148 min | R | December 22, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Eighteen years after he saved Zion, Thomas Anderson is a celebrated game designer who built a hit trilogy called The Matrix. His therapist keeps him medicated and his memories filed under fiction. Then a woman named Bugs offers him the red pill, and the franchise eats its own tail on purpose.
Thomas Anderson lives a comfortable lie. He designed a video game trilogy called The Matrix, the world treats him as a genius, and his analyst prescribes blue pills to keep the dreams away. The film opens by restaging the original’s first scene as a piece of software running inside the new story. This is a movie about the machinery of sequels and the corporate demand to mine the past forever. Lana Wachowski builds a reboot that interrogates the act of rebooting and dares the audience to notice the seams.
Keanu Reeves plays Neo as a tired man who suspects his own sanity. He carries the weight of someone who has done all this before and gets no relief from remembering. Carrie-Anne Moss plays Trinity as Tiffany, a suburban mother who feels a pull she cannot name, and Moss makes the recognition land in small physical hesitations. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II takes over Morpheus and plays him as a program that knows it is a program, all swagger and self-aware theater. Neil Patrick Harris plays the Analyst with a smug therapeutic calm that turns into the film’s sharpest villain. The romance between Neo and Trinity does more emotional work than any fight in the picture.
Wachowski directs from a script she wrote with novelists David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, and the literary instincts show in the talk and the structural games. The action choreography is the weak link. The fights lack the legible geometry of the originals and the editing cuts too fast to register the bodies in space. The film often intercuts footage from the first three movies on monitors and screens within scenes, a technique that comments on memory and franchise nostalgia at once. The production design splits the new Matrix into glassy tech-campus blues that make the simulation feel like a startup office.
This is a sequel arguing with the concept of sequels, and the argument is more interesting than the spectacle it interrupts. Wachowski clearly resents being asked to return and folds that resentment into the text until the bitterness becomes the subject. When the film stays on Neo and Trinity it finds real feeling. When it stages a chase or a brawl it goes slack. The result is a flawed and fascinating object that thinks hard about why it exists and never solves the problem of being an action movie that does not want to act.