The Matrix Resurrections came out, so of course we have to talk about it. I watched it on HBO Max. I haven’t had a chance to go to the theater yet, and I do intend to see it again there. Obviously, spoilers. If you don’t know there’s going to be spoilers, what are you doing here?
I like the movie. I don’t think the movie’s bad. Arguably I think it’s better than any of the other sequels we got. If you literally go from the first movie, then maybe to the ending of the third movie, and then to this, you’re fine. I think the second and third movies are a little muddy, but there are concepts that stay pretty stable throughout the whole thing.
Walking Into the First One Cold
I was a fan of the original Matrix. I’d gotten tickets to see it with a friend, and I was like, yeah, let’s go see The Matrix, whatever that is. I hadn’t seen any of the trailers, mainly because at that age I was just into my own little world.
So I walk into the theater and it’s right at the scene where Neo is being talked through the office by Morpheus. He doesn’t know it’s Morpheus yet. He gets into his little booth, the package guy delivers, he opens it up, the phone rings. “Hello, Neo. I am Morpheus.” Laurence Fishburne doing amazing work.
I got to see that movie about as cold as someone can. No clue what to expect, no clue what was coming. At the end of it I’m sitting there going, oh my gosh, what did I just see? I was legitimately amazed by it.
Then of course the second and third ones showed up, and each of these did something special. For the first Matrix they literally had to invent technology to make it happen. The second and third also tried to make some big leaps. Right now people are like, oh, the characters look so rubbery and it’s so CGI. Understand that at that point in time video games weren’t even doing this level of CGI work. By today’s standards those don’t look good, but at the time it was kind of groundbreaking that you could even get to that level. So I give them credit where credit’s due. I think the Wachowskis were doing some amazing things back then, and Lana Wachowski came back to direct this one and helped write it.
Thomas Anderson, Video Game Programmer
When you get into the movie you’re immediately brought into a vivid, very bold, colorful world, and it’s the world we see Thomas Anderson inhabiting now. Thomas Anderson, played by Keanu Reeves, Neo in the original series, is a video game programmer, and he’s world famous for having created the Matrix trilogy of games. It’s a very self-referential movie. The term meta has been used probably to death, but it’s extraordinarily that.
The implication is that he’s been really overwhelmed by where he needed to go to create the game, a game that questions the nature of our reality, very similar to how the original movie did. He had to go somewhere dark, someplace that apparently helped him disassociate from reality a little bit. So he has a therapist, played by Neil Patrick Harris, who is doing really brilliant things in this movie, especially because I never think of Doogie Howser as a bad guy.
He gets coffee on a daily basis, he’s looped through this, and he’s always running into Carrie-Anne Moss’s Tiffany. Tiffany is a housewife with two kids and a husband named Chad. You get the sense it’s a middling sort of life. She’s living that Desperate Housewives life for real: I hate everything about everyone and everything, but this is my life and it’s wonderful.
He’s also being force-fed blue pills as his prescription medicine all day.
The Analyst, the Architect and the Modal
Neil Patrick Harris is known as the Analyst. The Analyst is the new form of control, the new version of the Architect. Remember, Colonel Sanders was like, “Hello, Neo. I am the Architect.” That guy. He had one vision for how this whole thing should work.
The Analyst, NPH if you will, has taken the perspective that people can be controlled under certain circumstances, and the one he outlines later is about Neo and Trinity. He had to work really hard to recreate them. I don’t know if he means clone them or genetically repair them. I think it’s repairing. I believe Neo is not a hundred percent himself, I think he’s bioengineered, so it’s less cloning and more like cell therapy. In essence, if you don’t ever let them come together, they generate more energy than most groups of people. Almost enough to keep this iteration going.
The thing they don’t make clear is whether this is a segment of the Matrix. Is it an offshoot, a little version of it, or an actual full-blown thing? In this current Thomas Anderson mini Matrix they use the phrase modals.
Thomas Anderson, who built the Matrix, still subconsciously believes the Matrix is real. That’s why he goes to therapy. That’s why NPH is there for him as his therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever. So he’s built a modal. Think of it as a pocket universe within the Matrix.
According to the movie, the purpose of a modal is to create programs that have to evolve. You want the program, but you want it at state D. So you have to create the modal that’ll run the same program through all the same steps it ran through the first time, to go from A to B to C and eventually arrive at D. That whole journey creates the program you want.
Neo’s trying to create Morpheus, because deep down in his subconscious he believes that if he creates Morpheus, Morpheus will find him. Morpheus’s job was to find the One. Unbeknownst to everybody else, he’s also put some of the tenacity and fighting capability of Smith into the new Morpheus model. That’s how we’re supposed to explain the fact that this Morpheus looks different than Laurence Fishburne. Because movies. And I’m fine with that. I have no problem with it. Whatever works, man.
Did We Put the Wrong Movie In?
The whole thing begins like the first movie started. There’s a phone call, there’s all the code, the code stops, somebody’s trying to trace the call. It’s almost verbatim, and I’m watching this going, did we actually put the wrong movie in? Back in the day, kids, you had to take a DVD player and put a movie in. Before that you had a VHS player and you put the tape in.
