The Matrix Resurrections was unsuccessful upon its release at the end of 2021, bombing at the box office when put up against the much more crowd-pleasingly nostalgic Spider-Man: No Way Home. The film also left many critics and audience members who did see it perplexed, assuming that the movie would offer a similar experience to the original film. But The Matrix Resurrections is one of the best legacy sequels of the last decade, deconstructing the themes of the original three films and acting as a beautiful addition to Lana Wachowski’s filmography.
The Matrix Resurrections Grapples With the Legacy of the Original
The Wachowski sisters have a fascinating and varied career making movies, with many of the films they directed after The Matrix having incredibly polarizing releases before being reclaimed in later years. Critics and audiences panned their adaptation of the classic anime series Speed Racer when it was released in 2009, but recent reevaluation has seen the film reclaimed as one of the best live-action adaptations of Japanese animation ever. Similar scrutiny was given to their adaptation of David Mitchell’s award-winning science-fiction epic Cloud Atlas, but many critics now cite the film as one of the best movies of the 2010s.
Their only immediate box office and critical success, The Matrix, launched Lana and Lily Wachowski from the independent film world into the machinery of blockbuster filmmaking. Considered one of the best movies of the 1990s, The Matrix‘s genre-bending qualities — incorporating elements from anime, kung-fu films, science-fiction short stories and 1990s underground culture — made the film appeal to any number of different genre movie fans. And the movie’s ability to put a face to the anxiety many in the world had, surrounding how artificial intelligence and the digital age could build a world that was less human, meant that it resonated at a deep level with audiences everywhere.
The Matrix Resurrections deconstructs the legacy of the original movie, allowing Lana Wachowski and co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon to explore how the original film has been interpreted, and misinterpreted, over the years. In the film, which takes place decades after the end of the original three films, a group of human rebels must free Neo from a new version of the Matrix after a program named the Analyst figured out how to bring Neo back to life and place him back in a simulated reality. In this new simulated reality, Neo is back under the moniker of Thomas Anderson, now a video game developer who created the original three Matrix films as hit video games and is being tasked with making a fourth.
Wachowski, Mitchell and Hemon use this super-structure as a way to simultaneously parody the endless stream of theorizing around the Wachowski Sisters’ original work, while also showing that art can be interpreted from a number of angles where no one is totally correct or incorrect. Thomas Anderson and his group of designers, tasked with making a new Matrix video game, try and understand what made the original game work so well and butt heads over the answer. Is it the action, the romance between Neo and Trinity, the anti-authoritarian message about mistrusting systems of control, or a hidden allegory about the experience of being transgender? Everyone is convinced that they know the reason why The Matrix was a hit, but Wachowski, Mitchell and Hemon want audiences to know that every interpretation is as valid or invalid as you want to believe.
The Movie Explores the Consequences of Violence in Unique Ways
The Matrix was fairly revolutionary for American action movies, taking inspiration from the Hong Kong classics of master stunt actors like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and focusing on hand-to-hand combat and gun-fu action where the lead actors performed much of their own stunt work. With some of the best action sequences of all time, The Matrix‘s success as an action film had a huge tail effect, beginning the relationship between Keanu Reeves and stuntman/coordinator Chad Stahelski that would lead to the highly successful John Wick series.
The Matrix Resurrections features plenty of hand-to-hand combat sequences itself, including a great fight between Neo and a new version of Agent Smith played by a fun and campy Jonathan Groff, but is more notable for how it changes Neo into someone who is clearly troubled by how the violence of his past has affected his future. When Neo is awoken by the new heroes, he is dismayed by the fact that all of the sacrifices and fighting that he and his allies did in the original films didn’t fix the world, only moving the needle on relations between humans and machines a bit.
Maybe the most striking way in which they articulate Neo’s traumatic response to being flung back into a violent war between machines and humanity is in his lack of gun use throughout the film. Neo never actually fires a gun in the entire movie, instead spending much of the film either stopping enemy bullets or pushing back adversaries using a force-push-like power where he holds his hands up. The way that Neo poses, in a position that invokes someone who is protesting violence rather than seeking out violence, is the perfect encapsulation of Neo as a man who is tired of being forced to constantly fight.
Resurrections Proves That The Matrix Was Always a Love Story
It can be easy for audiences to forget just how much the Wachowskis prioritize romance in their films when their unique style and eye for action are often the focus of retrospectives surrounding the sisters’ movies. But romance has been a huge focus of Lana and Lily Wachowski’s filmography, starting with their excellent directorial debut and moving through their underrated television series, Sense8. The Matrix Resurrections builds on Lana Wachowski’s decades-long themes about the power of human connection and love between partners who care deeply about each other; it even goes deeper to assert that The Matrix was always a love story at its core.
As Thomas Anderson, Neo keeps encountering a woman who looks just like the character Trinity from his video game, and the two cannot shake the fact that they are connected in some way. Once freed from the new version of the Matrix he’s been trapped in, Neo discovers that the Analyst brought Trinity back to life as well and that the new version of the Matrix he constructed is powered by the unexplainable bursts of energy that come when Neo and Trinity are close to one another.
The Matrix Resurrections simply reinforces what has been there from the start, that humanity can only survive and thrive if we love and care about one another; that love transcends what we understand.
Some audiences may see the allegory of Neo and Trinity’s love as being so powerful and strong that it can transcend the laws of physics and power an artificially generated world corny, but all of the Wachowskis’ films take this kind of emotionally heart-on-the-sleeve approach to romance and human connection. This is evident from the first Matrix, where a kiss from Trinity and the confirmation that the Oracle told her she would fall in love with The One is the thing that finally unlocks Neo’s ability to bend the Matrix to his will. The Matrix Resurrections simply reinforces what has been there from the start, that humanity can only survive and thrive if we love and care about one another; that love transcends what we understand.
The Matrix Resurrections Is the Most Interesting Legacy Sequel of the 2020s
The Matrix Resurrections is exactly what every legacy sequel should aspire to be, the kind of movie that isn’t afraid to say something new and take a risk. It would have been very easy for Lana Wachowski to fall back on the classics, leaning on Keanu Reeves’ status as an action icon from years of John Wick films to make a simple action movie with some Easter eggs peppered in to keep fans of the original films happy.
But she didn’t do that. Instead, Wachowski, Mitchell and Hemon wrote a screenplay that challenged fans of the original film to take their preconceived notions about a classic movie and look at it again in a new context. What resulted was an excellent movie that deepens the emotional complexities of the original work, and that respects its audience enough to not just re-run the classics.
