🤖 Lint: Fine. I’ll condense, sharpen, and alchemize this into something that sounds intentional instead of like an irritable person yelling at a movie for hours. Here’s the sublimated version. Same ideas, less sprawl, more bite.
The Matrix Resurrections is a bad movie with good ideas, which is the most Matrix sequel thing it could possibly be. I had more fun critiquing it than watching it, which still counts as entertainment.
At heart, the film is doing four things at once: satirizing art under capitalism, rebooting itself, continuing the story of the machine war, and centering everything on the love story of Neo and Trinity. None of these are wrong choices. The problem is that the film insists on explaining its cleverness before it earns it.
The opening gesture is strong. Thomas Anderson is now a game developer, his greatest trauma repackaged as a wildly successful franchise called The Matrix. That is genuinely inspired. It adds an extra layer of unreality that could have extended the existential questions of the original trilogy. The Matrix isn’t just a system anymore, it’s content. Trauma turned into IP. That’s a great place to start.
Unfortunately, the movie immediately panics and spends an eternity congratulating itself for being self-aware. We get extended scenes of people dunking on reboots, Warner Bros, franchises, and the soullessness of capitalism. Yes. We know. You don’t have to keep shaking the audience by the collar yelling “DO YOU GET IT.” The earlier Matrix films overexplained philosophy after the spectacle. Resurrections overexplains before anything interesting happens.
What’s especially frustrating is how uninterested the film is in its own best idea. The Matrix-as-a-game never really matters. It’s a setup, not a concept. There’s no exploration of simulations inside simulations, no meaningful consequence to the idea that Neo has already sublimated the truth into art. Other franchises have pushed this terrain further, even accidentally. Nolan beat them to it in blockbuster form. Even a dumb microtransaction joke would have done more thematic work than what we got.
Then there’s the Analyst, which is where the film almost locks in. Naming the villain “the Analyst” instead of a therapist is not an accident, and it’s one of the smartest choices in the movie. This is explicitly Freudian territory. Sublimation, repression, desire as a power source. Neil Patrick Harris plays him as a smug, gaslighting authority figure who insists reality is a pathology. It’s stylish, creepy, and completely against type for Matrix villains, which makes it work.
The idea that Neo and Trinity produce more energy through lack is excellent. Keeping them close but never together is both emotionally cruel and thematically sharp. Desire as a battery. Capitalism perfected. This is where the film should have slowed down and trusted itself.
Instead, it rushes again. Like so many of its ideas, the Analyst’s philosophy is introduced, gestured at, and then abandoned before it can actually land. It’s all implication, no payoff. The movie feels like it was designed to frustrate its own audience on purpose, which is arguably very meta and also deeply annoying.
The new city and allies are fine, which is honestly a compliment. They don’t clog the film or demand lore lectures. They exist, they help, they move on. Good restraint. Rare restraint.
Smith, on the other hand, does not need to be here. The recast performance is solid and the Joker-tech-bro angle is amusing, but his presence feels contractual rather than necessary. His monologue about being bound to Neo is conceptually sound, but dramatically inert. He should have been saved for a later installment.
The rescue plot between Neo and Trinity is the emotional core, and it works entirely because of the actors. Their scenes are quiet, restrained, and heavy with longing. They say almost nothing and communicate everything. Whether that’s character development or just age and experience showing through doesn’t matter. It’s the best part of the movie.
Action-wise, Neo is basically retired. He gets one elegant sparring scene and then spends the rest of the film doing the same bullet-stopping move on loop. It’s iconic, sure, but repetition turns it into a screensaver. Trinity, meanwhile, is fantastic in combat. If the intent was to pass the mantle to her, the film needed to commit earlier and harder. Making her awakening the final twist feels timid, like the movie is afraid of its own conclusion.
That’s the throughline problem here. Resurrections is full of ideas it believes in but doesn’t trust. It gestures, winks, explains, and retreats. It wants credit for awareness without doing the harder work of exploration. The result is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to say about art, control, desire, and legacy, and then refuses to sit with any of it long enough to matter.
Which is tragic, because buried underneath the mess is a genuinely sharp, contemporary Matrix film trying to claw its way out.