. And they were successful. Here they also had a vision. A vision of quick easy money earned through nostalgia. Nothing else.

After a while, I actually started to wonder. Did the Watchkowskis really make the first Matrix? The difference in quality is just so huge here.

This new Matrix comes from 20 years of exhortations to the Wachowskis by Warner Bros., that wanted them to continue the original trilogy with other movies, following the mechanism to which we are used of emptying the a work's artistic value with innumerable iterations, sequel, remake, reboot, requel etc., in which the original idea by itself exploited to attract nostalgic is also poisoned by spurious narrative elements that seek to renew the interest for something already seen to attract new audiences, thus squeezing as much as possible of its initial creative vision to transform it into a commercial brand on which one can earn without having to take the risk of producing new original stories.
In particular, the Wachowskis have always hurled against this unhealthy Hollywood production mechanism summarized in the formula 'crisis of ideas' (a misleading term since there would be creatives with 'ideas', but one simply prefers not to fund them, betting instead on safe investments): from the unexpected success of their Matrix in 1999, they chose to disrupt most of the public hype with the two sequels (which only recently begin to be revalued... better late than ever!) and preferred to expand the history of the saga experimenting new medias beyond cinema, with the wonderful home-video Animatrix series in collaboration with some of the best Japanese animation directors from the early 2000s (veterans such as Kawajiri and Watanabe together with nascent ones like Koike) and with video games based on Matrix, including an MMORPG that tried to give ground to the Matrix concept with a fictitious virtual world ehere to connect living parallel to the real world. Meanwhile, even in their subsequent films (Speed ​​Racer, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending) the Wachowskis continued to claim the primacy of their personal artistic research over the generalist public expectations, two elements that met only with the lucky exception of the Sense8 TV series.
Without any doubt, the core of Matrix Resurrections is the criticism about this Hollywood production strategy, centered around the idea of ​​transforming everything into a consumption asset to be repeated until the public's interest saturation, ruthless when it excludes an author from the control over his work to entrust it to any other director so as to continue to grind money from the brand (possibility, this, which has almost realized in the case of this Matrix 4, if only Lana had not agreed to direct it in the end). This criticism is made explicit during the movie first hour in which, in the new fictitious Matrix, the original Matrix has become a video game produced by Warner Bros., cited directly as an unscrupulous company enriching by exploitation of its creatives' genius and from whose dominion one must "wake up" to be finally free.
Comments of this type were the starting point for more or less all the reviews I read about this film: a hateful parody of the first Matrix that criticizes the western cinema industry and laughs at the spectator, made apathetic from the convenience of stories that are always the same, repeated over and over again, and who is careful only to analyze the tributes towards the original work while is so used to fan service that he can only ask for more and more of it. Thus, it is suggested that Lana Wachowski made this movie with reluctance, capitulating to the insistence of Warner Bros., and hence with the rabious goal of sabotaging the whole operation to take revenge of public and industry: a kind of "I didn't want to do this film, so I will make all of you suffer for 2 hours and a half and I will let lose a lot of money to those who forced me to do it, suiciding me professionally in the name of my ideal purity of a whimsical artist".
Investigating a minimum, however, it turns out that it is very easy to question these conclusions: in 2019 Lana Wachowski suffered the loss of her parents and best friend in short distance from each other, and it was only after the inability to elaborate this dramatic mourning that she agreed to return to her most famous work, feeling she had something else to say about it that could substantially expand the speeches already concluded with the original trilogy. It is herself, in fact, to tell how the feeling of extreme solitude which followed this series of tragedies has been mitigated by her affection for the characters that she created over time during his artistic journey together with her sister Lilly, in particular Neo and Trinity, and how she realized that, although they were completed creations - in a broad sense "dead" - her need to find love from someone who knew her "brought them back to life", placing the foundations for a new Matrix movie. Which is not by chance called Resurrections.

