Despite good finds, The Matrix Resurrections is recycle rather than resurrection ★★★☆☆

Old fame and blue pills, that’s what game builder Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) thrives on. He once caused a furore with his Matrixtrilogy, games that suggested that reality is a completely manipulated shadow play. Especially thanks to the first game, generations of gamers started thinking about reality and the (un)free will. The visuals were also revolutionary: just take it bullet timeeffect, where the image is slowed down so much that you can see bullets glide through the air with the naked eye.

Today, Anderson drags on numb, unable to match his previous success. Sometimes he sees glimpses of the world behind the grid, but according to his therapist (Neil Patrick Harris), those are panic attacks. During the brainstorming sessions for The Matrix 4 Anderson looks exhausted. Instead of new groundbreaking ideas, his team comes up with clichés.

No doubt filmmaker Lana Wachowski here reveals some of the worries she must have had when she started the long-awaited sequel to their sister Lily without sister Lily. Matrixtrilogy (1999-2003). What would The Matrix Resurrections can you add? From messenger Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and rebel Bugs (Jessica Henwick), Anderson learns again that he lives in a fake reality. Again he dives down the rabbit hole, again he transforms into the messianic resistance fighter Neo. Wachowski, who wrote the script with Aleksandar Hemon and novelist David Mitchell, sees it all with irony and self-mockery.

And then that coffee bar scene where Anderson finally addresses the woman who secretly modeled for Matrixheroine Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss): as if the franchise is starting over as a romantic drama. maybe The Matrix Resurrections that too, at its core – hidden under familiar philosophies, complicated entanglements, and some lackluster action sequences.

Meanwhile, the film chews out many fragments The Matrix (1999). The classic moment of Morpheus making Neo choose between the red and blue pill becomes a ritualistic play with the Matrix as a background projection, so that Neo then and now faces the same decision in parallel, and also the old Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the new one mirror each other. Was that very first film itself a Matrix fabrication?

Despite such finds and the happy reunion of Reeves and Moss, The Matrix Resurrections recycle rather than resurrection. Fortunately, there are plenty of fine details to unravel, such as the therapist’s blue glasses, the strings of numbers sliding across a mirror like green vapor droplets, the carrot on Bugs’ shirt. And when Neo and Trinity float motionless in the air at the end, Wachowski finally finds the answer to the old Matrix magic: no bullet time, but still time.