So it is, unfortunately, with “The Matrix Resurrections,” which makes poignant use of hair cuts and color to mark the eighteen years separating the new film from the last installment in the “Matrix” trilogy.
The first sequel, “Reloaded,” is the “Godfather: Part II” of sci-fi movies: the Wachowskis went far beyond the earnestness of the original, and vastly upped the ante on its technical advances and kinetic fantasies, to create a film that is both a raucously exaggerated comedy and an even more hyperbolically extravagant action film.
As if Tom weren’t miserable enough, his boss , take a red pill, and go in search of Trinity.
An air of nostalgia is present from the start of “Resurrections,” when Tom uses new software to write a version of Trinity’s first big battle from the original “Matrix” into his video game.
One of the worst aspects of the trilogy was its indiscriminate use of gun battles, and they return in “Resurrections.” Two justly famous visual tropes, the slowing-down of bullets in flight and the force field with which Neo wards them off, return, too, with a couple of minor new touches that suggest technical advances more than artistic ones.
In the original film, the crucial turn of Neo’s initiation was learning, from a child who bent a spoon with his mind, that the secret is, “There is no spoon.” Neo discovered that, if he believes he can fly, he can fly.
They resemble each other; each one has become a sort of tabula rasa for self-re-creation, a mode of transformation that acknowledges the passing of time and that they’ll undertake together, with the sustaining strength of mutual recognition, mutual understanding.
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