Movie review: Though it isn’t great, ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ takes admirable risks (C+) - The Dallas Morning News

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When a new sequel to The Matrix was announced, I thought it sounded like a terrible idea.

When the first trailer was released, I thought, “Actually, this looks awesome, and I’m extremely interested in what they do with this story.”

Now that I’ve seen it, I’m between those two extremes. The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t stick all of its landings, nor does it quite manage to justify its own existence. But to its immense credit, it takes a lot of risks and does a lot of interesting things. And if you just want the trademark action scenes (complete with a lot of slow motion), then it’s got those in spades. Even when it’s a mess, it’s a well-made mess.

In true Matrix form, Resurrections opens by forcing you to ask a lot of questions. It begins with a new character, Bugs (Jessica Henwick), spying on what could basically be described as a shot-by-shot remake of the original movie — except that she notices it’s “wrong.” She seems familiar with the “real” story, and she knows this isn’t it. Her confusion continues when she meets someone who calls himself Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), despite not being the Morpheus we know and love.

Cut to elsewhere, and we see a familiar face: Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who seems to be living a relatively “normal” life as a normal human, not as a god-like hero named Neo. He’s a video game designer who became famous for a trilogy of games called — surprise! — The Matrix. He seems to have some struggles with knowing what in his life is real and what was part of his game, so he regularly visits a therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) who tries to keep him grounded in this reality.

Keanu Reeves stars in "The Matrix Resurrections." (Warner Bros.)

The mystery of this opening is compelling. What’s going on? Isn’t Neo dead? Is he trapped? Are we watching a sequel, a reboot or something else entirely? We see a lot of “real-world” analogs to The Matrix’s fantastic elements, including a black cat named Deja Vu. Maybe Thomas is just crazy. Maybe Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) is just his fantasy version of the attractive woman at the coffee shop, Tiffany.

Before you know it, you’re back down through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. The questions are fun when they’re being asked. Unfortunately, not all of the questions have satisfying answers.

Thomas’ business partner (Jonathan Groff) has unpleasant and surprisingly meta news. “Warner Bros. is going to make a sequel to the trilogy,” he says. “They’re going to do it with or without us.” In this moment, it’s hard not to imagine that director Lana Wachowski, half of the sibling duo that created The Matrix, is sharing her personal experience directly with the audience, especially given rumblings that Warner Bros. was, in fact, exploring more films in the series without them.

This meta layer of narrative is the kind of thing you’ll either love or hate, but it’s not the crux of the story. This is not Deadpool, where the fourth wall is constantly being broken, and it is not Space Jam: A New Legacy, where the entire point of the movie is to remind you of movies that came before it. Resurrections walks a fine line, but it mostly stays on the right side of it, daring to do something new instead of something easy. Even when it’s leaning on nostalgia, it does so with a twist.

Once you’re through the lengthy buildup and start to get a sense of what’s really going on, the narrative shifts more to a sci-fi love story. Neo will go to the ends of multiple worlds to be with Trinity again, and while this may be a tale as old as time, it still works.

No member of this cast phones it in. All the actors, both old and new, look like they want to be here. Reeves and Moss both somehow convey the sense that they haven’t missed a single step in 20 years and yet also have two decades more experience under their belts. If nothing else, it’s nice that Resurrections gave us an opportunity to see them embody these characters again.

When it ends, though, there are lingering issues that some people will struggle to see past. The motivations of one villain to ally with Neo never fully make sense, for example, while other aspects of the plot feel like they can only be explained by, “Well, we thought this would be cool.”

Still, if a Matrix sequel really was inevitable, then I think we’re lucky Lana Wachowski took a crack at it. It’s not all great, but at least it’s interesting.

The Matrix Resurrections (C+)

R (for violence and some language). 148 mins. In wide release.

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Movie review: Though it isn’t great, ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ takes admirable risks (C+) - The Dallas Morning News
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