Let's get this part out of the way: this movie isn't good. Almost every new character is annoying. The action doesn't do anything groundbreaking nor is it very exciting. There was no way that this movie was going to be as good as the first, even though it is better than Reloaded and Revolution.
Let's start with the bad.
Bugs, a new character introduced by this film into the Matrix universe, is the worst character in any Matrix movie. The blue haired captain is the equivalent of a self-insert character in a fanfiction about The Matrix - a Mary Sue.
But it's worse than that because Bugs was written by the original creator - so what she really represents is what Lana Wachowski thinks her biggest fans are and wanted to give them representation.
There's even a part near the end of the film where the new Oracle, Sati, tells Bugs that her brain is the closest to Trinity's. Why? They never say. It's not even all that clear how this fact serves the story. Basically, Bugs feels like a way for Lana Wachowski to give the blue hairs the feeling that they are as badass as Trinity and that this movie is for them. The film is decidedly NOT for them, but more on that later.
Even with these problems, I can't completely dismiss this movie as terrible.
SPOILER WARNING
I have long complained that one of the problems with reboots and sequels is that they always undermine the stories and character arcs of the originals in monumental ways. Take Force Awakens: Han went back to being a selfish smuggler, Luke became a bitter old man disconnected, Leia was still a resistance general, and the Empire was back bigger and badder than ever with a fresh coat of paint (how did the Empire rebuild itself to this level of power? We're never told).
Nothing that happened in the original movies mattered according to the Disney Sequels.
I have to give credit to Resurrections for not doing that. The war between the humans and the machines is still over. There is a tenuous peace. It's not perfect, but what peace is? Some machines and programs even work side by side with the humans.
Trinity and Neo's sacrifices at the end of Revolution still matter 60 years later.
For those worried that this movie was going to "reclaim the Red Pill" from the Right (which was the plan, according to one of the writers) - fear not, it doesn't happen. So, I'm going to go ahead and say that this dude either lying in that interview or they tried and failed spectacularly in their efforts to recontextualize what the Red Pill has become to mean in Right-Wing culture.
Actually, this movie is, somehow, even more based than the first - no that's NOT an exaggeration.
There are so many New Right dog-whistles and so much right-wing subtext that, if I didn't know better, I would say that Lana Wachowskis seems like she religiously listens to YOUR WELCOME, the uniquely New-Right podcast hosted by Michael Malice.
Who knows, maybe she does?
The trailers revealed that on top of Neo, Trinity, and a new Morpheus being back, Agent Smith has returned as well. The trailers pointed at the idea that he was going to be the villain again, but it was a trick.
The real villain of the film is Neo's cat owning therapist, who wears translucent blue framed glasses and multi-colored striped socks - played admirably by the openly gay Neil Patrick Harris (The Smurfs 2).
This therapist, named "The Analyst", over medicates Neo with blue pills and insists that everything he's experienced, all the conspiracies he uncovered, the truths he learned about the world, were all figments of his imagination. The blue pills this "expert" gives Neo are designed to keep him in a lethargic loop of stagnation - part of Neo's daily routine while trapped in the matrix includes him running in place on a treadmill.
Let me re-iterate, the villain of this film is a gay therapist that overdoses Neo on SSRIs!
It's not until Morpheus finds him again and gives him the Red Pill once more that Neo can finally break free of his therapist. Once again, the Red Pill frees Neo from the propaganda, toxins and lies fed to him by progressive institutions.
It is revealed that The Analyst is the successor to the Architect. The Analyst is a program that designed a new and improved Matrix that succeeds in generating energy beyond that of the one previously designed be the Architect. As explained by the Analyst, the Architect was "too concerned with facts and numbers", whereas The Analyst knows that the real way to keep the blue pilled humans in line is to give them an emotional narrative they will believe.
That's his role in The Matrix - to create and sell lies to control people by their emotions.
