CINEMA

Keep taking the pills?

→Early on in The Matrix Resurrections, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Morpheus 2.0 gives the artist formerly known as Neo a familiar choice. This time, however, those iconic red and blue pills are delivered with a knowing wink, and an acknowledgement that boiling life down to a simplistic pair of binary options is nonsensical. The scene is a neat encapsulation of everything that unfolds in this surprisingly meta return to The Matrix.

Eighteen years after Revolutions effectively put a full stop to the franchise, this fourth instalment is a mass of contradictions, a movie few were calling out for yet still feels worthwhile now it’s arrived. It’s built on opposing truths that shouldn’t co-exist, yet seamlessly combine to create one of the weirdest, most unconventional slices of nostalgia you’ll ever see on the big screen.

Despite setting out to exploit the same joyous corners of our collective cultural consciousness as The Force Awakens, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Spider-Man: No Way Home, it does so with a perspective all of its own – for better and for worse.

Because The Matrix Resurrections is simultaneously clever and stupid: funny yet deadly serious; obsessed with the past but still fresh and new; both a continuation of canon and a parody of its many clichés. It’s also, at times, giddily entertaining and disappointingly familiar. Red or blue pill? Let’s hedge our bets and say purple.

Admittedly, the chances of anyone walking into a screening of Resurrections having never seen a Matrix movie are practically zero, but few sequels or reboots rely quite so heavily on an encyclopaedic knowledge of what’s come before.

While the phone calls, white rabbits and cascades of green numbers alone are enough to transport you back to the mainframe, the movie’s opening sequence is also a Back To The Future: Part II-style riff on Trinity’s first, genre-redefining appearance 21 years ago. It’s déjà vu with a twist, a glitch in the Matrix that works on numerous, Inception-like layers of reality.