[What the film has to say about the exploitative nature of sequels
is less interesting than how it positions its male lead.]
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THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS” IS A CRUCIAL KEANU REEVES MOVIE  
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Alex Pappademas
December 30, 2021
The New Yorker
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_ What the film has to say about the exploitative nature of sequels
is less interesting than how it positions its male lead. _

“Resurrections” speaks to fundamental Reevesian themes, chiefly
the actor’s reluctance to participate in his own exploitation.,
Courtesy Warner Bros.

 

In “The Matrix,” from 1999, Keanu Reeves
[[link removed]] plays Thomas Anderson,
who pops a mysterious red pill proffered by an equally mysterious
stranger and promptly discovers that his so-called life as an
alienated nineteen-nineties hacker with a cubicle-farm day job has, in
fact, been a computer-generated dream, designed—I swear I’m going
to get all this into a single sentence—to keep Anderson from
realizing that he’s actually Neo, a kung-fu messiah destined to save
a post-apocalyptic earth’s last living humans from a race of
sentient machines who’ve hunted mankind to near-extinction. Neo
spends the rest of the film and its two sequels bouncing back and
forth between the simulated world, where he’s a leather-clad
superhero increasingly unbound by physical laws, and the bleak real
world, laid to waste by humanity’s long war with artificial
intelligence. Like “Star Wars” before it, “The Matrix” was
fundamentally recombinant, unprecedented in its joyful derivativeness.
Practically every cool visual or narrative thing about it came from
some other mythic or pop-cultural source, from scripture to anime.
And, like “Star Wars,” it quickly became a pop-cultural myth unto
itself, and a primary source to be stolen _from_.

Chances are you’re already aware of the original trilogy’s legacy,
even if you’ve somehow avoided the films themselves. “The
Matrix” is also like “Star Wars” in that we can’t avoid
knowing about it, because we now live in a world that it helped shape.
The scene in the first film where Neo chooses the red pill’s rude
awakening over a blue pill that will return him to obliviousness now
looks like a turning point in the history of American thought,
although “thought” may not be exactly the right word. Online
pickup artists and other message-board misogynists were the first
subculture to appropriate the notion of the red pill; if you described
yourself as “red-pilled,” it meant you’d accepted the supposed
reality that the spread of feminism had rendered society anti-male.
The concept propagated across the Internet, taken up by white
supremacists and militant gamers alike; by the Trump years, being
“red-pilled” had come to connote just about any epiphany leading
to a rightward political tilt on the part of the pill-taker.

That’s funny, of course, because from the vantage point of 2021,
it’s difficult to see “The Matrix” as anything but a wild
leftist provocation draped in a shiny sci-fi trenchcoat—a film
written and directed by two trans women, Lana and Lilly Wachowski,
about how it’s sometimes necessary to kickbox the cops, whether on
the street or inside one’s own head. Yet the specific ideological
valence of “The Matrix” has stopped no one, including people on
the other end of the political spectrum, from using the idea of the
red pill to mean whatever they want it to mean. It’s just too
rhetorically useful a concept to leave alone. On May 17, 2020, the
entrepreneur Elon Musk [[link removed]],
reportedly the world’s richest man, tweeted
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“Take the red pill,” in what was interpreted as either a veiled
protest of the pandemic-era stay-at-home orders that had shuttered his
Tesla factory in Fremont, California, or possibly a declaration of
broader Trumpian sympathies. About an hour later, President Trump’s
daughter Ivanka
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and added a cheerful reply: “Taken!” And then Lilly
Wachowski replied
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Trump’s tweet, writing, “Fuck both of you.”

