Why The Matrix Resurrections reviews are so mixed. Directed by Lana Wachowski from a screenplay by her, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon, The Matrix Resurrections is the fourth installment in the The Matrix franchise. As its title suggests, it resurrects Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) for another adventure in the virtual reality world. While some critics have praised the sequel for its ambition and romance, others weren’t so keen about its lack of originality.
The Matrix Resurrections sees Neo back as Thomas Anderson, a video game developer who came up with The Matrix and its sequel games, all of which were a big hit for parent company Deus Ex Machina. However, he senses something’s not right — though his therapist tries to convince him otherwise — and his feelings are validated when Bugs, a captain who escaped the Matrix thanks to seeing Neo’s true form, rescues him from his alternate reality. Neo joins the fight in freeing other humans trapped within the Matrix, including Trinity, while he also learns how and why he was brought back to life following the ending of The Matrix Revolutions.
Overall, the reviews for The Matrix Resurrections have been fairly mixed. The sequel maintains a 68% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but there has been a lot of criticism of the film having too much nostalgia and parts that feel far too familiar. Even the meta commentary has been criticized by some as being a replacement for a deeper analysis of the franchise overall. The critical reception also includes discussion of the film’s messy plot and overall lack of innovative ideas and well-choreographed action sequences. Here are some of the negative reviews for The Matrix Resurrections.
The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t even have the excuse of narrative exigency to hide behind. There is literally no reason for it to exist, a point that is incessantly hammered home by a sophomoric screenplay that mistakes self-referentiality for sophistication and actually includes the line, “Our beloved parent company, Warner Bros, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
Where Resurrections really disappoints is in the staging of the action. The Hong Kong-influenced long shots that made The Matrix so revolutionary are all but absent, replaced by rapid cuts that render the fight choreography less legible than in previous installments. And although there are a few giddy moments of sci-fi mayhem, the set pieces—and there are many—never reach heights as outrageous or as thrilling as the highway chase sequence in The Matrix Reloaded.
But more often the action just feels overly familiar. Indeed, nearly everything in this movie—which fittingly features a black cat named Deja Vu—exudes a sense of been there, done that. This includes both the returning performers (it’s safe to say that Reeves has found no further depth to wring out of this reluctant Messiah figure) but most troublingly, the newcomers too.
These particular reviews suggest the critics feel the potential in The Matrix Resurrections is lost. There’s too much a sense of deja vu in the action, storyline, and themes. To be sure, The Matrix Resurrections reckons with its own history, the idea of sequels and what the audience might want to see when returning to the world of the Matrix and its characters. For many other critics, the elements of the film work together, with praise given to Wachowski for bringing self-awareness and meta commentary to the story while also pondering its own existence. For those who gave the sequel a fresh score, they felt the action, romance, and story beats helped offer a fresh perspective on an older franchise. Here are some of the positive reviews of The Matrix Resurrections.
In many respects, The Matrix Resurrections does what other franchise sequels fail to do — tell a story about where the characters are now and where they’re ultimately going. As a story about Neo and Trinity, the fourth Matrix installment works, all while attempting to reference the past and move forward at the same time.
The world has changed dramatically since Neo first bent out of the way of incoming bullets, and yet The Matrix Resurrections easily makes a case for its own existence. After decades of audiences attempting to slot the franchise into one category of interpretation or another, the film argues against any imagined binary to show that beauty is found between such extremes. Wachowski builds on what of the greatest and most singular aspects of the original trilogy: its queerness.
This is a surprisingly playful, lighthearted film with a meta take on the idea of revisiting/rebooting a beloved franchise with a complicated cultural legacy. That makes "Resurrections" a wickedly entertaining, delightfully romantic addition to the "Matrix" canon – one that may prove divisive for those looking for a hardcore action flick, but will offer plenty of rewards for those willing to open their minds to a new kind of blockbuster.
Best of all, its emphasis on the romance between Neo and Trinity allows “Resurrections” to become a devastatingly sincere movie about how love is the best weapon we have to make sense of a world that fills our heads with the white noise of war and conflict on a forever loop.
Critics may be split overall on the appeal of The Matrix Resurrections, but that’s probably why it may be worth the watch. Everyone seems to have come out of the film with a different idea about what makes Wachowski’s film good or bad, with questions surrounding whether a sequel to a franchise that first began over two decades ago was actually needed. Regardless, however, The Matrix Resurrections does have a lot of positive elements that make it worthwhile for fans of the franchise. The film's dose of nostalgia are intermingled with new concepts to dissect and think about. It was never going to be a film everyone loved, but there seems to be enough within the story for viewers to, at the very least, be entertained for a couple of hours.