So what is Matrix Resurrections about?
The peace between men and machines resulting from the deeds of the Chosen one has failed and a new Matrix has been refounded. No longer by an Architect, who bound the existence of men to a predetermined causal event chain to efficiency the equations that regained it, in an almost ideal simulative algorithm of reality. Simulation that, precisely not ideal, was afflicted by the only defect of having to deceive men about the predetermination of their lives - that is the illusion of free will - hence lending the emergence of an anomaly systemic to the program, the Chosen one, who forced the algorithm to integrate it consistently into itself, planning an infinite cycle of destruction and refounding of the entire system as its only chance of stable survival. In this old version of Matrix it was the unexpected irrationality of a choice to disrupt the mechanism of the rational cause-effect series, due to having being stimulated not by pragmatic reasoning around the concept of 'superior good', which weighs the morally correct choice between pros and cons, but by an irrepressible feeling like Love, to which it doesn't matter what is absolutely right and that acts for himself, deciding as if there was no alternative, as if in that choice the possibility of doubt was missing, because dictated by a faith from which all subsequent actions move: "because so it has chosen". Matrix is ​​no longer the mirror of a depressing society that has an interest in considering men as 'batteries' useful only to keep it in operation, convincing them that there is no other value in life if not to 'discharge progressively' and die while working for It, therefore training them for an existence made of illusory free choices (because in reality rationally forced by the most trivial reasons such as guaranteeing a social position or simply do not miss at work) so as to distract them from grasping the true sense of life, that is to live true Love and live to fully enjoy it, even upsetting your life if necessary.
This new Matrix has been re-founded by an Analyst, a connoisseur of the human mind, who instead of repudiating it was inspired by it in his reprogramming work, exploiting its internal mechanisms to lock up men in unresolved lives dominated by the fear of making any choice, in a continuous oscillation between expectations and disillusionment, between hope and depression, which never reaches a catarsys from where one can move further, but establishes a spiral of endless frustration, from which one is as incapable of escape as well as desired to do so. Thus, the tension that permeates the lives of men generates an energy power (in the strict sense of 'caloric energy') immensely higher than that of an idyllic existence to which the Architect aimed in the previous Matrix, and thus solving the energy crisis of the machines following the Chosen one's peace at the end of the original trilogy. Also men have changed dramatically in this fourth chapter: nor blinded by faith in the Chosen one's Prophecy like Captain Morpheus nor skeptics but ready to sacrifice everything for the cause of the machines annihilation and the freedom of humanity as the General Lock. Because the peace brought by Neo has changed everything irretrievably: it convinced the skeptics to believe in the Prophecy propagated by Morpheus who became the guide of Zion, 'the city of free men' which became 'of the freed one', convincing them all fideistically that new hostilities with the machines were impossible and then causing its collapse when this rhetoric was denied by the real intentions of the Analyst. A catastrophe to which few survive, now guided by the synthesis of Morpheus and Lock, i.e. General Niobe, she who never believed neither the Prophecy nor the Chosen One but simply trusted Neo. Moreover, the civil war between the pacifist machines led by the Oracle against the Matrix re-builders guided by the Analyst led to their escape from the city of machines to the new human city, IO (2 in binary code, representing the dual nature of its inhabitants and what remains of the old Zion), where men and machines have (re)founded a new symbiosis, combining the empathy of the first to the boundless knowledge of the latter, determining a new prosperity for both but also distracting them from their original struggle for the release of the minds still encaged in the new Matrix.
Having defused the conflict between men and machines and all its epic rhetoric in which the whole humanity was saved by a Chosen one with mystical powers who foiled his antithesis and ended a secular war on a post-apocalyptic planet, and choosing instead to focus on a single individual's struggle of freeing himself from his idiosyncrasies that keep him locked up in his mind instead of living freely in the world and relate serenely with other people, the tone of the story needed to change necessarily, from epic to something else. And it is here that you see the Lana's genius, who traces a parallelism between the mind that repudiates its identity after the trauma of having been misunderstood, exploited and affected by others and that therefore decides to deform itself to adapt to the surrounding environment, getting used to a comfort zone made up of choices' evasion to comply with the reality in which it lives until it forgets what its original identity was... and the concept of "meme", which in the same way hides a meaning and an original context under an intricate series of superstructures that deform it accordingly to the new contexts in which it is located so that it can survive and last until it becomes extremely difficult to retrieve the original meaning. Which is exactly as it happened with the Matrix franchise, from an epic about Love as a sense of life to its opposite, the meme of the "Redpill Theory" that if embraced promises to wake up from the world's illusion and to reveal that Love does not exist and existence is a conviction without any solution (plus all its subject's variations in conspiracy sauce, from 9/11 to Covid-19).
Strengthened by her 20 years personal experience of misunderstandings between her intentions and the public - that sticked to the innumerable distorted interpretations of the first Matrix, refusing to understand that its true meaning rely in its sequels Reloaded and Revolutions - Lana Wachowski unites this discourse on the misunderstood and traumatized identity of an artist with a critics of memes that deform an original message to adapt it to any interpretation until it is transformed from subject onto which one can talk to object through which one speaks. And she does it leading to the extremes this speech but in the opposite direction to any expectation: the Wachowskis had already used us to reductions of non-original subjects in movies such as novels (Cloud Atlas) or animated series (Speed Racer) but always creating something in which their imprint was extremely recognizable, so giving new originality to the work. On the contrary, with Matrix Resurrections Lana proposes a parody of the original trilogy that exactly retraces the events of the first Matrix, to the point of using some scenes of the old trilogy in alternate montage or superimposed to new scenes, expliciting the quotations as much as possible to alter them in their own pathetic version in a meta-cinematographic satire on the mystification of an original work's themes in their infinite repetitions whose only interest is their mere commercial success: Matrix Resurrections literally becomes a meme of the original Matrix Saga.