Having maybe said in four words all that she felt she needed to say on
this issue, Lilly did not collaborate with her sibling Lana Wachowski
on “The Matrix Resurrections,” a new “Matrix” sequel whose
first act is a barely metaphorical rebuke of the many people who’ve
either willfully or just obtusely misread and misappropriated the
ideas of “The Matrix.” In “Resurrections,” Neo is back to
living the life of Thomas Anderson. He remembers the events of the
first three films, but with help from a therapist (Neil Patrick
Harris, reliably untrustworthy as usual) and some suspiciously
color-coded psych meds, he’s convinced himself that his life as Neo
was a vivid delusion. He’s now rich and a little bit famous because
he’s used those memories as inspiration for an award-winning trilogy
of video games, also called “Matrix”—and when we first see him
onscreen, he’s right where Thomas Anderson was at the beginning of
the original trilogy, zonked in front of a bunch of monitors, waiting
for a sea of code to show him a sign. Neo haunts Thomas the way that
Tony Soprano’s life haunted Kevin Finnerty. He’s too blue-pilled
to realize that the fellow coffee-bar customer he’s nursing a crush
on is really Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity, who’s been similarly
re-imprisoned in the simulation and believes she’s Tiffany, mother
of two, married to a guy named Chad. Neo and Trinity’s struggle to
find and love each other again, despite the best efforts of a
malevolent hive mind, will become the movie’s emotional crux. But
making Thomas’ rival a literal Chad turns the movie’s romance plot
into a riff on the Virgin vs. Chad meme,
[[link removed]] with Reeves as the
pining beta male. To make matters more meta, his alpha rival, the
“Chad” in this equation, is played by an actual Chad—Chad
Stahelski, who was Reeves’s stunt double in the original film and
went on to direct him in three “John Wick” films.

Whether you find this part of the movie clever or instantly exhausting
will depend on how big a sweet tooth you have for fourth-wall-breaking
gags like that bit of literal stunt casting. Thomas’s
compartmentalized reality begins to spring leaks after his business
partner (Jonathan Groff) informs him that their game studio’s parent
company, Warner Bros., has ordered up a “Matrix” sequel. “I
thought they couldn’t do that,” Thomas says, but of course they
can, contractually, and if Thomas isn’t willing to do it, they’ll
cut him loose and hand the project over to someone else. This part of
the movie appears to be based on a true story. The Wachowskis had long
opposed the idea of expanding on the original “Matrix” trilogy,
but, in 2017, _The Hollywood Reporter_ quoted sources as saying
Warner Bros. was developing a new “Matrix” film, to be written by
“Ready Player One” co-screenwriter Zak Penn. The beginning of
“Resurrections” is kind of a bird-flipping quote-tweet of that
news and its implications for the Wachowskis as artists. In a montage
of soul-withering development meetings, Thomas sits by in mute horror
as arrogant and/or pretentious tech bros spout suspect interpretations
of his original work (“ ‘Matrix’ means mayhem!”), while
popping off toy guns and brainstorming ways to take the original idea
in louder, dumber directions. “Originality” is now just another
marketing key word, and all the marketing guys parrot the language of
psychic-liberationist mind-fuckery that Timothy Leary bequeathed to
the hucksters of Web 1.0: “People want us up in their gray space,
switching their synaptic WTF light on!”

Thomas just listens, looking like he’s going to be sick.
“Resurrections” is, in other words, a piece of corporate I.P.
exploitation about how corporate I.P. exploitation ruins everything
cool, a sequel about why sequels suck, a big “Fuck you” from Lana
Wachowski to Warner Bros. that Warner Bros. gets to release in
theatres and on HBO Max just in time to boost its fourth-quarter
results. Everyone involved gets to have their virtual steak and eat
it, too. The fact that it’s Wachowski meddling with her own
blockbuster source code pays off in playfulness; any other
writer-director given a set of keys to this franchise would
undoubtedly have felt obligated to treat “Matrix” lore more
dutifully so as to dignify the cash grab. In this one, when iconic
moments from the first film are historically reënacted, there are new
characters watching from the wings, whispering things, like, “Why
use old code to make something new?” and generally acting as
surrogates for us, the viewers who’ve seen it all before. One of
these observers, played by Jessica Henwick, is named Bugs, “as in
Bunny”; this being a Warner Bros. movie, you wonder why they
didn’t go all the way and cast the Animaniacs as a Greek chorus
instead. Henwick is one of several actors who seem like they can’t
quite believe they’re in a “Matrix” movie, along with Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II, playing a reboot of Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus
who finds that he really enjoys the wardrobe and the catchphrases.

