Matrix: Resurrections and a Terminal Case of Sequelitis
The lazy person’s guide to resetting a story to make a bad sequel and/or reboot.
SOMEHOW the Matrix franchise gets worse with each new release—an impressive trick, truly1. Back in 1999, the original The Matrix was a huge hit that cast a long shadow: Between the effects, the style, and a premise that hadn’t yet been done to death, it defined “cool” for a while. The two immediate sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions were bombastic, overstuffed, and overly sweaty2, but at least delivered some nice action sequences to go with their increasingly boring Messiah story and the terminally boring love story between Neo and Trinity3.
And then I thought we were safe. But back in the cozy confines of 2003 I couldn’t have imagined the content-hungry maw of streaming platforms or the never-ending craze for reboots, re-imaginings, and sequels, and so here we are: The Matrix: Resurrections. And holy shit, it’s fucking terrible. It doesn’t even look cool any more4.
A lot of critics have bent over backwards to find things to like, most focusing in on the early stretch of the film. There’s a sequence that starts off as a replay of the first scene of the first movie, but new characters intrude, old characters are played by different actors, and it’s soon revealed to be a simulation within a simulation. Then we’re back in The Matrix, and Keanu Reeves is back as an older and wiser Neo/Tom Anderson, except now he’s a sad sack famous game designer and Trinity is a sad sack suburban mom5. The San Francisco of The Matrix is off in a lot of subtle ways, and Neo’s efforts to develop a sequel to his hit video game—The Matrix, yo—is kicked off when he’s informed that his corporate parent, Warner Brothers, is going to make the sequel with or without him6.
This has been analyzed as Lana Wachowski winking at us and saying that she didn’t really want to make this movie, but it was either eat the shit or let someone else take over her legacy. And the montage that follows of Neo and his team doing stereotypical tech-boy stuff to develop the game has been seen as a critique of the treadmill-esque world of tech and Silicon Valley while also demonstrating the grinding repetition of The Matrix7.
It’s not. Or if it is, it doesn’t matter, because the problem with The Matrix Resurrections isn’t that it despises the modern world and very much wishes it was still 20038, it’s that it gives in to the most basic mistake any sequel can make: It resets.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Sequel?
Some stories present difficulties when it comes to sequelizing them, because they work due to very specific narrative conditions. This is usually plot-related, but it could also be an essential character who dies by the end, or a twist that truly shocks and transforms. When trying to go back to the well, creators find they have to literally reset everything like a sitcom in order to make the engine rev again. This is why superhero movies keep giving us goddamn origin stories: They work, and keeping a superhero interesting is a lot harder than making them interesting in the first place. Instead of trying something new, you reset and put all the pieces back where they started, then play the same game again with minor variations.
But the reset9 is always a bad idea, because it forces the reader/viewer to go through the same damn story beats as last time, for the meager reward of a slight twist or different skin on top. In The Matrix: Resurrections, everything is put back to its starting position. Thomas Anderson is a miserable corporate drone, just a little higher on the pecking order. The simulation he unknowingly lives in is wrong in subtle ways, heavy on miserable loops and impossibly pretty skylines. He’s contacted by a bunch of weirdos in slick costumes and odd hair who insist he’s something else, something more10. He’s extracted from The Matrix and wakes up in a pod of goo with wires and tubes stuck in him. He emerges into a drab, rusty sort of real reality where the vestiges of humanity have carved out a refuge. He has to go back into The Matrix and learn how to be a god (again).
It’s the same story, essentially. And it may be intentional, they may be repeating themselves to make a point. But what a lot of writers don’t seem to realize is that when you reset it doesn’t fucking matter how clever you are, it’s going to be terrible. Maybe Resurrections does some clever stuff riffing on the way corporations wring every last dime out of a franchise, creative control be damned. Maybe it does have something clever going on about our modern society and the cancerous growth of the tech-bro world. Maybe the way everyone fanpersons over Neo like he’s a rockstar suddenly releasing a secret album is actually a sly commentary on everyone’s expectations around this movie. Maybe! Probably not, but I’ll concede: Maybe. It doesn’t make it a good movie, though, because we’re watching the same character do the same shit11.
I did mention that resets often resort to twists to make themselves seem fresh and innovative instead of lazy and bad, and Resurrections is no exception. This is a spoiler moment.
OILERSPAY OMENTMAY
So, Neo wants out of this miserable Matrix, but he loves Trinity like I love whiskey12, so he has to go back and wake her up both literally and in the Matrix. And then they have to fight their way out against what turns out to be the one solid idea in the movie, a Swarm where the Analyst summons every program in The Matrix to attack our heroes13. And they wind up trapped on a roof, and decide to do one of those “fuck it let’s suicide” things14 and jump ... and then Trinity starts to fly. And Trinity becomes basically the new The One (or a co-The One with Neo, maybe).
Twist! But ... it’s still the same fucking story beat. Neo had several such moments where he suddenly broke through, like when he stopped all of Agent Smith’s bullets in the first one. It’s the same beat in a different skin. That’s why this film leaves you with nothing more than a deep sense of bored dissatisfaction.
This has been 1,100+ words to say: The Matrix: Resurrections is a bad movie and I am dumber for having watched it. Of course, that means I wrote this essay after the endumbening, so ... wait, do I smell tacos?
Next week: The Boomer energy of The Lord of the Rings.
Another impressive trick is how I get slightly fatter every year.
