The Matrix Resurrections: Sometimes Dead is Better…Sometimes

The resurrection of dead things is an impossibility in the life of human beings, and if we’re being honest a near impossibility in our works as well. The great horror philosopher ( I say that somewhat ironically) Stephen King once wrote the words “Sometimes Dead is better” and in the reality of the creation of art this feels especially true. The current Hollywood landscape feels like a graveyard haunted by the visions, grandeur, creativity of it's past. Having long sacrificed itself to the gods of profit incentive and marketing, it spends an ungodly amount of time walking around its own cemetery in mourning looking for bodies it can excavate, and it seems in this case the Waschowski's latest effort is a rumination on that. Like old Judd Crandall, they are both hesitant and willing, but unlike the rest of that story what comes out does not feel dead, vile, and regretful, nor does it feel completely like a resurrection, and it provides a fascinating approach to this conundrum of bringing back something we and they loved, and something that maybe was best left dead.

The first and maybe most noticeable way Waschowski deals with this resurrection is to vent. Vent about their own frustrations with the work, about their own happiness and unhappiness, about their own loathing with the current job at hand, they do this rather brilliantly through the meta-conversations made through the avatars of them and us. After all this is not merely an IP to them, it has to bear some form of personal investment seeing as through it was so clearly a piece of their own transition into being, and to do it now missing your partner in crime feels even more personal and it feels that way in the movie. Neo's therapy sessions bare a kind of personal tension that transfers and registers on a level beyond that of a unique way to set up stakes, themes, and parameters. Keanu, so clearly an evolved actor adds to this a taut anxiety that makes us as unsure about this as they are, ( there is a very interesting through-line between Neo and Kohn Wick about a man who as deadened himself only to have to resurrect said self ) but then, through that tension Lana and co-writers Aleksandar Hernon and David Mitchell concoct a brilliant way into this. They do not fully resurrect their brilliant characters, its a mixture of possession and transference, they are them and they're not them. The matrix itself is both the same and different, it’s machinations have involved, it’s processes have changed, it’s inhabitants have aged and some have moved on, and it all meshes into its own unique experience culminating in a beautiful recognition by Lana and Co for a different POV into the “One” and subsequently Neos and Trinity's relationship dynamics. What comes out is a fresh feast for the eyes, and mind, one that seems almost as poised for revisits as any of the originals. What hurts and still haunts the movie is that deep sense of grief.

I have always contended that in the Matrix franchise Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus functioned as the soul of that series. Both in-and-out of the context of that franchise he was our gateway into the faith as well as a fundamental grounding rod of all of the film's large and sometimes confusing themes. Without him that series does not exist in any way -in the way that it exists to us now. It is in that lack of presence, of power, of earnesty, of love, that something is lost in this film and you can feel it again, both in the context of the film and out of it. Lana knows..there is a meta recognition of this loss in the film, it’s as if even before they sat down to write, before they saw the first dailies they felt that loss and it is written into the film, and into its imagery, and it hovers above every action, every sequence. Yahya Abdul for his part gives it a brave try, and fares damn well in another wonderfully creative resurrection, but it is no fault of Waschowski, Yahya, or the idea, it is simply the fact of the power, resonance, the massive brilliance of the actor that made the character as much an icon of cinema as is its lead and arguably more. In that way, the loss of Morpheus represents the ghost of the central tension of this film not only in how do we resurrect dead things, but how do we live with their death. What Lana gives us is a fun, funny ( this movie is actually really really funny) well thought out action movie that doesn’t bother trying to answer this, and instead deals with it, and what we get is this side of Mad Max Fury Road one of the best resurrections of a seemingly dead franchise we've seen, and proof that Judd Crandall was right sometimes dead is better..Sometimes.