The Matrix Resurrections (Venus Castina Pictures, Village Roadshow Productions, Warner Bros., 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched the film The Matrix Resurrections, fourth and latest (and, quite hopefully, last) in the series launched in 1999 by the Wachowski sisters when they were still the Wachowski brothers. When The Matrix came out in 1999 and was a smash hit its director was still known as Larry Wachowski and his brother and co-writer was Andy. When Larry directed The Matrix he was married to Thea Bloom, but in December 2002 they divorced and the word we got was that Larry had left her and taken up with an S/M dominatrix. Still later Larry went through gender-reassignment surgery and became Lana Wachowski, and shortly after that her brother also went through gender reassignment and became Lilly. Offhand I can’t think of another pair of brothers who came out as Transgender and ended up as sisters. The kinks of the Wachowskis’ private lives have often been cited as the reason they’re drawn to such off-beat stories as the Matrix cycle and other stand-alone films like Jupiter Ascending and Cloud Atlas.

The central premise of the Matrix series is that the reality we all know is only an illusion, kept in place by all-powerfull machines who draw their power by sucking the energy out of living humans and have created this illusion to keep us happy, content and unwilling to rebel against our machine overlords. In the first three films in the cycle the quest character, Thomas Anderson a.k.a. Neo (Keanu Reeves), gets led out of the Matrix and into the real world by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne in the first three films, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in this one), where he organizes a rebellion of the humans against their machine overlords – only at the enid of the third film, The Matrix Revolutions (released in 2003), instead of the kick-butt triumph of humans over machines our movie-conditioned minds were expecting, Neo and company negotiate a modus vivendi with the machines. I’ve long beloeved that cisgender heterosexual John Carpenter did more with the our-world-is-an-illusion premise and the idea that sinister forces have created a simulated reality for us to live in and not rebel in his 1988 95-minute near-masterpiece They Live than the Wachowskis did in three interminable 135-minute movies and now this 150-minute follow-up.

The gimmick this time is that Thomas Anderson has come out of his pod, and his new illusion is that “The Matrix” is only a video game he designed (and became world-famous for doing so), and he hooks up with Tiffany (Carrie-Ann Moss) who may or may not be his long-lost girlfriend Trunity, who died in the earlier sequence, but since we’re in the realm of fantasy here (albeit masquerading as science fiction), just because we’ve seen a character die does not necessarily mean we won’t see them again. When the film starts she’s married and has kids, but she soon frees herself from these unwelcome burdens and becomes good-ol’-ballsy motorcycle-riding Trinity again. But that doesn’t happen until two hours into this 2 ½-hour movie, and in between we get a lot of pseudo-scientific jargon thrown at us and we learn that the Matrix – the overall program by which machines rule the world and suck out human energy to power themselves– is being rebooted and improved by a secret master villain who turns out to be Neo’s therapist, billed only as “The Analyst” and played in a marvelously quirky way by Neil Patrick Harris, of all people(ahd he's surprisinglygood as a black-hearted villain).

In the hyper-violent opening sequence (in tact the entire movie is just baroque, over-the-top images of ultra-violence interspersed with shards of plot just to hold them together, and in the world after Buffalo, Uvalde and all the copycat gunb massacres since they “play” very differently from the way they did when Lana, formerly Larry, Wachowski surely intended to when she created them, just as the scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are wanded down with metal detectors as they enter high school also is a lot creepier and more frightening post-Uvalde) I joked, “Ah, L.A. Confidential meets Blade Runner.” The movie is so relentlessly dystopian in both its realities I can’t help but wonder why these all-powerfil machines don’t give us a pleasant illusion of our future – but then if the Wachowskis had done that, no one would have paid to see this. I don’t believe there is a one-to-one correspondence between violent video games and violent reality, but surely a nation that entertains itself with fantasies of brutal and spectacular violence is a nation where certain individuals can live these fantasies in real life with the guns America’s political class has decided to make incredibly easy to obtain.

Along the way the movie comes to a dead stop for a sequence ripping off Star Trek in which one of the original characters, Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith, reminding us of what a powerful and talented actress she used to be before she married Will Smith and they began making films as husband and wife with their real-life son Jaden playing their son – one critic for the San Diego Reader joked that it was O.K. for the Smiths to make home movies, but why did they expect us to pay to see them?), turns into a starship admiral upbraiding one of Neo’s friends in the film, Bugs (Jessica Henwick) – “as in ‘Bunny,’” we’re helpfully told – for exceeding her authority. There’s also a lot of attention given to the “Anomaleum,” a part of the Matrix ini which different anomalies get created and resolved – though if the function of the Anomaleum is to resolve ambiguities, Lana Wachowski and her co-writers, David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon, could have used it. Ultimately The Matrix Resurrections turns into one of those movies in which the only way you can enjoy it is to groove on the spectacular images and not even try to make sense of it.

Directors as different as Josef von Sternberg, John Carpenter and Christopher Nolan have all given us movies with this dreamlike sense of unreality but also grounded in realistic characters and emotions, but only one time in their filmmaking careers have the Wachowskis hitched their wild imaginations to a story that actually made dramatic sense. That was the film V for Vendetta, based on a “graphic novel” (term of art for a book-length comic book) written by Alan Moore and drawn by David Lloyd. The famously cranky and reclusive Moore ordered his name be taken off the credits because of the changes the Wachowskis made to his script, but they produced a finely honed and fiercely anti-authoritarian movie about a future dictatorship in Great Britain and the one hero, known only as “V.” and played by Hugo Weaving (a hero after the endlessly replicating villain “Agent Smith” he’d played in the first three Matrices), who successfully resists even while sacrificing his life in the process. It’s the one time in their cinematic careers the Wachowskis have harnessed their visual imaginations to a story that actually made sense, and it’s by far my favorite of their films (at least of the ones I’ve seen).