In its first half, Matrix Resurrections is a manifesto of this parallelism, the spiral of infinite repetition in series of everything that becomes minimally interesting to sell to the public which corresponds to the abyss of Neo's depressing and toxic thoughts, repeating incessantly in his mind in a cycle of self-pity and vain attempts to escape them that obsesses him more and more and deforms his identity until he forgets it. Neo who in this new Matrix is ​​resurrected and reprogrammed as a video game developer, a creative (a metaphor for Lana) that once was successful in his work but now is in a position where the same job makes him frustrated, preventing him from enjoying the only thing that makes him happy: give vent to his creativity.
In fact, the work that should be for him a pride - a trilogy of video games based on the memories of his previous life as the Chosen one, that is the Matrix's film trilogy of our reality - has been misunderstood, making himself feel misunderstood by the public (who in fact do not see him as he is but his connotations reworked by the new Matrix) and obliged to diminish it - therefore diminishing himself since his work coincides with his past memories, his identity - in an unwanted sequel (the fourth chapter...), done only to allow the company for which he works (Warner Bros. is explicitly cited here!) to enrich itself by exploiting his talent. This trauma is where Neo's mind is trapped, unable to elaborate it while he repudiates his true self to forget who he had been originally. Matrix Resurrections is the resurrection of the identity from the infinite layers of memes and mind, which can only take place in a way: remembering who you really are and choose to live as your real self, breaking the self-defense mechanisms that trap you in the comfort zone when "it is much easier to bury the reality that getting rid of dreams". And that's what Neo does to escape the alienation of his work: he clings to his creativity, creating a simulation of the old Matrix game, where he 'resurrects' his unconscious memories of the two figures that made him what he was and has now forgotten, Captain Morpheus and Agent Smith. This simulation is noted from the outside and it will be the key to awake him back to reality by the crew of the Mnemosyne (Greek goddess of memories), in a scene that is a revival and a meme of the first movie, its layers symbolically fractured by a gash on the screen where the meme is projected, and from which the mind can escape thanks to a portal through a mirror, citing "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" and then also reminding to the White Rabbit of the first film.
Then follows the re-mastering of his powers as reborn Chosen one in the most meme scene of the entire film: a duel parody of the original in a dojo parody of the original against the new Morpheus, in turn also a parody of the original, parodies which are always in scenes placed inside Matrix or at its border with the outer world like here, the Structure program. This meme overload scene is literally razed to ground by Neo with a deflagration power never seen before in the Matrix saga, thus convincing the crew and the public that he has regained its identity of Prophecy's Chosen one. But their arrival to the city of IO - whose inhabitants also experience a frustration equivalent to what men encaged in Matrix experience which is the lost of their identity of liberators of humanity from its slavery imposed by the machines, now reduce to cynical and self-assessur reasonings on their condition which distract them by cowardice and convenience from the original mission due to the reaching of a bare minimum condition of stability thanks to the technological advances made by the rebel machines disciple of the Oracle - reveals the fear of all: he stayed in Matrix for so long that he is now as weak and insecure as Mr. Anderson was at the beginning of the first movie. His skills seem to be sopite or depotentiated by time, so it is evident to everyone that this Chosen one will be unable to drive the fight against machines as once. The reason is simple: Matrix's trilogy and this fourth chapter too are not based around a Messiah savior of humanity, but on a duality.
The defeat of the machines and of the previous Matrix was due to the love between Neo and Trinity, instilled in the heart of her from the Oracle through the prediction that she would have fall in love with the Chosen one, in this way "unbalancing" irreparably the anomaly inherent in Matrix and finally breaking the system's death-rebirth cycle: it was thanks to Trinity's love that Neo became the Chosen one resurgent from death, who resurrected from death also Trinity overturning the outcome balanced by the Architect. The love that binds Neo and Trinity was the extreme of the anomaly that, completely out of the Architect's control, allowed them to reach together the city of the machines where the Chosen one could put an end to Matrix and hence avoid the destruction of Zion. Now though, Neo is alone. The Analyst has perfectly understood that was its proximity to Trinity to give him strength and has built the new Matrix entirely around this idea: he crosses their lives, he does both warn that the other person is special, he makes them so close they can almost touch each other. But he always avoids that they recognized themselves as twin souls, always keeping them at a distance thanks to the Matrix he built around them, which always intervenes to separate them after the first approach: it is a pendulum in eternal tension between aspiration and frustration to maximize the energy produced by their bodies. In this way, the Matrix anomaly seems broken, the Chosen one reduced to a miserable afflicted by a life in which he does not recognize himself, locked up in Mr. Anderson's identity. Nonetheless, Neo freed himself and he knows that to defeat the Analyst he will have to free Trinity from her mental loops that keep her trapped in Matrix, making her remember the love that was between them, i.e. her lover of the Chosen one identity. With this purpose, Neo and the Mnemosyne crew return into Matrix but the metanarrative speech of the the movie returns to cross the story.
