Matrix Resurrections and The Stories We Tell Ourselves
- Glendon Frank
- Feb 14, 2022
- 9 min read
I love stories.
Everything we do and perceive, we do it best through narrative. Some people consider this a flaw, consider it some great failing of the human experience, as if the goal is to maintain total dispassionate objectivity at all times. But I love it. I love that the arts make up such a crucial part of the way we interact with one another. I love the way narrative manages to make reality somehow more real. There’s a barrenness to reality that can be cold, uncaring. However, a story can make that reality approachable. Understandable. Digestible. And can cover all the beautiful intricacies of that reality in a way that starting cold hard facts cannot.
More than I love stories, I love stories that understand that inherent nature of storytelling. I wrote earlier this year about The Green Knight, one of my favourite movies from 2021, which was all about storytelling. How do we use stories to ingratiate ourselves to one another? How do we narrativize ourselves through our stories? Very cool stuff. I’ve talked at length about The Last Jedi, a movie that is, among other things, about what Star Wars means, the impact those stories have had. While I’d hardly want every movie to be a metanarrative about storytelling, I can’t deny that when those movies do come around, I’m always spellbound. Stories are vital, important, and exciting, and anyone who can tap into why we depend so much on storytelling is someone worthy of listening to.
It's been a rough time. I’ve been angry a lot over the past month. Or maybe just the past two weeks. Or maybe just the past two years. It’s not that I’ve been irrational; there’s a lot to be angry about. A lot of people are angry about a lot of things, and a lot of people are angry about the same things for different reasons and from different angles. So, I’ve had trouble writing – not for a lack of ideas. I’ve had plenty of ideas! But right now, maybe more for myself than anyone else, I’ve felt the need to write some positivity in the world. Try as I might, I can’t find a lot of positives to write about. Since Joss Whedon’s Variety article I’ve really felt the need to write about my shifting relationship with him and toxic creators at large, the way we often need to re-evaluate authors and their works over time. But I don’t have it in me to write about how a creator I once respected is a narcissistic abuser who has hurt most if not all of the people he’s worked with. I’ve also been very pent up about the Disney+ streaming model recently and the ways it’s felt increasingly like storytelling poison. The Book of Boba Fett was actively hard to watch. But it gives me no joy to write about how the biggest media corporation of our time is passively hurting art while most people are content to eat it up, myself included. Every once and a while someone accuses me of being a “snobby critic” which is deeply funny to me because most of the time I broadly like things, and I don’t have a lot of desire to spend all my time talking about why things are bad. But in times like these, it’s hard to think of much else.
I get the sense that Lana Wachowski is in a similar place.
The Wachowskis are easily some of the most passionate and earnest directors of our time. Everything they create, good or bad, is filled with their personal touch. Nothing reveals this more than the Matrix trilogy (remember when everything had to be done in trilogies? Simpler times). The Matrix movies are all gushing with theme and passion, even, possibly, to their own detriment. Now, I don’t have a deep personal history with these movies. A friend tried to get me to watch the first one as a kid; I think we got to the Neo and Morpheus fight when the VHS crapped out. Thoroughly overwhelmed with everything that had already happened, I didn’t make an attempt to return to The Matrix until a few years ago. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? The Matrix is, frankly, a perfect movie. The metaphors it's dealing with are potent just as relevant today as they were twenty years ago. The Wachowskis’ approach to action fundamentally changed an entire generation of filmmaking. How many movies can you say that about? And then they made two more.
The Matrix sequels long had a reputation for degrading the name of the franchise. Only in the past couple of years have I heard other takes on them, insisting that while they weren’t on the level of perfection that the first one is, they’re still worthy flicks in their own right. After all, you don’t get movies quite as ambitious as anything the Wachowski’s make. I finally watched them in the past couple of weeks, and wow, yeah. I genuinely loved Reloaded – it’s structurally a mess, but it’s also just two hours of people philosophizing about cause and effect, choice and free will, and then beating each other up in the coolest ways imaginable. It’s hard to be sour on a movie where I’m asking, “how did they make that?” every five minutes. Revolutions was a little harder to watch. A 30-minute battle scene without a single main character in it? A movie that takes place almost entirely in the real world, and not the titular Matrix? The climactic end stuff works a lot more, but as much as I adore Hugo Weaving doing the most with that performance, there’s only so much you can watch of him and Keanu Reaves fighting while everything is turned up to 11. And, maybe it was just my mood going into the movie, but something about the finale just fundamentally didn’t connect with me. One of our main characters dies on the way to the finale, and another sacrifices himself for the dream of peace. It all works thematically, but something about it felt hollow. Humanity has won out, but at what cost?
Enter The Matrix Resurrections. Suddenly, Neo is alive, working as a game programmer best known for his hit video game trilogy – The Matrix. Except Warner Bros is now asking him to make a fourth game, to continue the story he finished and was done with. The story he poured so much of himself into has now been taken from him by the industry and is to be turned into a corporate product. He has to put up with listening to all the people in his company speculating on what The Matrix meant while he feels voiceless. Returning to The Matrix is borderline traumatizing, driving Neo to therapy as he gets worsening flashes and hallucinations of another life. A hauntingly familiar woman named Tiffany stops him for coffee one day. She’s played his game and found some comfort in it. She asks him what it’s like to be a creator. “Did you base your main character on yourself?”
