Movie Review: ‘The Matrix Resurrections’

Review by Lauryn Angel

The Matrix was a mind-blowing movie in 1999, and it’s still a favorite. And though I’ve been burned by Matrix sequels in the past, I had high hopes that The Matrix Resurrections would live up to the original. Unfortunately, despite some excellent performances, the movie felt flat for me.

Keanu Reeves returns as Thomas Anderson/Neo. Anderson is a game designer whose popular game franchise, The Matrix, is being rebooted, despite his claims that he did not want to return to that world. Anderson is haunted by echoes from the game that feel more like experienced memories, and he’s working through this with his analyst (Neil Patrick Harris). These feelings/flashbacks intensify when he interacts with his boss (Jonathon Groff) and a woman he meets at a coffee shop he frequents, whose name is Tiffany, but whom he remembers as Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). And just as Anderson fears he’s losing his grip on reality (again), he meets Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and reunites with Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) – who isn’t quite the way he remembers him.

There are a lot of story parallels with the first film, which gives this movie the feel of – as one character in the film quips – “same story, different faces”. And while some of this was fun, a lot of the movie feels repetitive. Abdul-Mateen and Groff give excellent performances in their turns as Morpheus and Smith, but when those performances are spliced with footage of Lawrence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving, I was reminded of how much I missed those actors in the roles they originated. I enjoyed Henwick as Bugs and Neil Patrick Harris is always fun to watch. Reeves and Moss slip back into their roles with finesse, and when Neo and Trinity are reunited, the movie is more enjoyable and starts to resolve one of the issues I had with the original trilogy (that being the handling of Trinity, which I won’t go into here).

The problem is that it takes too long to get there. The movie spends too much time dwelling on Anderson’s middle-aged malaise and not-so-slyly poking fun at its own existence that the third act feels rushed and almost thrown together. And while I really liked the ending, I wanted more of that dynamic throughout the film.

I do recommend re-watching the original trilogy before watching this installment – something I neglected to do – as there are some plot points and characters that you will want to have fresh in your memory whilst watching this. In fact, I plan to watch this film again once I have time to re-watch the first three, to clarify a couple of things for myself.

The movie is entertaining, and it was fun to see what Neo and Trinity would be like 20 years later. There is some addition to the lore, but there aren’t any ground-breaking effects this time. I did not see it in IMAX, and I don’t feel like IMAX would have added much to the experience.