In fact, they encounter the Exiles appeared in Matrix Reloaded together with the Merovingian, who further reiterates everything said so far up to now, explicitly shouting against the sequel and remake culture of entertainment industry and regretting the times of once in which "he had grace". Ironically him who was part of a film sequel, thus stating that in the Wachowskis' vision Reloaded and Revolutions weren't a bastardization of the first Matrix as its fans continue to think, but a coherent and necessary continuation to it. The clash continues with Agent Smith, who in this new Matrix is again the negative of the Chosen one and, because of this, is imprisoned too as the opposite side of the same anomaly that destroyed the old Matrix. And just like Neo, he is deformed from the incarnation of human logic, which categorically refuses the animal body it lives into and cannot understand how to men can live relying on an irrational choice such as Love, into the oppressor and the exploiter of the creative talent of Neo as his boss in the video game company for which he works. This is the umpteenth example of how the tone of the story has changed from the epic representation of human society to the psychoanalytic analysis of a single man: Smith's nihylistic cynism is no longer an universal feeling of all humanity, but a part of Neo's personality as individual. Now he fights Neo to wake up his power and to ally with him in the final clash against the Analyst who holds them both in a cage: he continues to interpret the self-destructive and depressing part of Neo's character but, having already been defeated in the past, he becomes a resource from which Neo can remember his own capacities and get rid of the same insecurity thoughts of Mr. Anderson.
In the end they reach Trinity, who in this fourth chapter is far more interesting than in the trilogy. There it was her unveiling the existence of Matrix to Neo. As soon as she met him she immediately knows who he is (on the contrary of Neo), because she fell in love at first sight just how was predicted by the Oracle: she then assumed the role of the Chosen one lover, whose blind faith in him was the only reason for which Neo believed in himself, thus forming an unbalanced duality, in our eyes made fragile solely by the insecurities of Neo whose privileged point of view eclipsed those of her, of which we didn't know nor could suspect anything due to her extremely strong personality. Trinity was the perfect partner, so much in love that it was already enough to hold together the couple, and asking for a more realistic relationship would have been out of place: it was the epic tone of the story at making love at first sight between two souls twin a credible synthesis of a relationship, so to be able to concentrate on the rest of the events. Again it is the tone of the story to substantially differentiate the trilogy from this fourth chapter, where characters' roles and their ways are overturned. Because if Neo welcomed the news of the existence of Matrix without excessive doubts, Trinity refuses the idea and repudiates Neo until the last, although she has already experienced the events of the trilogy which intuitively suggest her that they are actually linked by something she can't explain. The socket of the Analyst on her is too strong: he forced her in a frustrating family life in the role of a submissive wife to her husband (called Chad, clear reference to the Redpill Theory) and whose only escapism is her passion for motorcycles, passion that hooks to her previous life as well as the plot of his video game hooks for Neo. The very complicated plan to save her (which refers to that of Reloaded to get Neo to the Architect) may not serve anything, as well as Morpheus's efforts to free Neo could have been vain if he had decided to take the blue pill instead of the red one. Because Matrix remains a saga based on the concept of choice, a variation of attitude that determines the genesis of the Chosen one, led by his faith in that choice becoming the reason why a gear, although oiled and ideal, can jam free liberating a man's life from his uncertainties. And in this fourth chapter it is Trinity to have to take a choice to become the real Chosen one of the film: as soon as she wakes up she acquires powers who compensate for those who are now missing in Neo, up to exceeding them as she gets used to them. The duality that binds Trinity and Neo is finally rebalanced, as the movie meant from the very beginning with the new game that the developer Neo was realizing after the trilogy based on Matrix before this was canceled to make Matrix 4: BINARY, as binary is the relationship between them as Chosen one and his lover, one drawing strength and meaning from the other, and this time reversed in the respective roles being interchangeable as it has always been implicit in the trilogy.
When Trinity finally wakes up we arrive at the true meaning of the film: the only way an identity can rise from the mists of its mind is to remember who it truly is and return to express itself regardless of the surrounding world by breaking all the constraints in which it felt trapped and abandoning to a new creative impetus without the fear of being again misunderstood. In the same way, the recovery of the original meaning of a work is what allows a new originality, a creative remembering his own talent that sweeps away and reduces to silence all the unnecessary mystifications and the memetic repetitions born in the absence of real creativity and in abundant of post-modern irony intentions. The passion for originality becomes what saves life, so the only value of memes is reflected in the final dialogue between Trinity and the Analyst where she (Lana Wachowski) confesses that it is thanks to him (the one who made a meme of the old Architect's Matrix) if she is back to life after the Revolutions finale, and that he allowed her to create something new by giving her "another chance".
Matrix Resurrections is an amazing operation of reappropriation of the meaning of a work by its creator from the misunderstandings created in 20 years with its audience which, thanks to a perfect metanarrative balanced between satire and parody, solves the defects of the original saga and enriches its starting material, reiterating the extraordinary capacity of its author on how to express her artistic vision not into an elitarian or highly-sophisticated discourse but remaining inside pop culture and mainstream media.

