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For years, Warner Bros. has dreamed of making another “Matrix” movie, but the Wachowski siblings — architects of a cyberpunk classic whose appeal rests largely on bending rules and questioning authority — resisted the pressure, insisting they’d said everything they wanted to with the original three films. Let’s not forget: By the end of the trilogy, Trinity died, Neo sacrificed himself and the humans were freed from their virtual shackles, which means anyone hoping to continue that story had their work cut out for them.
That explains a clever moment of self-awareness early in “The Matrix Resurrections,” a welcome but undeniably extraneous fourth installment — more of a patch than an upgrade on the franchise that came before, reframing déjà vu not as a bug but as a feature of the brand. In said scene, employees of a San Francisco video game company sit around a corporate conference table, brainstorming how to build upon the Matrix saga. “Our beloved parent company, Warner Bros., has decided they will make a sequel to the trilogy,” one says, explaining that the studio is planning to do it “with or without” the creators.
Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, or so director Lana Wachowski seems to be telling us, slyly stepping back from the dazzling infinity mirror presented in the earlier films to reveal one more layer: the real world in which we the audience reside. Sadly, that’s about as wild and/or meta as “The Matrix Resurrections” gets, while the rest could fairly be described as more of the same: more time- and gravity-defying action, more Goth-geek fashion pointers, more “free your mind” mumbo-jumbo.
Essentially a greatest hits concert and a cover version rolled into one (complete with flashback clips to high points from past installments), the new movie is slick but considerably less ambitious in scope than the two previous sequels. Where those films set out to break sound barriers in our brains — the way “bullet time,” the highway sequence and Neo’s final battle against an apparently infinite number of Agents Smith did — this one largely eschews innovation. Rather, “Resurrections” takes comfort in the familiar, fleshing out the emotional core of a world that always felt a little hollow.
In short, Wachowski doesn’t add much to the rich mythology she and sister Lilly have established, but she’s careful not to mess it up either.
By reviving Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and a handful of other key characters (some, like Agent Smith and Morpheus, requiring new actors to step in), “Resurrections” tethers its latest iteration to the “simulation hypothesis” — the theory, given oxygen by Elon Musk, that video game technology is advancing at such a clip that odds are good you’re already living in one. The difference, compared with “Matrix 1.0”: The “sheeple” in the movie’s brave new world have that potentially liberating information, and still they choose to sleepwalk through their lives. Just like … you?
