The Matrix trilogy are nothing more than video games that he designed. Meanwhile, a new band of rebels attempts to free Neo, and Trinity who is also trapped in the fake reality. Lana Wachowski, back on directing duties, made the creative decision to actually include footage from 1999's The Matrix and its two sequels, 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions, within the new movie. They are shown both as a flashback tool for Neo but also appear within scenes for the characters to comment on.
1999's The Matrix was a seminal movie that changed the way motion pictures were made. Conversely, The Matrix Resurrections has bombed at the box office and divided both critics and audiences. While some have praised the return of Trinity and Neo and their enduring relationship, others have dismissed the movie as an attempt to capitalize on The Matrix brand with a needless continuation. To that end, the movie has faced criticisms of it being a rehash of the original movie, something that the flashback scenes don’t help with.
The use of flashbacks from a previous film can be a useful narrative tool as a shortcut to remind audiences of previous events. However, The Matrix Resurrections' overuse of this technique is so overwhelming that it distracts from the story it's trying to tell and forces the audience to unflatteringly compare The Matrix Resurrections with the original movie, in real-time. The new Matrix movie is both self-aware of and content with this problem, though, as it frequently comments on and satirizes the problems with extending/repeating a completed story. For example, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's version of Morpheus quotes Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus when meeting Neo in a bathroom, acknowledging the inferiority of the new setting compared to the atmospheric setting in the original film. Later on, that first meeting scene is actually projected on a screen that Neo walks through, in an effort to trigger his memories through nostalgia. Comparisons are unavoidable and unfavorable.
It's a bold move to so blatantly hold The Matrix Resurrections up against the quality of the original movie, and one that doesn't pay off. Using archive footage of Fishbourne and Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith has the (presumably) unintentional consequence of lamenting their absence from the latest entry and diminishing the valiant efforts of their replacements. Elsewhere, the re-staged opening of The Matrix, where Trinity escapes from cops and agents, is clunky and "off." While this is an intentional choice by Lana Wachowski to highlight its fakeness to Bugs (Jessica Henwick), it nevertheless elicits a longing for the near-perfect version filmed over 20 years earlier over the re-imagined scene.
While there is no shortage of interesting new ideas in The Matrix Resurrections, they are often pushed to the side while the film treads over old ground in its attempts to retell the first half of the original movie over again. The Matrix Resurrections is at war with itself, wanting to be both something new and more of the same all at once. Cutting down the compulsion to mimic, repeat and directly show scenes from 1999’s The Matrix could have allowed the new story more room to breathe and helped it to escape the shadow of the original.
