The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
★★ — The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
There's a version of this film that could've genuinely shaken things up. Think about where The Matrix Revolutions left things: Neo apparently freed, the war seemingly won, yet still capable of seeing and affecting the Matrix from the outside. That's a genuinely fascinating loose thread. It practically screams that something deeper is going on, that the rabbit hole doesn't stop where everyone thinks it does. A fourth film that grabbed that idea by the collar and ran with it, a Neo who discovers he was never truly free, a Matrix more insidious and layered than anything we've seen before, could have opened up a whole new philosophical trilogy. The bones were right there.
Instead, what we actually got is one of the most frustrating wastes of potential I've sat through in years.
The Matrix Resurrections isn't a bad film in the way that a cheap, careless film is bad. It's bad in a more dispiriting way. It's self-satisfied. It spends so much of its runtime winking at the audience, practically nudging you in the ribs going "see what we're doing here?", that it forgets to actually do anything. There's a stretch in the first act that's almost uncomfortably meta, the film essentially critiquing itself and the franchise before you've even had a chance to settle into your seat. I get what Lana Wachowski was going for. I genuinely do. But self-awareness only works as a shield if there's something worthwhile behind it, and here, there really isn't.
The plot holes are enormous. I don't mean the enjoyable kind of gaps you spend time puzzling over on the drive home. I mean the kind that suggest the story simply hasn't been thought through. The stakes never feel real. There's no tension worth speaking of. And the whole thing carries this weirdly smug vibe, like the film is too cool to fully commit to being what it needs to be: a proper, gripping, ideas-driven science fiction film.
The characters don't help. Trinity is back, which should feel momentous, and there are brief flickers where it does. But the new Morpheus left me cold. He's not a bad performance exactly, just a completely different character wearing a familiar name, and the film never convincingly bridges that gap. The new additions around him are almost entirely forgettable. I couldn't tell you much about any of them a week after watching. Even Keanu Reeves, who can carry this kind of thing in his sleep, looks genuinely uncertain for much of the runtime, like he's searching for the version of this film that made sense on paper.
What really stings is how much it leans on the universe established in the original 1999 film. So much of Resurrections is essentially a highlights reel, recycled imagery and callbacks and moments designed to trigger a warm response in anyone who grew up on the original. That's not storytelling. That's nostalgia bait dressed up in a trench coat. And when you consider how boldly original that first film was, how it didn't lean on anything, how it just threw you headfirst into something utterly new, the contrast is pretty damning.
I've thought about it a lot since, probably more than it deserves, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: this film is afraid. Afraid to let go of what people love, afraid to genuinely challenge its audience, afraid to be weird and uncomfortable in the way the best science fiction is. The Matrix Reloaded got a lot of grief at the time, and some of it was fair, but at least it was swinging for something. Resurrections mostly just swings for recognition.
Two stars. A painfully missed opportunity, and I mean that in the most literal sense. The opportunity was right there, staring it in the face, and it looked away.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2025-04-06
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Lana Wachowski: The Matrix Revolutions (2003) · The Matrix Reloaded (2003) · The Matrix (1999)
More with Keanu Reeves: The Matrix Revolutions (2003) · The Matrix Reloaded (2003) · The Matrix (1999)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