Studio’s should just know when to leave things alone instead of trying to cash in on franchises that were relevant many years ago. As with so many projects today the movie relies on nostalgia without realizing that that is not what makes a movie good. You also need a good, intelligent storyline and compelling characters to make it work, none of which this movie has. Neo and Trinity simple aren’t the same characters as they were in the first 3 movies. That Lawrence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving aren’t in this to reprise their roles as Morpheus and agent Smith doesn’t help much either.
Another things that’s missing that the first movies were known for is the use of great effects. Some of the shots are painfully obviously filmed in front of a green screen. I mean, it’s 2021, we shouldn’t be able to tell the green screen scenes from the stage/location scenes, especially not in a movie with a budget like this one.

One positive that came out of this is that you’ll look back on the original trilogy with more fondness. After watching this I felt myself wishing it was as good as Revolutions, which is something I’d never thought I’d say…

There was a moment in the first hour of this movie where I thought they were going to double down on the meta approach and make this sequel about a struggling video game designer on the verge of a mental breakdown who created the original trilogy in the form of a video game series during a manic spiral. I was locked in and thought we were in for the most radical shifts of a series in a long time. The overt jabs at sequel culture and franchise flogging was on point, and I thought Lana was on her way to produce something really poignant here. But then it just became...everything it just poked fun at? Was that the intention? Was this purely Lana's way of grappling The Matrix from WB's hands and giving Neo and Trinity a happy ending, quality be damned? Is this all a meta commentary on nostalgia bait and how seeing the same things over and over again makes them lose their relevancy?
Whatever the intention, what we're left with is a hollow and messy regurgitation that pales in comparison to the original saga. I never really cared much for Reloaded or Revolutions, but at least those entries had some of the greatest action segments of recent times. Reloaded's highway scene and Revolution's War for Zion are both amazing highlights in very mediocre movies. Resurrections is equally as mediocre, but has no redeeming segment to make the 2 and a half hour runtime worth the investment. A shame, because if the first hour had been expanded upon, I think something truly special could have been made here.

