Score: 3.5 / 5
Lana Wachowski returns solo to the franchise that made her name great in the latest requel churned out of a major studio. I'm not mad about this one, mostly because it felt much more like the original film than the sequels it spawned. I always had a soft spot for the turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece that changed science fiction cinema, and while its sequels are fun, they went a little too crazy for me with their effects and simple (if bizarre) stories. Resurrections is lighter in apocalyptic tone and more fun, even as it grapples with cerebral themes in surprising ways.
The movie begins with what first feels like a flashback to the opening of the franchise as we watch Trinity's (Carrie-Anne Moss) eye-popping escape. The scene shifts to a new character named Bugs (Jessica Henwick) watching her, much as we are, who then also needs to escape and uses similar martial arts and time-defying action to do so. Within just a few minutes, we're already back into the world of the Matrix, even if we don't necessarily remember all the rules of the virtual realm. Bugs has discovered an old code being run in a loop around this moment, when Trinity first found Neo within the Matrix; it seems that someone is still looking for the "savior," who was presumed to be dead. But maybe she's after something else; it's when she locates a slightly altered version of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) that the plot really kicks into high gear.
Speaking of which, I can't pretend I fully understand the plot of this movie after a single viewing. I felt the same way about the previous installments too, but this one does a lot of work to, well, resurrect characters that Revolutions carefully and caringly ended. As such, it jumps through didactic hoops that I'm not sure will ever make full sense to me. There's a new AI -- at least, I think that's what he is -- called the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) who is working to understand the human mind and perfect the Matrix before its reboot. Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff) returns, this time as more of a trapped denizen of the Matrix looking for something between liberation and revenge. And, of course, we're re-introduced to Neo, who is still very much alive.
Living in a mild-mannered existence as the successful creator of a video game series called The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has occasional flashbacks -- or hallucinations -- to his time as Neo, many years before. Drawing on these for his games, he also vaguely recognizes a woman named Tiffany (also Moss) at a local coffee shop; she's married with children and also has no recollection of their shared past. In the movie's best scenes, Anderson meets with creators in his board room as they hash out ideas for a sequel game. The dialogue is shockingly, wonderfully aware of its metafictional attitude, and the geeky characters bounce ideas such as "bullet time" around with knowing chuckles. To make the Matrix an inside joke while inside the Matrix is the most brilliant idea Resurrections has to offer, and it really is too bad the film didn't capitalize on this storytelling device.
In fact, my main gripe with this film -- apart from the hurtle-jumping required to follow its plot -- is much the same as it was with the previous three. Heady concepts aside, I will never get why the Neo-Trinity love story trumps everything else. In a world of reality-shattering revelations and impending apocalypse of humanity, their love is framed as more crucially salvific than anything else. It's as if, to make the amazing, daring ideas sell, the Wachowskis felt the need to centralize the love story; now, so long after the trilogy ended, I can't help but wonder why Lana and the new writing team decided to continue this trend. It makes what is otherwise an exciting, fun, and interesting diversion damp with sentiment and (in my opinion) unearned nostalgia.
Clearly I'll need a rewatch soon, if only to see a preternaturally aged Jada Pinkett Smith doing her sassy thing, and I desperately hope the movie makes more sense. Because I really want it to! As I said, this is probably my favorite since the beginning simply because of tone and less of an emphasis on masses of tentacled machines clawing through the earth's crust, a la James Cameron. Perhaps the happiest surprise to me is that the Matrix itself doesn't feel nearly as dangerous or icky as it did before; this is the first time in the franchise I believed how and why people in the Matrix didn't question their reality. Similarly, the lack of imminent danger made the whole thing feel less emotionally draining than previous installments. It made philosophical nuggets in the dialogue more palatable and more fun to consider in real time! And, of course, there's the purely entertaining draw of seeing a Wachowski prove again that she is the real master of big-budget, eye-popping sequences that every other action filmmaker has been trying to imitate for decades now. The multiple high-speed chases and group battles feature some of the best CGI of the year, often incorporating multiple explosions or fights in different speeds in the same frame. It's cool stuff, y'all.
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