I like to picture the Wachowskis on set while filming the Zion scenes and just shouting “MORE ORGY TIME!” every few minutes.
Seriously, the energy between Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss is 100% Hate Fuck.
I know it thinks its clever to mock it’s own stuff like Bullet Time, but that mockery would hold up better if there was a single visual moment in this film that was memorable or even looked good.
The reason why Neo and Trinity are a) alive, b) back in The Matrix, and c) younger than they should be is hilariously bad. Should I spoil it? Okay, I’m gonna spoil it, you have been warned: It’s because the new designer/warden of The Matrix, The Analyst (taking over for The Architect), realized that the Matrix can only function in a state of perpetual tension between longing for what you cannot have and fearing the loss of what you do have, and so he plugged Neo and Trinity in while keeping them apart and holy shit I literally cannot go on.
There’s also a sidekick/handler character named Jude who’s sort of like Marlon in “The Truman Show,” always ready to show up unexpectedly and keep Neo distracted. Then he vanishes from the film entirely without explanation, because fuck giving a shit.
One of the most brilliant ideas in The Matrix is the idea that a simulation designed to distract humanity from their enslavement would be boring as hell and not the raddest video game ever. Yes, I just used the word raddest.
One actually amusing moment in the film brings the character of The Merovingian back from a lengthy exile. He appears as a comically disheveled version of himself, looking like Tom Hanks in Castaway. He unleashes a stream of profane French and English complaining about the modern world like every Boomer asshole you’ve ever seen, saying stuff like “We had grace. We had style. We had conversation. Not this...[mimics text message sound]. Art, films, books were all better. Originality mattered! You gave us Face-Zucker-suck and Cock-me-climatey-Wiki-piss-and-shit!” I am honestly not sure whether he’s supposed to be a satire of a Boomer irritated about Twitter or if this is exactly what the film is about.
You have no idea how hard I have worked to come up with a way to reference “The Reflex” by Duran Duran as a pun on “reset.” Why? Certainly not because it’s a clever joke, or even a reference most people will get and/or appreciate. Writing is mysterious.
In the first film, the way the weirdos imagined themselves in The Matrix felt slightly subversive, all S&M leather and hairstyles that were choices. This time around it all felt very cosplay, but that may be because the style of The Matrix is no longer subversive at all and is basically mainstream. And also cosplay.
And I say this as a man who loves his routine deeply and unreservedly. When The Duchess announces that I have no choice but to accompany her to a faraway place where we will eat strange things and purchase many expensive frivoloties, my first thought is how much disruption this will cause to my lunch schedule.
Hint: It’s a lot.
Even so, I enjoyed it better ten damn years ago when I played Left 4 Dead.
I’m just going to admit that I will never be willing to jump off a roof in the vague hope that I’m actually living in a simulation (or am possibly secretly [very secretly] Superman). I will surrender, name names, and apologize to my captors rather than jump off a roof. Don’t judge me—you could have jumped off a roof this morning, you coward.
It definitely had that "well, if you insist, here's a movie" quality overall. I confess I didn't feel dumber so much as two hours and twenty-eight minutes older when it was over. For the most part, it seemed like a movie specifically created to show how unnecessary it was. If corporate executives and movie producers were capable of shame (hahahahahahahahahahaha) it would have . . . you know what, no point in even finishing that thought. (sobs) Also, Neil Patrick Harris was so incredibly stunt cast that from the first millisecond I saw him in the first trailer I knew he was the new Architect. Excuse me, Analrapist. (Am I mixing my IPs there? Yes, I am.)
But the one thing it did that I keep thinking about is its almost throwaway concept of identity adopted in this movie. Neo and Trinity were dead. They're acknowledged as having been dead. The Machines then used super future technology to rebuild them cell by cell and were somehow so good at it they were able to make new Neo and new Trinity like me putting together a 3,000 piece LEGO Millennium Falcon (hard, but I got there eventually). But holy shit this is an utterly reductive concept of identity that's pretty damn depressing. The We're All Just Machines idea was always implied (with greater or lesser emphasis depending on your interpretation) in the earlier Matrix movies, but those earlier ones left room for a more nuanced concept of identity. Yes, our identity is tied to the aspects of what we are, whether we're a program or a human, to our code or our meat, as it were, but it's also something greater than that, an emergent property of complexity that results in more than the sum of the parts. By that conception, putting together cellular LEGOs of Neo and Trinity would, at best, result in clever but ultimately unconvincing forgeries. As movie viewers, arguably that's what we got, but in the film's universe what we got was a continuation of old Neo/Trinity, a coherent and unbroken line of identity. Who they were was just about clicking the pieces in place in a certain order. So much for emergence. We really are just machines.
Now that's actually a pretty interesting philosophical idea to explore. Not a new idea, to be sure, but in the context of the world we now live in, where we're all willingly being reprogrammed on a daily basis by the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, cable news, and Amazon, Wachowski had an opportunity to do something she simply glossed over, to my disappointment and ultimately, ugh, distress. I mean, if you can make a new Neo and Trinity out of whatever leftover parts they had at the end of Revolutions plus some junk lying around the Machine City, why stop at two? What if, like Smith in Revolutions, we had millions of Neos and Trinitys? Would they all be the same, as the LEGO model of identity implies, or would we see something different emerge in each of them? That, combined with some actual effort at the kind of visual set pieces we crapped ourselves over in the first movie, might have made for much more interesting movie, and possibly even one worth making.
I'm rambling.