I was really, really hoping that all the bad reviews this got across the 'Net were just the result of low expectations...sadly, I was wrong, and the bad reviews were well-justified. From the opening scene - an almost-step-by-step replay of the opening scene in the original Matrix movie - and throughout, this stinker showed absolutely zero originality and was nothing but someone's blatant grab for attention, money, or (in all likelihood) both. Of course, one can't expect Keanu Reeves to be as nimble and bullet-dodging flexible as he was 22 years ago, but seriously, to try and pull this off....it was just too much. I almost felt sorry for Reeves trying to portray an older version of the bad mamba jamba he was in the original trilogy, and poor Carrie Ann Moss trying to reprise her role as Trinity was every bit as excruciating. The new and whatever-is-the-opposite-of-'improved' Morpheus was nothing short of ridiculous/insulting. I could continue ranting and raving about this but enough has already been said; suffice it to say, I was so looking forward to this "resurrection" of one of my favorite movie franchises, but I'm going to do my forget this thing ever happened, and just content myself with the gorgeous sunrise at the conclusion of_Revolutions_ 18 years ago. RIP, Matrix.

The first Matrix was extraordinary, game changing on so many levels.

Even if the sequels were far from it, they had the benefit of still having incredible action scenes (well, mostly the second).

Doing another sequel is hard, and doing it 20 years later is an even different exercise. A bit like the last Star Wars trilogy, they totally failed to keep what made the original great but it looks like they still captured the spirit of it. Only on the surface though. They did not actually get the spirit of it, only the nostalgia.

It starts great. Doing the exact same thing as the first one when you're doing a sequel is pretty bad, but when you do it 20 years later, having the exact same intro is a perfect way to plunge your audience back.
And here it's even more perfect, because that fits the theme, we know the Matrix had countless repeating versions with slight differences.

So the first great thing about the original was obviously the concept. It starts identical but with a twist. The whole meta thing is actually great (with the direct jab at WB that probably explains the movie), it fits the universe, it fits the ending, Neo having been absorbed by the machine city. He's now back in a version of the Matrix where he is the world famous developer of the Matrix game trilogy. That IS a great start.
And he subconsciously coded a Morpheus + Agent Smith program to wake up himself. All good. The world has several mechanisms to keep him in, mainly through his psychiatrist.

However, this is the first huge blow. The loss of Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne is heavily felt. I mean, Keanu Reeves was ok as Neo in the first, but can't say that the performance itself was unforgettable, and this time it doesn't even look like he pretends to act. The new Morpheus is flamboyant, but he looks more like a cliche imported from another universe than something that fits here. The rest of the cast is totally transparent and replaceable, though you can play at spot the Sense8 cast, that's it. Actually if you haven't seen Sense8, apart from Bugs that gets a lot more screen time, by the time you're finished watching you probably won't be able to remember their name, looks, or whatever they did. Spoiler: they did nothing, whether in the story or in the fights. Remove them and there is just barely more fighting to do for Neo, that's it. They're basically all cameo and not fully scripted characters. Probably to bring some Sense8 nostalgia for some people that would not have seen the original ? Or more likely just "let's put my friends in my movie".

Here the only enjoyable part is Neil Patrick Harris who is perfect. But his role doesn't allow him to carry the whole movie by himself.

As it is explicitly pointed out in the meta part, the second great point was revolutionary effects. And even if it's teased before it's shown, the new bullet time is not as impressive or novel than it was at the time. That being said, it would have been hard to come up again with something so different today, so good points for at least trying.

And even if you were not in the Matrix concept at all, at least it had some of the most memorable fight scenes of all time, being kung-fu or gun fights. Not only were they innovative and interesting, they were above all followable. What we get here is a pale copy of a copy of a copy.
The fights and action scenes have no interest at all, none of them. They are filmed like most action scenes today, with more camera than actors movements, making it a lot harder to follow or understand, and a lot less memorable as you don't even really see what happens.

