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The Matrix Resurrections has been somewhat maligned since its release, with its heavily meta first half and its drastic change in action style from the earlier movies putting off a lot of people who loved, in particular, the first film. But I think the movie is kind of an incredible achievement, a brilliant update to the themes of The Matrix 25 years later, and the inevitable evolution of the story from a filmmaker who was never just going to rehash what she did originally – and we shouldn't want her to. I urge you to revisit it – or watch it for the first time – on Netflix with an open mind to where this movie wants to take you.
In Resurrections, Neo is back… sort of. He's Thomas Anderson, the creator of The Matrix, a colossal video game hit. He's been working on new ideas, but all anybody wants to speak to him about is a sequel to The Matrix. Eventually, he's told in no uncertain terms that his parent company, Warner Bros., will make a Matrix sequel with or without him, and that it'd be better if he were involved.
This meta moment mimics the reported real-life circumstances around the development of this movie – and is so meta that it rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. But The Matrix has always been meta! The training dojo scene in the original movie has commentary about Hollywood action movies of the time. "Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place?" asks Morpheus – about a movie set as much as about the training simulation. The Matrix trilogy's whole over-arching plot is about subverting the traditional Hero's Journey in movies, and having Neo actively reject how he's 'supposed' to behave in the story.
Resurrections' version of this Hollywood rebuke is to make the point that it's been asked to be 'The Matrix, again' – and even starts with a redux of a scene from the original film – but that it can't be The Matrix, again. Not just because Lana Wachowski has changed in that time, but because the world has changed, too. The pre-millennium malaise depicted in the original movie is long gone, and even its action would be pointless to repeat when so many movies have copied it and riffed on it.
So instead we have a movie where people are kept in the Matrix by a system that uses their anger as the method of keeping them trapped, where expressing dissent might get you attacked by an army of bots, where the good guy's coolest power is twisted against him, where isolation won't help you and our power to overcome The Man is driven by coming together. It makes up for the ways the original trilogy under-used Trinity, and gives the saga the 'hell yeah' ending to match the first movie it maybe always should have had.
I'd rank it among the best Netflix movies personally – obviously not everyone feels the same as me, but I think that partly depends on your expectations.
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