Eventually, the story moves from the world inside the Matrix—where
they’re badass lucid dreamers, avatars skinned in cool suits and
sunglasses—to the war-torn future, and Abdul-Mateen gets to come
along only as a man-shaped cloud of C.G.I. nanoparticles, which puts a
real damper on his energy. At this point, this “Matrix” movie
about how they probably shouldn’t have made another “Matrix”
movie becomes just another “Matrix” movie, albeit one that wears
its self-awareness like an “_ask me about my self-awareness_”
T-shirt. For what it is, it’s still pretty engaging, losing steam
only when it tries to make topical points about our red-pilled
political climate. The new iteration of the Matrix converts ordinary
people into swarms of murderous hate-bots to protect its grip on
power; its creator gloats about how easy it is to control people with
feelings, rather than facts. “If we don’t know what’s real,” a
character says to Neo, “we can’t resist.” None of this is
objectionable. But minus a shot of bathroom graffiti guaranteed to
turn every dude on Reddit into an expert on the thematic resonances
between this film and Don DeLillo’s “Americana
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(Don-pilled!), it’s served up without even the modicum of subtlety
and egg-hunt mystery that made the original “Matrix” such a
durable chew toy for undergrad post-modernists. There’s nothing to
unlock in “Resurrections”—it’s a movie whose password is
“password.” Then again, if you were Lana Wachowski and you’d
spent nearly twenty years watching the world’s worst people hijack
your ideas, you’d probably opt for placards over puzzles, too.

What “Resurrections” has to say about the exploitative nature of
sequels, the tendency of sheeple to opt for lives of superficially
comfortable, algorithm-controlled bondage, or the cyclical nature of
life itself is ultimately less interesting than the way it
symbolically repositions its male lead. This is a semi-important
“Matrix” movie that’s probably too pinned to its context to
resonate into the future the way the first one did, but it feels
destined to go down as a crucial Keanu Reeves movie. I spent the
better part of 2020 writing a book about Reeves’s movies, the thesis
of which is that most of Reeves’s characters are essentially
versions of himself, and most of his films are actually metaphorical
dramatizations of the dilemma of _being_ Keanu Reeves, a sensitive
nineties artist whose career has been one long push-me-pull-you
struggle with commercial imperatives, including the making of sequels.
That being the case, “Resurrections” could not feel more designed
to delight and unnerve me, specifically, if it had arrived at my
doorstep as an unlabelled DVD in an envelope with no return address.
It speaks to what I believe to be fundamental Reevesian themes,
chiefly Reeves’s reluctance to participate in his own exploitation,
which led him to choose Dogstar and “Hamlet” over a
post-“Speed” action-movie career that was his to lose and seemed
to tempt him little. In its profound (and profoundly
early-nineties-ish) ambivalence about whether it should exist at
all—and its attempt to work through that ambivalence onscreen,
inside the story—the previous Reeves sequel that “Resurrections”
most obviously recalls is “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” from
1991, in which Reeves reprises the role of lovable headbanger Ted
Logan and also plays his own evil robot doppelgänger—a walking
sequel with no soul, built to kill Ted and destroy everything he
stands for.

Reeves would spend the rest of that decade trying not to become an
evil-Ted version of himself. After 1994’s “Speed,” he could have
settled into a long run as a slightly more zen Bruce Willis; instead,
he ran off to play Prince Hamlet in a 1995 Manitoba Theatre Production
of “Hamlet.” By the time the script for the first “Matrix”
came to him—which happened only after a baffled Will Smith turned it
down and Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio had done the same—he’d
spent more than a few years adrift. The part of Neo finally allowed
Reeves to square his own hipster-philosopher bent with audiences’
desire to see him kick ass. Before shooting, the Wachowskis sent him
to martial-arts training camp but also told him to read Baudrillard
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books on evolutionary psychology and cybernetics. This, it seemed, was
the kind of improbable part he’d spent years looking for: a pop
blockbuster with a hefty syllabus, an intellectually fulfilling
tentpole-making experience.