Then you get past it, and sure enough it feels very much like the opening of The Matrix. It’s that green sort of set. The police are all gathered, some agents show up, and there’s a Black agent, the first time I think we’ve seen a Black agent, who’s sort of the stand-in for Agent Smith in this scenario.
Then we see Jessica Henwick, who was in Netflix’s Marvel Iron Fist series. She’s amazing in this thing. She plays a character named Bugs, like Bugs Bunny, because she always gets in trouble.
Come to find out, everybody in this future has grown up over the last 30 years with stories of Neo, the fall of the Matrix and the rescue of Zion. So she’s watching this whole thing and she’s like, I know how this story goes. Only this less than perfect iteration of Trinity isn’t doing so well. And you find out this is a modal.
They have to come and free Neo, and you go through a lot of the same stuff. This is a movie that repeats a lot of the beats of the old one, in order. This is nostalgia porn on a level I’ve never really experienced.
We’re living in a giant petri dish of nostalgia right now. Spider-Man: No Way Home did it amazingly well and arguably will go down in history as one of the best. The Matrix just swung, and I think did a passable job.
A Love Story, an Agent and Io
Everybody has said this and it’s really true: The Matrix is a love story. It’s a love story between Neo and Trinity, and the depths and lengths to which they’ll go to stay together. I think that’s huge.
Thomas Anderson, the gaming guy, has an agent. See what I did there? Do you see what they did there? His agent is played by Jonathan Groff, who’s been in a lot of different things, most notably the Disney Plus release of Hamilton, where he plays King George. My wife was watching the movie going, where do I know him from? I think I know him from somewhere. And I was like, yeah, you do. It’s King George.
He’s amazing, and he’s definitely channeling Hugo Weaving. Once Neo wakes up, you find out there’s part of Agent Smith’s code that was embedded within this guy, and that acted as the spark to bring Smith back from where he’d been purged. So you have Jonathan Groff playing an amazing version of Agent Smith. I actually kind of like it.
Once Neo and the group get out, you find out that humans still exist. Niobe, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, has been aged up a lot, and I think it’s aged up not great. I think they could’ve done better, especially when you see what they were doing in Captain America: The Winter Soldier with Peggy Carter when she’s older. That was inspired work. So I’m like, y’all couldn’t have made Jada Pinkett Smith a little better looking as an old lady? Nothing?
She runs the entire place now, and it’s a place called Io. That stands for input output, for those of you who are still playing at home with all the Matrix verbiage. Io is essentially a kind of sci-fi utopia, and there are some machines who’ve lived there with them, because I guess when Neo went to the Machine City and faced Smith, there was some sort of reformation that happened there as well.
Let Her Choose
At the end of the day they all decide, we’ve got to go back in. All they’ve got to do is save Trinity, because Neo’s going to do it no matter what. They set this whole stage like somehow he’s not going to walk right in and tell them to go F themselves.
Neo shows up and tells NPH, look, I want her to have the opportunity to choose. If she chooses to leave, we leave. If she chooses to stay, we stay. And Neil Patrick Harris is like, okay, let’s do it. I’ll roll the dice. I think I know you humans well enough. Super cocky.
She shows up, and of course NPH pulls the kids in and the husband in. It’s funny, later on, after Carrie-Anne Moss wakes up, she punches him in the mouth and is like, that’s for using children. How dare you. Because the Analyst implies several times that he knows how to control women. A little bit of misogyny from our Matrix computers. Our programs, if you will.
A Swan Song, and the Part I’d Skip To
It’s a wonderful installment. Everyone seems to be implying that this movie changes the rules and there’ll be all kinds of Matrix stuff. I don’t know. I feel like it was just a swan song. Great example: I don’t think old Captain America from the 1993 movie is going to suddenly show up in the next Captain America anything.
I enjoyed it. I’ll probably watch it again. But I feel like it took too long to get where it was going. The minute Spider-Man: No Way Home is available on Disney Plus, I’ll probably rewatch it almost as many times as I’ve seen Endgame or Infinity War, which is a lot. They’re infinitely rewatchable. There’s a part of this that’s rewatchable, but I’ll always jump right to that part. I think I skip over everything until they get him out. Once they get him out, the story starts to move. I can take or leave the Io city stuff with Jada Pinkett.
It was good. It wasn’t great. It didn’t break any ground. It didn’t live up to the other ones in terms of groundbreaking design and technology.
And I’ve got one criticism. The martial arts was lacking in this one. It felt like what you’d see in any basic level martial arts movie or fight movie. Trinity and Neo never really pick up guns or weapons either. They’re always hand to hand. I get it, guys, it’s so peaceful, they can handle everything. They’re either using force fields or dodging bullets. There was that really incredible set piece where they jump off the building, and apparently they really did do that, so that’s kind of awesome.
The Verdict
The Matrix Resurrections lands at a 6 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I was on IMDb, and IMDb currently has it at a six out of ten. Funny enough, before I saw that rating, I’d also rated it a six out of ten. It’s not a bad movie.
If you have HBO Max, you should totally watch it. I want to see it in theaters just to get that experience, but I don’t think you have to. It didn’t feel like a theater movie, whereas Spider-Man: No Way Home absolutely felt like a theater movie.
There you go. Now you know, and knowing’s half the battle, and you’re halfway to being the know-it-all that I know you can be.
Give me your two cents on The Matrix Resurrections. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
