Now this is how you reheat a piece of pop culture. Nearly 20 years after The Matrix Revolutions, which left its two main characters dead, director Lana Wachowski returns to the series with enough self-aware wit, narrative ingenuity, and filmmaking prowess to more than justify the endeavor. I won’t spoil exactly how Wachowski, who wrote the screenplay with David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon, brings back Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), except to note that the plot offers some wry meta commentary on our current, IP-driven popular culture (and the pressures on artists to work within it). At the same time, The Matrix Resurrections seamlessly, cleverly clicks into place within the “realities” of the larger Matrix universe (both actual and virtual). Reeves and Moss are riveting—simultaneously hardened and softened by the passage of time. Somehow, this makes their characters’ romance feel more real than it did in the earlier installments. Among the new cast members, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has fun riffing on the character of Morpheus (previously played by Laurence Fishburne) and Jessica Henwick has such an electric presence as a rebel captain that you almost hope she goes on to anchor her own Matrix spin-off series. I do wish the filmmakers (and it should be noted that Lana’s sister and previous collaborator, Lilly Wachowski, is not involved this time around) had pushed their inventiveness even further and devised a creative way to move past the gun worship and indiscriminate bullet-spraying that makes a fair amount of the action unnecessarily wincing. Such callousness stained 1999’s The Matrix; it plays even more poorly now, in a country that’s only suffered through 22 more years of random, senseless gun violence.
(12/21/2021)
