I just came back from watching The Matrix: Resurrections a second time, and while the first impression was somewhat positive but confused, this second viewing made me appreciate the film a lot more. Resurrections is beautifully earnest about what it sets to do, and what that is is simply, like the first one, Lana Wachowski’s expression of her life experience through her art.
(Also, right off the bat, I just loved how familiar faces kept appearing one after the other. There are so many Sense8 actors in there it was like watching a cast reunion, and as a fan I was just super happy to see that. I’m also 99% convinced that the key shop is not just a reference to the Keymaker, it looked exactly like Wolfgang and Felix’s shop!)
After two sequels that were kind of okay but mainly kind of a letdown, Resurrections is a sublimation of the original trilogy. It takes their themes and distillates them through the lens of the last 20 years. It is unapologetically Lana’s Matrix: a sequel that neither sisters wanted to make originally, but when it became inevitable, one that she had to make herself to keep control of her story, of her narrative. Because these movies are (or at least, started from) fundamentally autobiographical allegories, it would have been unthinkable to relinquish this control to a studio. That’s where the whole hyper-meta first act comes from, with its continuous self-reference that is always just shy of breaking the fourth wall.
(Caution: what follows contains spoilers)
It’s no wonder that reflections and mirrors come back as crucial tools and visual cues to navigate between the Matrix and the “real world”. Self-image and representation were always at the heart of the first Matrix movie, and this theme comes full circle here again with the added emotional maturity of a person who’s lived through transition and can look back at what was. Both Neo and Trinity know what they look like, but what the world sees is a completely different person. And eventually, it is no longer “Thomas Anderson” coming out, as the metro barrels down towards him, shouting “My name is Neo” in a defiant, yet almost intimate act of self-acceptance. It is “Tiffany” who instead asserts her true identity publicly and becomes empowered: “My name is Trinity,” she says, and indeed she always was, and nothing her family or society could say or do would change that. It’s not an accident that 20 years later, Trinity, not Neo, has become the One.
The Matrix universe can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and that’s okay. For me, I don’t think you can really dissociate the art from the artist when the art is rooted is such personal life experiences. Resurrections upends the blue pill/red pill binary, because as Bugs say, such a binary solution was always an illusion. Forget about spoons, there is no choice: deep inside, in your heart, you know what you should do to stay true to yourself, and doing anything else would be a betrayal.
All in all, I find Resurrections to be a perfect bookend to the story the Wachowskis started in 1999. It’s not without flaws, the meta stuff in the first third was almost a tad too much, the fight scenes are not as clean or memorable as before (although the Analyst subverting bullet time was pretty neat), and I found the Merovingian cameo to be gratuitous. But the film works despite these flaws, because deep down there is so much love for the characters, and so much earnestness in the tale of their literal resurrection, that it’s impossible for me not to like it.
It’s a leap of faith, and when you find in yourself the courage to take the step… at that moment, that’s when you are, finally, free.
4.8/5