The Matrix Resurrections review—How many blue pills is too many?

Take the blue pill and keep on enjoying The Matrix franchise. Or take the red pill and find out how bad The Matrix Resurrections really is.

You have two options: you can hit the back button and return to the previous page and go on believing whatever you want to believe about The Matrix Resurrections. “Who knows, maybe it was good.” Or you can take the red pill and keep reading. You can learn the truth about The Matrix Resurrections and just how bad it is.

Okay, cheeky intro out of the way. Let’s get into it.

I’m thinking about what’s the best way to start this review, and my instinct is to share two pieces of information. One: I hated this movie. Two: I have not seen the original Matrix Trilogy. I’m sure I can find no shortage of Matrix fans, or people in general, who would say that not having seen the originals will have predisposed me to dislike The Matrix Resurrections. But it’s the movie’s fault for being this bad, not mine.

When I go into these decades-after-the-fact sequels and revivals, I know to a certain extent what I’m going to get. There will be recreations of old scenes, there will be the mythologizing of the original cast and characters, and so on. Fine. J.J. Abrams set the frame for blockbusters for the next 10 years with The Force Awakens. What I ask for, the bare minimum to be a good movie, is to have an entertaining story. A considerate story, that introduces us to characters properly instead of throwing them into instant danger and expecting me to care before I’ve learned anything about them.

That’s how this movie opens. Bugs (Jessica Henwick) gets into trouble after getting into some old code, and I don’t know why I should care. I can tell that this is an homage to an older scene, but that’s not enough to make it compelling. I don’t know who Bugs is, what she wants, what world she’s coming from. I suppose the intention is to establish some mystery, but it just felt opaque.

I suppose we’re also supposed to care because of the involvement of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), but that didn’t work for me either. This is a movie that does not care about initiating new audiences to a franchise that, as a reminder, has had an 18-year gap between installments.

Once the prologue is over and we meet Neo (Keanu Reeves), the movie rubs me the wrong way by surrounding him with incredibly unpleasant characters. After the first few scenes of Jude (Andrew Caldwell) and Mr. Smith (Jonathan Groff), I had to pause the movie and breathe. Groff says all of Smith’s lines in the same barely-disguised villain voice, and then his mouth disappears because that happened in the old ones.

In the first half of the movie, Neo is tasked with making a sequel to the original Matrix trilogy games (hahahahaha do you get it?). Nothing comes out of it except a montage that I fully believe was only made to create footage for the trailer, and some self-serving conversations by the other game designers about what the old Matrix was and what the new one should be. It’s so irrelevant I wonder why I’m mentioning it at all.

The movie is peppered with flashbacks to the original movies. They try to pass these off as stylistic, and some of them do look pretty cool. However, they use it far too often and not very creatively. It’s gratuitous and comes off as nostalgia baiting.

Eventually, the first half mercifully ends, and from there the movie gets more tolerable. There are more action scenes and more nods to the days of old. To me, the effect is quite numbing. I don’t care about what I’m watching and neither does the movie, but at least the horrible characters are gone and we get a clear goal: save Trinity from the Matrix.

That sounds promising, but the movie doesn’t do anything with it in a way that justifies a whole new movie. Once Neo and Bugs get out of the Matrix, we see a new crew. They are given bare-bones introductions. We know nothing about them. Why? Why, in a two-and-a-half hour movie, do we not learn about these characters we are having a journey with? Maybe because the movie is more concerned with recreating old scenes, reuniting us with old characters, and engaging in long bouts of exposition.

That’s The Matrix: Resurrection in a nutshell. I’m sure this movie has its audience. It’s just not me. Nor is it anyone who likes good stories, or imagination, or interesting characters.

Grade: D

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