YNOT at the Movies

If you walk around the Civic Center area in San Francisco, you don't have to look hard to see some homeless people on the sidewalks who are tripping on drugs. They appear to be out of their reality and into another world. I am not sure if that's where the director Lana Wachowski got her inspiration for the 4th installment of the Matrix franchise, "The Matrix Resurrections" (USA 2021 | 148 min.), because the film's characters definitely sound like they are tripping and the film's narrative doesn't make sense, despite the characters are constantly explaining themselves. It has been about twenty years since the Matrix trilogy was released, so it's understandable for the filmmaker to feel obligated to remind us what the fuss is about in the world of the Matrix. However, the more explaining these characters try to do, the more confusing the story becomes.

The central characters of the series are Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), who now are about twenty years older in this film than in the previous trilogy when they saved the world together on a motorcycle. Neo lives under the name Thomas Anderson as a developer in a gaming company in downtown San Francisco co-founded by a cocky and handsome brat named Smith (Jonathan Groff). Trinity, however, is a married woman named Tiffany with two kids. Of course, Neo and Trinity don't know each other as Thomas and Tiffany at first.

With long hair and a beard, the doleful Thomas is having issues figuring out the difference between his hallucination and reality. He seeks help from his therapist, the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), who is probably the only character in the movie who speaks with coherent sentences.

Well, Thomas has every reason to doubt his reality, because he is from a computer generated world, and Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) have been looking for him.

After several sequences of chaotic fighting, Thomas and Tiffany team up together again as Neo and Trinity to watch the sunrise over the spectacular San Francisco skyline. (I happened to be walking down the streets that morning when they were filming on the roof of that building.) Okay, maybe they are together for something else, but who knows what.

Sure, in a sci-fi film setting, things might not make sense from a human's perspective. But nothing seems to make sense in this film. If you are not familiar with the three previous films or have already forgotten about them, you would probably have a hard time getting the story, if the film has one. The director Lana Wachowski certainly knows about the situation, so she uses her characters, such as Bugs and Morpheus, to constantly mumble about what they are doing and why. That behavior totally resembles the drug users on the streets of San Francisco, who talk nonsense to themselves all the time.

As an action flick, the film has plenty of kung fu fighting sequences and flying bullets, but it looks just like a mutation of any other sci-fi action film, except with a funny twist by adding some zombies to the San Francisco streets. When it comes to acting, while the terrific Neil Patrick Harris is having a ball playing that manipulative psychologist, Keanu Reeves looks dreadful throughout the film and never smiles.

"The Matrix Resurrections" opens on Wednesday, December 22, 2021.