Normally, when I write “spoiler-free” film reviews, there’s some aspect of the work — a twist, a shared-universe revelation, or the appearance of a long-lost cast member — that I’m trying to avoid, but with a film like The Matrix Resurrections, I’m genuinely interested in what exactly this means for a film like this. In the past week or so since I saw Lana Wachowski’s sequel to the magnum opus that she co-directed and wrote with her sister Lilly, I’ve been hyper-careful around friends not to tell them anything beyond the sort of vague discussion I’m about to have here, while also making a case for why it’s both worth one’s attention and admiration. It’s good form to always strive to do this no matter what film you’re talking about, but the issue of advertising remains the same: Trailers, as they always have, tend to spoil everything and the same old question emerges about whether or not one has been spoiled by the marketing itself. At first blush, it would seem that there is a ton of footage of this tentpole out there, with long-ass trailers seeming to hit every other week in the lead-up to release and a perpetually growing amount of TV spots each seeming to contain lots of new and unseen images. And, of course, because of this, there’s been a web of speculation about what exactly is going on behind the scenes here, and I’ve spent the past week trying to dispel that stuff when it’s brought up to me, which is almost exclusively based on interpretations of the trailers.
The wonderful news is that, unlike something like Spider-Man: No Way Home, it is impossible to spoil exactly what makes The Matrix Resurrections so special with a single image. I’ve known a ton about this film for the last few months, ever since early word began to emerge from test screenings and crawl its way across the shorefront of the internet, but that knowledge had absolutely no bearing on how much I enjoyed this film. You see, like most truly great films, it really doesn’t matter what you know about this film beyond its context: That Lana Wachowski once co-directed a trilogy of films about the adventures of Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie Ann-Moss), who were a part of a human-centric resistance to the sentient machines that had enslaved humanity — physically in amniotic pods, stacked in giant pillars, and mentally in a virtual world modeled after 1999 — in the far-flung future in order to harvest the electrical energy that their brains supply to power the robots after mankind blacked out the sky Highlander II-style. Their freedom came at a cost, of course, with the comforts of modern life ripped away, replaced by both scarcity and the threat of annihilation around every corner in the ruined cityscapes of the “Desert of the Real,” but it rewarded them with benefits: Knowledge of the secret systems of the Matrix itself, manifesting itself in acquired skills (kung-fu, gun usage, a different perception of time), as well as the fundamental honesty of this type of existence.
You’re also probably well aware that Neo is “The One,” a mythical figure of power and enlightenment prophecied to bring about an end to this state of affairs and establish peace with the machines, allowing them to live in co-existence with the humans congregated in the city of Zion. He did so, in fact, thanks to his and Trinity’s sacrifice at the end of The Matrix Revolutions, in which he was able to defeat a self-replicating virus known as Smith (played by the sadly-absent here Hugo Weaving) that threatened all life, be it artificial or biological. Neo’s transformation from curious worker drone living under the name “Thomas Anderson” to an actualized person capable of being able to change the world holds significant relevance to Wachowski’s own life story — for a lot of millennials, her work is often the first piece of media authored by a trans person that they see — and that has a ton of bearing on how Resurrections unfolds and what it means. This doesn’t mean that Resurrections is obvious in the way that it wields its politics, with Wachowski and her co-writers, the novelist David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) and prolific screenwriter Aleksandar Hemon, avoiding the easy layups one might take when “red-pilling” entered the cultural lexicon in ugly fashion. Yet she and her collaborators embrace the heavily-metatextual (as you might have guessed from the trailers) and what emerges is a kind of autobiographical portrait of the artist at this current point in her life, comparable to the type of autofiction popularized by certain French directors in its almost-essay like qualities, who is drawn back in by the studio system, after alienating it, to author its continuation.
There was a fear, which was not wholly unfounded, that this Matrix would essentially just be one of those soft-reboots that retreads the plot and imagery of the first film to stoke the kind of box-office boosting and nostalgia-fed endorphin response on the part of the audience, but this perspective is inherently antithetical to that approach. In terms of how it practically impacts the filmmaking, it means that Wachowski has continued her move away from the specific kind of one-on-one fight that the Matrix films excelled at and into the world of the setpiece, which defined other masterpieces she worked on in the interim, like Speed Racer. These setpieces are thrilling in the same way that the ones in that film were, with a finale full of so much vehicular chaos that you can almost feel the day-glo aesthetic creeping in from the edges of the frame. But the fights here will undoubtedly disappoint some, as one can feel the absence of Yuen Wu-Ping, the choreographer of the original trilogy, but I’d argue that they aren’t the point by now: she’s so accomplished at staging large-scale action that she can afford to emulate the kind of action style popularized by the Thai and Indonesian filmmakers working in the DTV space in the states when going for the few small-scale engagements that exist here. It’s handheld, grungy, defined by its immediacy rather than its grace, which fits well with the overall thematic ethos guiding the film. In terms of how that perspective impacts the storyline, well, let’s just say that it’s not The Force Awakens. Circumstances have tangibly changed, and not just in aesthetic fashion: Rather than the design of an X-Wing slightly being modified or the helmets of the stormtroopers being a little more, the world of The Matrix Resurrections is wholly shaped by the choices that Neo made and the tactics he used, a reflection of Wachowski’s own impact on cinema.
The fact that this influence and its consequences are meaningfully interrogated throughout the course of the film would already place Resurrections atop the pile of most-interesting studio sequels released in the last decade — one can see shades of Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant here, where the part-god/part-creator relishes in the hold that their creations have had, though to less outright nihilistic ends — but the magic lies in the combination of that self-reflection with Wachowski’s capacity to make entertaining and amusing populist cinema. That, in and of itself, is the beauty of her form of cinematic expression: she can take a metaphor that is genuinely meaningful to her, reduce it down to the most universal elements, and make it so compelling that it enters the popular consciousness and continues to endure in influence. For all that makes The Matrix Resurrections separate from its peers in the franchise, it’s this commitment to a kind of enlightening entertainment (which doesn’t spare the latter in pursuit of the former) that fully links it to its predecessors.
I’ve already been asked if it’s as good as the original films of the trilogy — and this is a short break to tell you that if you think Reloaded and Revolutions are bad, you are wrong — and I’ll say it here, for the record: Yes, it is. If you had to ask me to pick a favorite, I could not, as I love each of these films equally for what they bring to the table and to the overall story that they tell. I don’t consider it to be a worthy successor but rather the kind of continuation that we all should have known was coming from Wachowski, and it is the best possible Christmas present that filmgoers could have asked for in this year or any other.