In the second and third “Matrix” movies, Neo seemed increasingly
burdened by the role of world savior and Reeves seemed increasingly
weary of playing one. There is no creative act so exciting that it
won’t start to feel like a job if you have to do it over and over.
The wittiest thing about the “John Wick” movies is the way they
build their story _around_ Reeves’s disinclination to keep going
back to the well—they’re all about a hit man, for whom making hits
is a soul-killing way to make a living. And they’re also about
getting older, something Reeves now knows a thing or two about.

At one point in “Resurrections,” Neo slips into a movie theatre
through a jagged hole in the screen. What’s playing on the screen is
meant in the film to be footage from Thomas Anderson’s “Matrix”
game, but it’s really footage from the original “Matrix,” of
Reeves’s first meeting with Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, and all
of a sudden, we’re looking at Reeves looking at his own smooth,
young, worried face circa 1999, a forgotten self projected twenty feet
high. “Time is always against us, et cetera, et cetera,” Morpheus
says, quoting a Fishburne line from the original that takes on new
weight in this context. Time _is_ always against us—all of us.
It’s hard to imagine another leading man agreeing to return to one
of his most iconic roles in the way Reeves does here, boldly risking
comparison with his younger self by playing a Neo who’s lost a step
and never quite regains it. The big fight scenes are mostly about him
getting knocked around, and when he attempts the Superman-style
up-up-and-away move that was once his signature, he can’t quite
clear the sidewalk, and his shirt rides up a little, exposing a few
vulnerable inches of normal-guy abdomen.

Because “Resurrections” is all text and no subtext, more than one
character remarks on Reeves’s supposed agelessness, which has been
the stuff of memes for years. ( The tongue-in-cheek Web
site keanuisimmortal.com [[link removed]], which
has existed since 2010, presents evidence that Reeves, purportedly
born in 1964, has actually lived for centuries and may actually be
Charlemagne, former emperor of the Carolingian Empire.) But in the
last few years, he’s aged like a man in his fifties, and has
gravitated toward roles that don’t deny that fact. The character of
John Wick was written for a Paul Newman type before Reeves decided to
do the movie; last year’s overstuffed “Bill & Ted Face the
Music” was, deep down, a story about two now middle-aged guys and
their evolving relationship to their own heroic potential, and derived
much of its pathos from the knowing sadness in Reeves’s crinkled
eyes.

That’s true of this movie, too, which—whatever else it tries to
be—works best as a story about two lovers reuniting in middle age,
played out on the faces of two actors who aren’t afraid to let
themselves look eighteen years older than the last time they shared a
screen. In a storytelling decision guaranteed to rankle the online
manosphere, it’s Carrie-Anne Moss who gets the archetypal
a-hero-will-rise arc in this one. Neo’s destiny is to support her
until that can happen. They need each other the way Sandra Bullock and
Reeves needed each other in “Speed,” a movie about a man taking
external problems off a woman’s plate so that she can focus on
driving a bus. In the end, it’s Moss who gets to wipe the smug look
off the evil A.I.’s face, while Reeves watches from the sidelines, a
delighted spectator like the rest of us, holding a cat and murmuring
an inevitable but well-earned “_Whoa._”

_ALEX PAPPADEMAS is a regular and semi-regular contributor of reported
features, essays and what have you to the New York Times, the New
Yorker, GQ, GQ Style, GENMag.com, Mr. Porter, Men’s Health, and
AirBnB Magazine._

_THE NEW YORKER. New Year's Sale. 12 weeks for $12 $6, plus get a free
limited-edition tote. Cancel anytime._

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