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I was never much of a Matrix fan: despite the gosh-wow overhype of the adrenalin rush I remember spending the first film's entire running time in a state of calm, and rewatching it last week I was still relaxed more or less throughout. I then got half an hour into The Matrix Reloaded before pausing the Blu to go and check whether I had actually seen it before because I couldn't remember a single frame of it; apart from the extended car chase sequence it had wiped itself from my memory. Revolutions, which for some unknown reason I hadn't seen before, proved itself to be the most interesting of the three with a genuinely stunning battle sequence halfway through and a natural conclusion. Much as I hate the idea of constantly having to do homework for the week's new blockbuster, I've had worse days than revising the minutiae of the Matrix Trilogy.
But The Matrix Resurrections is a mess, frankly. A mess that didn't need to be made, a Twenty Years Later Part 4 to a trilogy that had already reached a satisfying end, missing key members of the established cast and crew, and largely incomprehensible even if, like me, you spent a day last week furiously revising with the BluRay box set. If you went into this one stone cold you'd probably emerge wondering if the reels were in the right order. Near as I can figure, we're in another simulated world in which Thomas Anderson (beardy Keanu Reeves) is now a top videogame designer who created three Matrix games and is now being pressured by Warner Brothers to make a fourth one; he's also met a woman called Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss) who isn't Trinity - or is she? There's a massive shootout in Anderson's office with Morpheus, who unaccountably isn't played by Laurence Fishburne this time but Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, but Anderson's shrink (Neil Patrick Harris) convinces him it's all in his head and gives him more blue pills....Eventually they decide they have to heist Trinity out of her Matrix pod (why?) before the Bots and Agents realise she's gone because they need her life energy to stay "alive", but only if she makes the choice to leave the Matrix voluntarily, in a coffee shop full of armed goons. Then there's a massive fight/chase sequence with explosions and helicopters and motorbikes and whatever.
Interspersed with all this is a lot of philosophical jabber about free will and destiny and illusion and reality and stuff, and a lot of self-referential winking to the diehards in the audience that doesn't so much break the fourth wall as drive an armoured truck through it, leaving us unsure how seriously we're supposed to take it or how seriously the makers are taking it. (Stay to the very end for a final thudding joke on this theme.) What's really shocking about The Matrix Resurrections, though, is how it's so visually ugly. Many of the action sequences are plagued by that motion smoothed lo-def look that you'd expect from the behind-the-scenes video featurette but not the movie itself, particularly after all the strides made in digital photography in the last twenty years to the point where it's indistinguishable from, and possibly even superior to, 35mm celluloid stock. For a film to look as poor as this when they spent $190 million on it is unforgiveable.
It's not the worst film of the year by any stretch - there are at least two films released in recent months that I've positively hated - but it's easily the least of the Matrix films. It doesn't add anything beyond more of the same, it's never exciting despite the cranked-up crash-bang mayhem, it's never mindblowing fun despite the scope of the sandbox they're playing in. It's a disappointment, it's an entirely unnecessary addition to something that frankly we'd almost forgotten about as a Cultural Thing beyond a few funny Twitter memes, it's a film as baffling in its content as its decisions (no Don Davis and Juno Reactor on the soundtrack?). Some of it clicks, but a lot of it clunks.
**