It doesn’t take long to realize Resurrections is more than just another soft reboot. This isn’t a scrappy young director inheriting an older franchise and taking a new spin on it. Rather, this is Lana Wachowski, deeply familiar with her own work, returning to the work that made her a name. A work that is incredibly personal, but that has been reinterpreted and rebranded for twenty years. “That’s what the Matrix does,” one character says, speaking of the titular lotus-eater simulation. “It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us.” The idea of the Matrix from the original movies has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In Resurrections it takes the form of Lana’s relationship with the industry, puppeting the skeleton of her work in order to sell a few copies. In one way it’s a movie about parasitic fandoms. The antagonists use Neo’s presence for their own gain, exploiting The Matrix IP for power and profit, while everyone – Neo included – suffers.
The metatext is an interwoven conversation about humanity’s relationship with stories. Resurrections is ever-critical of the cash cow approach to modern franchises. “We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told,” says Jonathon Groff’s character, “just with different names. Different faces.” It really says something that, despite how much Resurrections borrows heavily from the imagery of the original trilogy, it still feels refreshingly new. I couldn’t help but think of The Force Awakens while watching it; where the new Star Wars trilogy found themselves resetting the story world to a familiar ground zero, Resurrections feels like a surprisingly natural extension of where we were left in Revolutions. The moments where it does borrow from familiar iconography feel less like indulging in nostalgia as much as they feel like intentional moments of commentary. The Matrix has always been about humans working for freedom within systems of control, and Resurrections’ ability to maintain its freshness despite the “reboot” format says a lot about Lana’s dedication. And while the action isn’t quite as insane as it was in the original Matrix (and let’s be honest, that’s a very high bar) it still looks more kinetic and innovative than any other action movie out right now. All I want in these movies is to be in that place of “how did they make this? How did they think of this?” and Resurrections delivers in spades. But as much as it is a technical marvel and a pointed critique of the industry, that core affection for the characters outshines all else. Resurrections is a movie about the power of love, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many other directors working today who could tell such a sentimental story with this much sincerity.
Stories can sedate, but they have just as much power to motivate. The most prominent new character is a woman named Bugs (played by Jessica Henwick) who strongly believes in the legends of Neo, the saviour who sacrificed himself for peace. Seeing Neo awoke her to the real world, gave her something to fight for. The memory and influence of Neo motivates all that she does. One of Bugs’ crewmates, Lexy, speaks about how she was inspired by Trinity. These stories mean something. They made people feel seen, they gave people hope and vision. Bugs and her group are the modern generation, all of those whose lives have been transformed by Lana’s movies. While some have used and abused the text, others have learned and grown from it. In their hands, stories become powerful. They inspire, they revolutionize. Not merely entertainment, they can hold words of life for the people who need it the most. While Lana is critical of the ways her work has been taken from her, she is more than happy to acknowledge and appreciate those who have found meaning in it.
So, why return to The Matrix? To send a message to her critics? To write a love letter to her fans? Or, is it simply for herself? In an interview, Lana Wachowski has talked about how she had every intention to leave The Matrix behind, but the death of her parents brought her back to the world of her creation. Stories are, inevitably, things we have some control over. And in a time when everything is coming apart, why not create something good? Why not return to a bittersweet story and give it the happy ending it deserves? Ultimately, the stories we write, we write for ourselves. The original trilogy concludes with Neo’s salvific death, but twenty years later, we finally have his heroic resurrection. It feels, in a way, like the natural continuation of the trilogy. Where Revolutions felt bogged down by its grand scope, Resurrections is deeply intimate and human. Even in the dazzling set-pieces, everything is grounded by Neo. This franchise has always been centrally about Neo and Trinity’s love story. While that love was generally high-soaring and perhaps a little underwritten, in this final installment it finally finds its roots not in grand acts of sacrifice but in intimate moments of conversation and reconciliation. Where the original trilogy was grappling with questions of human agency and will, Resurrections is able to be more focused on these two people, letting them fight for a “happily ever after.”
Resurrections was deeply cathartic in a year without many happy endings in sight. This year sucked, a lot, and when uncertainty is the name of the game it’s so cool to have a movie like this that works so hard for a definitive happy ending. I get the desire to go back in a time like this and create something genuinely good, to give your characters the catharsis and release that’s simply not possible in reality. Where the real world can be cold and brutal, stories can be colourful and bring life. They inspire and empower, giving hope when things seem hopeless. The story of Neo is a spark of hope for Bugs and her crew, and it’s one for the audience as well. To see a creator have this much power over her story in a time where everything is motivated by long-term franchise potential is just very cool.
There’s a lot that went over my head with this movie, and I don’t think I could give you a scene-by-scene run down if I tried. But the essence of it won me over more than any movie I saw this year. It quickly rocketed up into my top 3 of 2021, if it hasn’t already secured itself as my #1. I just adore that we can still occasionally get ambitious passion projects like this every once and a while. And it feels rare to see something this sincerely filled with joy and hope. I teared up more than a few times in this one, it just really did it for me. We should be writing more stories about how love and storytelling are important and can save the world! That sounds cool and better than a lot of what we’re currently making! I’m sure I will have a lot more thoughts as I digest this thing more, and after I feel comfortable writing a spoiler-filled reflection.
At the same time, it’s one of those rare movies that defies the act of interpretation, due to how deeply personal it is. In the end, as it has always been, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
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