Let’s get this out of the way first: there should never have been a fourth Matrix movie. Had the terrible, greedy, misguided business drones at Warner Bros. not made the wretched decision to resurrect the long-dormant action/sci-fi franchise in an attempt to make barrels of money from people whose tastes they didn’t understand enough to know they probably didn’t want another Matrix movie — with or without the help of the Wachowski sisters — we’d have never gotten The Matrix Resurrections. How fortunate we are, then, that not only did at least one Wachowski (Lana) sign up to make this movie, and not only did they seemingly gave her carte blanche to make whatever movie she wanted to make, but it’s far-and-away the best, funniest, most interesting Matrix movie since The Matrix blew peoples’ minds wide open back in 1999.
If you’re familiar with the Matrix franchise, you know that this is probably a controversial opinion. After all, how can a movie that was made under duress really compare to movies made in the franchise’s prime? In some ways, Resurrections is a lot like many legacy reboots: it’s full of references to the original property, and it has several characters who we loved from the old franchise, mingling with some interesting folks who exist in the world since we last inhabited it. But what sets Resurrections apart is the fact that it doesn’t just reference the other Matrix movies — it finds ways to interrogate the legacy that those references are part of. It doesn’t just wink at the camera about how silly it is that we’re doing this thing again — it gives us a character (Jonathan Groff) who says, verbatim, “Our beloved parent company, Warner Bros., has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy — and they’ve informed me they’ll do it with or without us.”
How do they pull it off? By not pretending to be anything besides a return to the long-dry well. We open essentially exactly where we did in 1999 — it’s Trinity, there’s cops, she’s dressed in a tight bodysuit. Only this time, the scene isn’t happening in a vacuum — others are watching it play out, alongside us. Part of cinema is turning off the feeling in your brain that makes it feel like an act of voyeurism, but (to quote a character later in the film) the thing that made The Matrix different was that it fucked with your head — and Resurrections forces us to confront that by presenting us with Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who keeps returning to the point where Trinity finds Neo in hopes of, herself, being able to find the mythical savior. This time, she finds someone else: an Agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who has begun to see the world as it really is — and standing in what they soon realize is the apartment of the Neo, the Agent begins to see what he really is, and must do.
Let’s go back to Neo — or, if you’re any of the people around him, Thomas Anderson. To them, “Neo” is the hero in the beloved video game trilogy he designed, which took the vivid fantasies in his head — of a life where he takes a pill and ends up as a cyberpunk messiah fighting alongside his friends and lover, Trinity, to take down their machine overlords — and made a trilogy of games called The Matrix. The look of the Matrix games is one of the more controversial-yet-brave choices Wachowski makes: rather than presenting us with shitty fake video game clips, it simply pretends that the original films are the video games — when Tom’s boss quotes Agent Smith, and we see Hugo Weaving’s character delivering the same line in The Matrix, we’re to believe that what we’re seeing isn’t just a suppressed memory, but a clip from his video game. Let’s be clear: Resurrections is unquestionably, entirely, criminally underrated, but it still has many of the hallmarks of Wachowski films, including the fact that they will, inevitably, include some laughably cringey stylistic choices.
Now a well-respected game dev toiling away at his next project, Tom dreams of a life beyond his own so much that he willed it into existence — and even went so far as to build a self-contained looping modal within a digital environment inside The Matrix that would, if he really were in a false reality created by machine overlords, would evolve to come and bring him back to reality. Is that overkill? Sure, yeah, but when your life is as mundane as his, what else are you gonna do? In all other ways, Tom is like the rest of us: he sees an analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) to help him handle his mental illnesses; he takes antidepressants; he is slightly repulsed by his coworkers; he has no idea how to flirt, even if that woman at the coffee shop, Tiffany, looks shockingly familiar, but he just can’t tell why. He also seems incredibly sad — those around him, including the aforementioned analyst, occasionally make oblique references to the time he thought he could fly and nearly stepped off a building. In other words: he may be living out his life, oblivious, but he’s sure feeling dragged down by the whole thing.
When Tom’s boss (Groff) calls him into his office and tells him that Warner Bros. have given them the option to take a hands-on approach to the resurrection of their long-dead corpse friend, the movie goes into one of its most inspired sections: one where, in service of deciding where the fourth installment would lead, they embark on the task of attempting to define The Matrix and its legacy. What’s the thing that really makes it special? Is it the Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek references? Is it “guns — lots of guns”? Fuck — is it bullet time? For everyone around Neo, they’re just talking about a video game series — but even though Neo has no idea, they’re dissecting the very real, very important war that he himself waged against the very system employing many of them. Another movie would talk around these concepts, but Resurrections confronts them head-on, as though the talking heads of a documentary were sent to the soundstage and allowed to prattle on about how influential the queer politics and gun-fu of the Wachowski Sisters’ masterpiece were.
Tom really doesn’t participate in these conversations, though: he sits, he listens, he exists adjacent to them, but it’s more accurate to say that they happen to him. After all, there’s this nagging feeling in the back of his brain that they’re talking about the “cultural relevance” of his own experiences, his own rebellions, his own gun-fu. As this happens, his sense of self begins to rupture, he begins seeing the cascading code of the universe in the condensation of his bathroom mirror, and he begins to tackle the agonizing process of attempting to figure out if the version of him that exists is the true version of him. Or, if you’d like to borrow a phrase from the trans community: his egg got cracked.
