The Matrix Resurrections Review

For roughly forty minutes this is a sharp, funny, genuinely angry film about being made to produce a sequel. Neo is a game designer whose studio informs him the parent company will make another Matrix with or without him, and the brainstorming scene, a room of executives shouting unusable pitches about bullet time and capitalism, is the most alive writing Lana Wachowski has done in twenty years.

Then the film has to become the sequel it is mocking, and it has no better idea than the ones it just satirized. The Analyst is a talkative villain who explains the new rules at length, the recast Morpheus is stranded in a role the script never justifies, and the action is the weakest in the series by a distance, shot flat and bright with the green grade abandoned, cut into confusion, and finished by having a mob of civilians detonated at the heroes.

What survives is the center. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss play middle aged people who have lost something and know it, and the final rooftop scene between them carries real feeling. A brave and unusually honest failure, but a failure, and considerably worse made than the films it is arguing with.