- UK release: December 2021
- Director: Lana Wachowski · Writers: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow Pictures
- Genre: Cyberpunk science fiction action / legacy sequel · Runtime: 148 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Keanu Reeves (The Matrix, John Wick) as Neo / Thomas Anderson; Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix, Memento) as Trinity / Tiffany; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman) as Morpheus; Jessica Henwick as Bugs
- IMDb: 5.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 63% critics / 63% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
Eighteen years after The Matrix Revolutions seemed to bury the trilogy under its own portent, the green rain is back, and this time only one of the two directors has returned with it. Lana Wachowski makes Resurrections without her sister Lilly, without the brawl choreographers and the wirework crew that defined the originals, and apparently without much patience for the idea that a fourth Matrix film should exist at all. The result is the rare blockbuster that spends its first act mocking the studio that paid for it, then dares you to keep watching once the joke has been made.
The setup
Thomas Anderson is a celebrated games designer, the man behind a legendary trilogy called, with a straight face, The Matrix. He is medicated, comfortable, faintly haunted, and convinced by a kindly analyst that the visions of another life are episodes to be managed rather than memories to be trusted. Across the cafe most mornings sits a woman named Tiffany, a wife and mother who reminds him of someone he cannot name. When a new crew of rebels comes hammering at the walls of his very pleasant prison, the old question returns in a new shape: not simply whether the world is real, but whether a man can be talked out of the one thing he knows.
That is as far as I will take it. The pleasure of the opening hour is watching the film unpick its own mythology in plain sight, and a synopsis that gives away how would spoil the trick.
The cast
Keanu Reeves has aged into the role rather than out of it. The blankness that once read as messianic now reads as exhaustion, and it suits a Neo who has spent two decades being told his memories are a malfunction. He is quieter here, sadder, and more moving for it. Carrie-Anne Moss is the film’s centre of gravity. Trinity was always more than a sidekick, and Resurrections finally makes the relationship its engine rather than its reward, with Moss carrying a grown woman’s worth of buried life behind a suburban smile.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II takes on Morpheus and wisely declines to impersonate Laurence Fishburne, playing instead a younger, glossier reconstruction of the part with real wit. Jessica Henwick’s Bugs, the blue-haired captain who refuses to let a legend stay retired, is the most purely enjoyable newcomer the franchise has fielded, and Neil Patrick Harris does smooth, smiling menace as the analyst better than the script entirely deserves.
The craft
This is where the film and I part company a little. John Toll’s photography is handsome and bright, almost too bright, trading the trilogy’s clammy green murk for clean daylight, which is a defensible choice that costs the film some of its old dread. The bigger problem is the action. The Wachowskis once changed how Hollywood shot a fight; here the set pieces are busy, choppy and oddly weightless, shot and cut without the geometric clarity that made bullet-time worth slowing down for. A film this self-aware about its own legacy cannot afford to be outclassed by its own opening sequence, and at times it is.
What does work is the emotional architecture and the ideas underneath it. Wachowski is plainly more interested in repetition, nostalgia and the machinery of franchise comfort than in another rooftop chase, and when the film leans into that it has a melancholy intelligence the action never matches. The Klimek and Tykwer score keeps the mood unsettled rather than triumphant.
How it stacks up
Against the original The Matrix, this is a lesser action film and a stranger, more personal one. The 1999 picture was lightning in a bottle, a perfect machine; Resurrections knows it can never be that and turns the knowledge into its subject, closer in spirit to the heart-on-sleeve sprawl of Wachowski’s own Cloud Atlas than to the clockwork of the first film. The obvious cousin is Tron: Legacy, another belated return to a cult digital world that looked gorgeous and moved its feet less surely than its forebear. As a legacy sequel that interrogates the very impulse to make legacy sequels, it has more on its mind than most.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics and audiences have landed in the same divided place, both around 63%, which is unusual and telling. Admirers single out the romance and the cheek of the meta-commentary; detractors find the action limp and the self-reference exhausting, a film too busy winking to thrill. Both sides are right about the thing they noticed. Where I differ from the harsher verdicts is on whether the trade was worth making. A clever, sincere, slightly broken film about love and memory interests me more than a competent retread would have, even when its punches do not connect.
Verdict
Resurrections is the weakest Matrix film as an action picture and one of the more thoughtful as a piece of science fiction about why we keep returning to the same stories. I value intelligent genre filmmaking and ideas that earn their place, and this has both; it also has a love story that finally pays off two films of groundwork. The fights let it down, the daylight palette drains some of the atmosphere, and it will not convert anyone who came purely for the kung fu. But it is more memorable and more rewatchable than its reputation, and braver than it had any commercial reason to be. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now. Streaming in the UK on Sky Cinema and NOW from launch.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: as of this writing Resurrections remains the final Matrix film, its disappointing box office having stalled talk of a fifth entry, though Warner Bros. has since announced a new Matrix film with a different director attached. Its standing has settled roughly where it opened, admired by a vocal minority for its romance and meta-textual nerve and dismissed by many for its action. It is widely available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Max in regions where that service operates.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: The film features scenes of strong violence when shootouts result in bloody detail. There are also fantasy sequences which include a woman breaking a man’s jaw and slitting his throat, as well as scenes of martial arts violence.
Threat and horror: Moderate horror images include a man’s mouth being sealed up by his own skin. There are also sequences of threat when a character is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f***k’) and a use of ‘bitch’ as well as milder terms.
Additional issues: There are suicide references when a man is shown leaping from a building. Infrequent sex references are comic.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