We’ve made it a startlingly long way so far, but it’s time we confront what The Matrix — and especially Resurrections — is really about: it’s transness. While the original films were trans-coded in a way that allowed you to miss it (you can enjoy the film just fine without knowing that estrogen tablets were red back in the ‘90s), Resurrections is defiant in its messaging. When Tom meets Tiffany, the coffee shop mom, for the second time, they discuss the feeling of seeing herself in a character, and having her husband laugh at her for thinking it. Later in the film, when she’s finally come to terms with the fact that she’s actually Trinity, she barks at the people who dare to call her by her deadname. The Wachowski sisters hadn’t come out in ‘99, and they sure couldn’t be as overt about things as this film is, but it’s unmistakable — and if you’re a trans Matrix fan, it feels like such a breath of fresh air.
The experience of a trans person has never been more succinctly explained than by Morpheus, telling Neo about the Matrix for the first time: “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” The way these feelings manifest are different for everyone, but if you feel it, you know it. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, but you don’t recognize the person staring back. The people around you are calling you by name, but even though you know it’s correct, it hits your ears wrong. When you try to explain these feelings to anyone around you, they never understand — either they look at you like you’ve grown an extra head, or worse, they try to convince you that it’s just a figment of your imagination. The Matrix Resurrections does a better job of depicting many of the feelings of transness than many other movies that are explicitly meant to be trans narratives. It feels clear that, above anything else, Wachowski wanted the film to ooze with the kind of unmistakable, cool queerness that exists beneath the surface of the original trilogy.
Resurrections takes its sweet-ass time getting to the point where Tom is ready to be freed again — but when it gets there, the gleeful confrontation of its own lineage begins to really pay off. He’s ushered back into the real world by Bugs (who can’t believe how lucky she is to have finally found the Neo) and the modal he created, who has taken on the name of Morpheus. Now firmly in the future, the payphones of old are discarded in favor of more stylish mirrors, windows, and doorways, which leads to some beautiful, mind-bending visuals. Once Neo is freed, the film goes light-speed. We begin to learn the truth: after Neo and Trinity embarked on their suicide mission at the end of Revolutions, the machines… just kinda hit the reset button, and put Neo and Trinity back in their goo pods. The machines (led by Harris — yes, Neo’s therapist was a machine gaslighting and drugging him) learned that though all humans give off quite a lot of energy, the bodies of Neo and Trinity produce a shitload when they’re near each other. It took 60 years for the freedom fighters who survived the attack on Zion to find Neo again, but the world has changed considerably — now living in the hidden city of Io, they live alongside many machines that see more value in working together than in enslavement. “Zion was stuck in the past. Stuck in war. Stuck in a Matrix of its own. They believed that it had to be us or them. This city was built by us and them,” a wizened General Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) tells him as he marvels at the strawberries they were able to synthesize because of their partnership. Now, with Neo back, it’s time to flip the script of The Matrix: they embark on the task of freeing Trinity.
Though the “Freeing Trinity’s Mind” segment could be a mirrored rehash of The Matrix, it evades that at every turn, setting up a web of characters new and old, machine and human, devoted to making this world better, faster, stronger. The film’s camptastic villains reveal themselves: his boss (Groff) is just a reskinned version of Agent Smith, watching over his ol’ buddy Mr. Anderson, while his analyst is a program designed to learn about the human psyche. Groff luxuriates in the quasi-homoerotic love the OG Smith had for Neo, going far enough to force an unexpected alliance on Neo late in the movie, buying him time to fully free Trinity’s mind as The Analyst fights to prevent it. The freedom plan feels a little bit convoluted, but the gist of the plan is this: extract Trinity’s body from the battery farm where it’s being kept, while convincing Tiffany that the world that she exists inside of is a machine-created lie designed to keep them all complacent. Easy stuff!
Ultimately, the thing that makes Resurrections such a blast is its commitment to never taking itself too seriously. Sure, Wachowski poured her heart and soul into the film’s aesthetic and color palette — the sharpness of the blues around Tom are just crisp enough for the nerds to be unable to not think about the denial-fueling blue pill — but everyone within Resurrections feels like they’re legitimately delighted to be doing it. It’s regularly very funny; the moment where Neo tries to fly again has just enough of an epic build-up that, when he immediately lands back on his feet, it’s laugh-out-loud-worthy. Perhaps the most clever thing the film does is with Trinity’s husband — Chad. The implications of the the name “Chad” are certainly not lost on Wachowski, but it goes deeper: the actor is none other than Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick franchise and, crucially, Reeves’ stunt-double from the Matrix movies. This means that Trinity is married to a Neo impersonator, who was once close enough to fool us, the viewer, into thinking it was Neo, and who was sent by the Matrix to keep her away from the genuine article. Who the fuck thinks of that?!
The film ends with a jaw-dropping sequence as the machines running the Matrix throw absolutely everything they can at an escaping Trinity and Neo, to the point of utilizing their newest technological advancements to simply make people throw themselves out of windows at them as they run through city streets. They escape in the end, of course — thanks to Trinity, who can now fly, too — and are able to help change hearts and minds together, fully aware of their own power in the new world they find themselves in. It’s easy to sneer at this, but Resurrections gives Neo, Trinity, and the world we once believed in the happy, hopeful ending that they all deserved. Sometimes, even movies about revolution need to give you something to feel good about.
At the end of the day, we would probably all be better off if Warner Bros. hadn’t forced this movie into existence — but though we aren’t that lucky, our Runner-Up prize is the kind of movie that can leave you feeling a little like Tom, forced to feel as though he’s unraveling as he tries to make sense of the fact that he sees something that those around him don’t. Resurrections has been dismissed out of hand by many Matrix devotees, and labeled as pointless, soulless, and — eugh — “woke.” But we beg of you: dig deeper. This isn’t a reboot feebly attempting to be as good as its predecessors. This is a reboot that knows what it is, and wants to confront its own existence — which is, as we see time and time again in the Matrix franchise, the first step one can take towards becoming something new and beautiful.
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