“The Matrix” Never Gets Old – The New Republic

The video game company is forcing Thomas to
make a sequel to the original trilogy (director Lana Wachowski’s meta-critique
of the entertainment industry and its penchant for flogging creativity to
death) and he reluctantly plays along while undergoing a full-blown crisis.
Many shots commence of Keanu staring off into the middle distance, miserable.
Watching the sun rise, miserable. Taking a bath with a rubber duckie on his
head, miserable. Eating blue pills prescribed by his therapist, miserable. The
sole light of his life is a married mother of two he shyly spies on at the
local coffee shop. One day they finally introduce themselves, and when their
hands clasp it seems to spark a long-forgotten memory. “Have we met?” she asks.
This person is, of course, Trinity (though her slave name is, cruelly and
hilariously, Tiffany), and she is played by a Carrie-Anne Moss who is still
regal, still a bit alien with her luminous blue eyes and face full of angles,
still cool as hell.

As in the original Matrix, Thomas is eventually liberated by a group of humans in the
real world, and he assumes his true identity: Neo, the One. The reason it has
taken them decades to find him, we learn, is that the machines have thrown a
digital veil over him, such that when Thomas looks in the mirror he sees Keanu
Reeves, while the rest of the world sees an anonymous old man. (If there is a
better metaphor for the warped self-perception of the middle-aged, I haven’t
encountered it.) Neo’s crew has joined forces with a character from Thomas’s
video game—the new Morpheus, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen—who has become
self-aware and escaped his creator’s confines. How this all happens exactly is
difficult to explain, and to be honest I’m not sure I quite understand it
myself. (Resurrections is full of
incomprehensible lines like: “Are you the one who hacked my modal?”) No matter,
the gang is back together again, though instead of playing Morpheus as a
mystical holy man dropping Zen koans, like Laurence Fishburne, Abdul-Mateen has
turned him into a dandy in garish suits who swills martinis.

The usual hijinks ensue: People scamper across
walls, bullets are halted in midair, and fists turn concrete pillars into dust,
though nothing really blows your mind the way the fight scenes in the original Matrix did, as if the movie universe still
hasn’t progressed beyond the quantum leap the Wachowskis made in the late
1990s. As the gang go about freeing “Tiffany” from her “happy” marriage, the
questions they are chasing are these: Why does the Matrix still exist? And how
were Neo and Trinity plugged back in? It is in this explanatory effort that Resurrections falls into the trap that
hampered the other sequels, Reloaded
and Revolutions, both of which, in
their plodding attempts to fill out the world that was outlined in the original,
dispelled the suggestive mysteries that made it so intriguing in the first
place. The sequels abound with chattering characters—the Merovingian, the Last
Exile, the Analyst—who pile up a Jenga tower of explanations for what’s going
on, but whose relationship to the story feels both overdetermined and
maddeningly elusive. They’re what again, precisely? Computer programs? Software
glitches? Machine consciousness? Do the screenwriters even care?

The significance of the Matrix movies lies in concerns beyond the arcane plot. These days,
the idea that our minds are all jacked into a matrix is rather obvious. We are
as much in its thrall as the poor fetus-humans in their pods of pink goo,
though like one of the first movie’s bad guys, the turncoat Cypher, we choose
to live under this cloak that has been cast over reality—that now is reality. But the original allegory
from 1999, coming when the internet was still in its infancy, is a little
harder to parse. The Matrix referred to the sense, widespread in popular
culture at the time, that we were held in the grip of the complacent
consumerism that characterized the pre-9/11, pre-financial crisis, pre-Trump
America. We were entertaining ourselves to death, filling our empty lives with
even emptier goods, and turning a blind eye to historical injustices,
sentiments evidenced in movies like Fight
Club (“You are not your fucking khakis,” in the words of renegade anti-hero
Tyler Durden), music by bands like Rage Against the Machine (whose stomping
track “Wake Up” closes the original movie as Neo soars through the air like
Superman), and novels like Infinite Jest
(featuring a video that literally kills its viewers).

Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/164866/matrix-never-gets-old