Being part of "The Matrix" will no doubt bring in box-office dollars and subscribers to HBO Max where it is also playing, but the nearly two and a half hour long adventure didn't benefit me from its namesake history. It sets the preceding flicks as a video game called "The Matrix," where Tom Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is a "world famous designer" but after a failed suicide attempt, is popping pills, you can guess the color, at the prescription of his therapist, played by Neil Patrick Harris. Tom, also known as Neo, does indeed return to the Matrix, but lemme just stop right there- I could go deeper into the plot, but that would expose potential spoilers like character's true motivations and I'm just not that kind of critic. I'm also not the kind of critic who gets paid but hey, who asked?
"Resurrections" does a decent job at filling in some of the blanks a first-timer to the series might wonder, as Tom/Neo also needs a refresher on how it all works. I didn't know who Tiffany/Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) was, but then the film told me plainly. It's a narrative as elegant as Mr. Reeves general performance (which consists of him looking dazed and drunk most of the time), but it functions to remind the general audience of what happened, what, like twenty or so years ago.
Technology has come a long ways since "bullet time" revolutionized action movies, and as an action movie, "The Matrix Resurrections" fails. There isn't any "new" gimmick like bullet time to hold our attention, so what we get rather rudimentary hand-to-hand fights. We get a couple actually, but its all things we've seen before, just a basic "punch" here and a "kick" there. You know you're in trouble when one of the longest fight sequences takes place in a decrepit warehouse. Oh, someone got thrown into a decaying wall, how "exciting."
But in addition to the "action" genre, this is also science fiction, or at least that's what its Wikipedia page tells me. Since I'm not a scientist, I'm not sure how "scientific" anything onscreen really is, but it did make sense, even to a non-scientist dummy like me, so it has that going for it. What it doesn't succeed at is world-building: outside of the Matrix, it looks like any random city in America. And once we get inside, it becomes a mess of murky colors and indiscriminate shapes that are supposed to be machines, ships, or places. There wasn't a moment that went by that I found myself in awe, instead the visuals reminded me about how good "Star Wars" is at just that.
Perhaps I was supposed to wonder at the logic it jumps through, and I will admit, it did have me guessing pretty consistently (Like, why do the blue and red pills look like "gel-caps" in flashback scenes but now look like capsules?) But it feels artificially complicated, an opaque delivery of what boils down to two rescue missions, first Neo and then Trinity, so what's the point? Is the mythology a warning about the "metaverse" tech companies today preach about? I'd rather watch "Ready Player One." I don't mind to be asked questions a film doesn't have answers to, but "Matrix 4" barely has questions, and it's heritage's once technical prowess is in desperate need of a firmware update.