This new version of the Matrix has also replaced the Agents. Instead of white men with brown hair in black suits, the Analyst is able to activate any random NPC within his Matrix and turn them into a bot that will follow his every command. The Analyst calls this army of literal blue-pilled NPC sleeper agents, The Swarm and even smugly brags about how much fun it is to activate The Swarm (a cancel mob) to crush his opposition.
The agents were a terrifying foe because they could take over the body of a blue pilled human. The Swarm is magnitudes worse because there are thousands, if not millions, of people in the world with no mind of their own. What the analyst has built is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic army of unquestioning minions who, by the end of the film, are throwing themselves out of 10 story windows to defend the Analyst's blue pill narrative.
This is not an exaggeration, this really happens in the film.
We learn that The Analyst had Neo and Trinity resurrected, kept them close to each other, but gave them new identities to prevent them from actually reuniting. The Analyst tells us that he originally believed that only Neo needed to be resurrected - but that his experiments to use Neo to hyper-power his new Matrix failed until he reunited him with Trinity.
Neo cannot be The One without the love of his life, his soulmate - their relationship and love is the cause of the Anomaly.
The Analyst gets upset when Trinity starts to remember her past and says "women used to be so easy to control" which on the surface seems like a conservative message. But over the past several years, how many articles have been published about how white women vote the wrong way in the corporate press?
Point of fact, Neo cannot fly in this film (why, we are not told). Instead, it is Trinity who takes to the skies to save her beau during the climatic action sequence of the film - but she could only fly because she has her man by her side.
This is not an exaggeration - the love between two cis-heterosexuals in a traditional, monogamous, relationship is the strongest force in the film and what ultimately saves the world.
And that's not where the New Right metatext ends.
Let's talk about Agent Smith, long cited as the pinnacle of an extremist, racist, fascist, right-wing boogey-man. We learn that The Analyst also resurrects Agent Smith, gives him a new identity and tethers him to Neo - in effort to keep and eye on him. When Neo is freed by the red pill, so is Agent Smith, who quickly fosters a desire to bring back the old Matrix and believes he must murder Neo in order to bring his plan to fruition.
The two battle, Agent Smith fucks Neo up, but the battle ends in a stalemate and Agent Smith beings to realize that The Analyst, with his swarms, his militarized police, and his FBI agents, is a bigger threat (no, this is not an exaggeration - the progressive villain of the film uses the power of the state to crush his opposition).
Agent Smith still wants the old Matrix back, but he and Neo put their differences aside to fight the Analyst together in "A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to [the Analyst], which they perceive to be...intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony."
It takes the extremist Agent Smith, teaming up with normies, Neo and Trinity, to defeat progressive Analyst and free the NPCs from their blue-pilled prison cells.
Wild.
When considering some of the contextual elements of the film - the Left has for years lamented the loss of the term "red pill". They've invented interpretations and tried to retcon the Matrix to take it back. These left wing interpretations are dismissed as jokes in the beginning of the film. Ouch.
Despite contentions from the writers that the dystopian costumes and wild hair designs mean that "The Matrix is a trans metaphor!" there are ZERO explicitly trans or non-binary characters in this film. While watching this film, the absence of any non-cis characters was noticeable to the point that it felt like an intentional repudiation of the "trans metaphor interpretation" and a reinforcement of the film's right wing messaging.
Every few months, another tweet goes viral from someone who says "Do they [right wingers] realize the Red Pill was invented by trans women?"
We do know. We always knew. It's never mattered.
The term has been instrumental in getting us to where we are now. And we thank the Wachowskis endlessly for it.
You can see the wishes turn to complaints from the activist left online. They demanded Matrix Resurrections take the phrase back.
To keep us from ever using it again. But if we learned anything from this movie, the Red Pill will never be theirs.
In fact, it was never theirs to begin with.
Cinematography: Pretty good. Has too much of the modern assembly line filmmaking in it.
Performances: No one is great, but most of the new actors are terrible.
Score: Its the original's score but updated. Good, obnoxious at parts.
Length: About an hour too long. Have I mentioned that I hate all the new characters yet? Cut all of them out.
Final Rating: 5/10
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