Blue Pill? Or The Red Pill? 

How about not Resurrecting a franchise 20 years too late?  

“The Matrix” broke new ground when it debuted in March 1999. It changed movies and its legacy in pop culture will always be cherished. There was nothing like it when it came out in the early Spring of 1999.  

The sequels, while divisive among some but those two films still delivered a conclusion to the trilogy. We thought we had seen the last of Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. But 20 years later here is “The Matrix Resurrections”.   

I am conflicted. I really do like some of the ideas presented in the film by Lana Wachowski. The execution is not as good. The film becomes too meta sometimes for its own good and does not come off as clever but cynical and bitter. 

“The first half of the movie was getting annoying with all the visual callbacks to the original trilogy. It picked up a little but just felt meh overall” said Alycia Brown, a Behavioral Therapist. 

The plot revolves around Neo once again needs to escape into the real world, rescuing the woman he’s been pining after inside the Matrix for decades: Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity. The love story at the center of the film works well, as do a few exposition dumps that do a relatively good job of trying to justify this movie’s existence while building on the franchise’s mythology. 

Again, the main issue of the film is that nothing here really needs to happen, and the film feels like a tacked-on epilogue after “The Matrix Revolutions”.   The action scenes are nowhere near as good as the original trilogy and feels choppy, the original composer Don Davis is sorely missing, and this film just feels off. There is something missing. 

Dragging Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and Agent Smith back into the Matrix for one more adventure result in a blockbuster that has little of any substance to say, action scenes that won’t register, and a retreading of old ground that literally sees clips from the previous movies play out on screen on multiple occasions. 

The Matrix Resurrections is playing in theaters everywhere. 

Grade C-