Kudos for including part of the original's fight choreography. It could be seen as a cheap move to elicit viewer's nostalgia, but it felt right. However that's my whole point ! I may have seen the original Matrix several times, but the last one was at least ten years ago, yet I still remember and am able to recognize these fights' choreographies. By the time I was out of the cinema I wouldn't have been able to cite an interesting fight movement in this one. Neither fists nor guns.

And now, after the disappointments, the things that were actually annoying kept piling on.

The included scenes from the original trilogy felt right in the beginning (again, it was spot on in the theme), but were just annoying at the end.

Now the story was ok in the beginning, the explanation of the new humans/machines interactions kinda felt right. But then the whole story is "I want my girlfriend back". And as Niobe clearly sees it, at least in the beginning, there is nothing showing that there is anything to gain there, while there is a lot to lose. It really doesn't feel like the important mission it should be. It's only fuelled by Neo's personal desires and Sati's revenge. That's it.
They can try to explain it by saying that it's all about Neo+Trinity, but that's really cheap. Like we kiss and the world is right now. Feels like a real let down compared to the original's background story and stakes.

If this had been dealt with in, I don't know, half the movie, and then we could have gone back to actually making progress in the universe, ok. But at the end, it doesn't seem anything new has been brought in the Matrix universe. Could be the opening of another story, but not sure I (or anyone) really want to see more after this one. An interesting idea that is totally ignored is that Trinity actually saw the future of what would happen inside the Matrix on top of her flashbacks. But yeah, apparently that was not a clever thing added, more likely a mistake.

We'll skip the fact that Neo's pod is not even really guarded, despite being clearly identified as important and in its own tower. How is it not under constant overkill armed surveillance ?? And more importantly once Neo is out, how the fuck is Trinity's one still in the same accessible place ??

It's not clear at all why Smith has been kept, and what his goal is now. The interpretation is ok, but the character feels out of place, just a cheap plot device.

It's also too clean and happy, nobody ever dies.

If most of the small things here to bring back memories of the first ones were tactfully included, the apparition of the Merovingian felt like cheap fan service that didn't even work. Actually it was probably the turning point that started to remove the nostalgia veil and emphasize all of the movie's defects.

Neo is barely fighting, he spends half the time stopping bullets, that's it.

As a generic action movie it's not bad, just not great, bonus points for the Matrix nostalgia, but malus points for the disappointments. It will probably feel more and more shitty with time.

Hey did you know that if something is meta it’s automatically good. God, I hated this. It dragged more than any of the other movies at their worst. It’s self indulgent, obsessed with itself, and if you didn’t particularly care about the Matrix like me, it’s hell, cause it has nothing to offer outside of that.

Neo and Trinity still have zero chemistry and their romance is more of a bedrock than ever. The fight scenes have lost even their sense of identity when they thought somehow Yuen Woo-ping wasn’t an essential part of the franchise. Now they’re just like all the other action sequences today. And remember how Fishburne and Weaving had the most presence and charisma? They’re gone! Mateen is doing his best, but there is barely a semblance of an arc for him. He exists, quite literally, in service of Neo. What a great look for the white director in dreadlocks who didn’t even ask Laurence back and in interviews go on and on about how much the other two central leads meant to her. At least Jada’s back! As an obstructive bureaucrat. And Groff is a black hole of charisma, what an utter downgrade.

Every single callback and echo needs a flashback to hammer it in. Doesn’t it suck how we all be on that phone? Neo flushes his pills down the sink and rebels against his therapist to be truly free, how original and fresh. What a total bore. And lines like ‘all the bad’ are supposed to be a respite from the MCU? This is boring. All the other Matrix films hit that benchmark of ‘sure is Matrix’, as unremarkable as that is to me. This couldn’t even hit me that. Please stay dead this time, Matrix. If we ever needed you, we definitely don’t anymore.

"Are memories turned into fiction any less real? Is reality based in memory nothing but fiction?"

To put this sequel's existence in context, I think it's important to know why Lana decided to make this while Lily decided not to.
Recently they lost their parents and Lana wanted to make something that would allow her to reminisce about the time they were alive, but Lily felt that she had changed so much as a person since then that revisiting the past would've only made her grief more difficult for her.

