In the Flesh: The Matrix Resurrections

The act of having a cake and the act of eating said cake are, at an existential level, famously and fundamentally at odds. It’s a narrative dilemma which has plagued thirty years of blockbuster action franchises, saddling the entire enterprise with the overinflated tension of debating whether it’s going to be a safe retread or, at the risk of alienating viewers who want only what they’ve seen before recreated in a slightly different key, a departure. The Matrix Resurrections tries to split the difference and in the process fumbles both possibilities, its inquisitive and uneasy first act calving into a sludgy, by-the-numbers second and third weighted down by interminable scenes of exposition. Neil Patrick Harris explains the story. Jada Pinkett Smith explains it. Then Jonathan Groff, doing what I sincerely hope is not his best Hugo Weaving impression, explains it again for good measure. The structure of the movie, we’re told again and again, is itself a commentary on the story within a story that is the Matrix itself, a yearning, endless separation from the beloved and familiar packaged and held in stasis to support a new generation of machine overlords.

There is, to director Lana Wachowski’s credit, some tension and meat to the film’s early attempts to grapple with the issue of whether the movie should exist at all. She skewers corporate culture’s heartlessness, winks at the financial incentive for Warner Bros to churn out another Matrix flick, even pokes fun at herself for kick-starting what might well lead to even more movies. Our guide through this netherworld of falsehood and reality, a natural update to the original film’s take on stagnant office work and compulsory conformity, is again Neo himself (Keanu Reeves, lion in winter), here reimagined as a tortured game designer brainwashed and trapped in a brand-new iteration of the titular Matrix as he pines for Tiffany/Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss, who has aged like some liquor no one who isn’t the pope even knows exists), an unhappily married woman drawn again and again to a coffee shop where it turns out the repressed chemistry between her and Neo is the juice that keeps the new Matrix pumping and the reason both of them were painstakingly rebuilt and slotted back into the virtual world.

The problem is that once we get through this intriguing premise, all that’s left is to experience The Matrix again, except this time there’s no Lawrence Fishburne or Hugo Weaving and the thrills and imagery are all twenty years old and recreated with sometimes limp and unconvincing CGI. At its best Resurrections has the kind of painterly beauty so many Wachowski joints display, a soft-edged visual style somewhere between noir and watercolor, but at its worst it’s far too close to the sludgy corporate grays of Disney’s last decade of filmmaking. Everything we see in the film’s agonizingly overlong second and third acts is just a reprocessed version of something from an earlier movie. A subterranean fight with the recast Agent Smith, present for unclear reasons and with none of Weaving’s force or intensity. Another kung fu sparring session with the recreated Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), but this time in a poorly CGI-ed waterbound dojo. More of the Merovingian’s (Lambert Wilson) creepy minions, except now they’re nondescript and undifferentiated clown-samurai rather than the iconic albino vampire twins from Reloaded. It’s a buffet of familiar dishes, all lukewarm and wilting under the heat lamps.