Film Review: Keanu Reeves reckons with reality once more in The Matrix: Resurrections
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: Resurrections
★★★★☆
Was The Matrix only ever a game? As The Matrix Resurrections (15A) opens, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) believes the answer to that question can only be yes, because Anderson is the award-winning computer game designer whose greatest success was ‘The Matrix’, which he designed some decades earlier.
But Anderson is struggling to cope with reality, and medicating heavily with blue pills as he tries to quell the growing suspicion that all is not what it seems.
Meanwhile, the viewer already knows that a very different world lies behind Anderson’s reality, in which Bugs (Jessica Henwick) is being pursued by Agent Smith (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who swiftly reveals himself to be a digital version of Morpheus, the sage who is seeking Neo, aka The One who will free humanity’s mind...
Written by David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon, and directed by Lana Wachowski, The Matrix Resurrections sounds pretty convoluted on paper, but – providing you’ve seen the original Matrix (1999) – is pretty easy to follow on the big screen.
The development of a new computer game, ‘Matrix IV’, allows the makers to slip in quite a bit of sly exposition, whilst also poking fun at the idea of unnecessary sequels by deconstructing the many theories that try to explain what The Matrix was all about.
A heavily bearded Keanu Reeves is enjoyably dazed and confused as the frazzled, futuristic messiah, and he gets solid support from Carrie-Ann Moss, who reprises her role as Trinity, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the conflicted, dual-identity Morpheus-Agent Smith.
The visuals are nowhere as revolutionary as they once were, of course; even so, The Matrix Resurrections is the best the franchise has offered since its original outing. (cinema release)