The movie was fine and thought-provoking as it set up its (new) world up until the half-point. After that, it devolved into mindless action-y schlock. A missed opportunity to explore those new narratives, philosophical and ethical questions about post-Zion singularity. After all, The Animatrix was the first time they introduced the possibility of "proselytizing" or "liberating" (however you want to look at it) machines to join the humans' cause, and this film didn't add much there.

The synthetic Morpheus was another big question mark left unanswered. "Morpheus" says that his guess is that Neo wrote him with elements of Morpheus and Smith, "the two forces that helped him become him", but that doesn't answer the question why Neo made him an Agent (an instrument of control) in his "modal" simulation. Did Neo find Morpheus oppressive or controlling? And why in the simulation the Agents managed to catch up with Trinity and beat her up? Does that mean that Neo underestimated Trinity and the way he wrote her in his simulation was weaker than the real one? Or did he purposefully write her weaker so that she wouldn't escape nor manage to free him, as a coping exercise to reject the "delusion" of The Matrix and accept his (new) reality?

The next step (if they want to make more sequels or a TV series) seems to be a man-made Matrix (or Matrices) where humans and programs can live harmoniously in peace, if they choose to live there instead of the "desert of the Real".

No one expected it, and no one asked for it. In fact, it doesn't have the signature of The Wachowskis because it's a solo adventure without Lilly at the helm. And it shows, because what was good about these films, among other things, was the work of the two sisters working together.

And I was hopeful. The beginning of the film is wildly original, working with a "meta" plot in which it plays with our own image of the trilogy, playing with our memories. Was the Matrix a movie, a video game? Or was it the simulation that was rebooted? Those glorious minutes when we thought we were about to see another stroke of genius didn't prepare us for what came next.

After that introduction, Matrix Resurrections is a comfortable film that has been thrown from the sidelines. Reusing images and concepts from the original trilogy to make us feel safer and to appeal to something that has already been done, without innovating, without defending an idea. There are no attractive characters, only patches to try to replace great icons who are no longer there but who they want to keep squeezing. There aren't even effects or music to keep us hooked, but a succession of action without order or concert so that you don't think you're watching an empty production.

It's all peppered with political and ideological allegories that throw away what was already considered part of a mythology that has given rise to many, many discussions, just to reinforce a new idea that doesn't fit in with what came before.

Fortunately, what was not expected to be attractive does not disappoint.

The first Matrix will always be revolutionary to me. The 2 subsequent sequels will always be 2 of the biggest bummers I experienced. So I was wondering what Ressurections would feel like and...well...at times I enjoyed it, but as a whole it felt very "meh, that was fine". It really felt like it wanted to be a few different films and couldn't find a consistent voice. Was it nostalgia porn? Heck yeah! It even used copious clips from the first movies in this one for full effect. Did it want to be meta commentary on nostalgia porn? Kind of? It tried to be clever and pointed but was too obvious about it. Was this a (soft) reboot? A bit...it felt like it hit a lot of the same beats as previous Matrix films while trying to set up for another try at redoing things. Was it a cerebral action movie? I mean, not really. I'm sure it wanted to be but the action was very bland, especially by Matrix standards. But did I like it?...I'm not sure yet. Saying it was fine is some pretty faint praise, but it wasn't as revelatory as I wanted, but also didn't outright suck. So...I guess your mileage will vary.

I have never really been a fan of the Wachowskis, and out of everything they have been involved with, either as directors or writers, I've only really cared for the original Matrix and V for Vendetta. The Matrix Resurrections doesn't really change any of that...

The Wachowskis have their very own kind of “pretentious”, and that's really ruining my enjoyment of most of their movies, and yes...it ruins my enjoyment of The Matrix Resurrections as well. It tries it best to be smart and clever, but falls pretty flat in execution. The action is also rather low-key. A weird choice...

However...it looks and sounds great, and some of the acting is actually quite decent. Especially liked Jessica Henwick, but both Reeves and Moss did good too. Too bad they had a convoluted mess of a story to try and act to. It's not easy to try to polish a turd...it ends up stinking no matter what you do.

No matter how you look at it The Matrix Resurrections can't hold a candle to the original. It's more on par with the lackluster sequels of the original trilogy. Tried as hard as I could to not reach for my phone to burn time, but lost the battle about halfway in...