The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
Directed by Lana Wachowski
Plagued by strange memories, Neo's life takes an unexpected turn when he finds himself back inside the Matrix.
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49 films that influenced The Matrix Resurrections
What critics say influenced The Matrix Resurrections
That’s where the praise belongs to Lana Wachowski, clearly inspired by films such as Lamberto Bava’s Demons , Inception , and following in the footsteps of what Craven did with the Scream series.
While Scream is rightfully regarded as Wes Craven’s definitive meta-slasher movie, it wasn’t the late filmmaker’s first stab (sorry) at self-referential horror.
There have been many apt comparisons of The Matrix Resurrections to Wes Craven's metatextual New Nightmare, but I was also struck by its similar thematic threads to Joe Berlinger's much maligned (and much misunderstood) Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a film that acknowledges the existence of its hugely influential predecessor and seeks to interrogate its own societal impact.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare , the seventh installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, exists outside of the series’ continuity and in a world in which Freddy Krueger is known for being … an iconic movie villain.
Similar to movies such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare or Star Wars: The Last Jedi , this is a self aware Matrix movie, unafraid to break the mythology into pieces, and build it back together in the artist’s own vision.
It’s hard to explain just why I love The Matrix Resurrections as much as I do, but the best comparison I can make it that this feels like Lana has crafted her own Matrix story by way of New Nightmare here, and considering just how much I adore Wes Craven’s meta sequel with every fiber of my being, then perhaps it should come as no surprise that Resurrections absolutely blew my mind and thrilled me from start to finish.
The vibe of Resurrections is not so unlike the iconically playful opening of Wes Craven’s Scream 4, which practically shouted “We know you know how the story goes” — and then doubled, tripled, quadrupled-down on that knowledge with a nesting-doll nimbleness, a sense of humor about itself and about the fact of sequels, about our cynicism toward their utter non-necessity beyond making more money.
That’s where the praise belongs to Lana Wachowski, clearly inspired by films such as Lamberto Bava’s Demons , Inception , and following in the footsteps of what Craven did with the Scream series.
There are lots of moments that recall Satoshi Kon’s filmography, Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” and the Wachowskis’ Netflix series “Sense8” to create this unstable world that is unnerving yet wholly intriguing.
It is as wildly hopeful about the matter of romance as canonical greats like Borzage (“History Is Made At Night”) and Murnau (“Sunrise”) and Powell-Pressburger (“A Matter of Life and Death”) and bluntly meta about the edifices of its very premises.
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Wachowski paints in broad, colorful strokes, showcasing the types of big emotional motifs that would fit right at home inside a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama like Written on the Wind or All That Heaven Allows .
Wachowski paints in broad, colorful strokes, showcasing the types of big emotional motifs that would fit right at home inside a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama like Written on the Wind or All That Heaven Allows .
But unlike Alex Proyas’ “Dark City” and David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ,” it struck a chord and has remained current in pop culture.
Consider the fate of Dark City , Alex Proyas’s sci-fi noir that came out the year before The Matrix .
You see, like most truly great films, it really doesn’t matter what you know about this film beyond its context: That Lana Wachowski once co-directed a trilogy of films about the adventures of Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie Ann-Moss), who were a part of a human-centric resistance to the sentient machines that had enslaved humanity — physically in amniotic pods, stacked in giant pillars, and mentally in a virtual world modeled after 1999 — in the far-flung future in order to harvest the electrical energy that their brains supply to power the robots after mankind blacked out the sky Highlander II -style.
To be fair, there are indications in the first act of “Resurrections” when it seems that the picture—the work of Lana Wachowski, going it alone without the participation of her former partner Lilly—appears ready to take off on a wild “Gremlins 2” trajectory.
In its own enjoyably twisty way, The Matrix Resurrections is the Gremlins 2 of action movies: subversive, angry, unruly, delirious, delightful.
A lot of that is done in the movie’s first hour in such a meta way that it will come off as pretentious to those who don’t know how brilliant movies like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare or Gremlins 2: The New Batch have proven to be.
Think of this as the "Gremlins 2" of the "Matrix" series.
In that moment — and the gloriously silly montage set to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” which immediately follows — it becomes clear this is Wachowski’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare or Gremlins 2: The New Batch , a decidedly euphoric middle finger to studio mandates and nostalgia-laden franchise filmmaking that is perfectly content to infuriate as many viewers as it might captivate.
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The fact that this influence and its consequences are meaningfully interrogated throughout the course of the film would already place Resurrections atop the pile of most-interesting studio sequels released in the last decade — one can see shades of Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant here, where the part-god/part-creator relishes in the hold that their creations have had, though to less outright nihilistic ends — but the magic lies in the combination of that self-reflection with Wachowski’s capacity to make entertaining and amusing populist cinema.
It doesn’t matter that there is a 32-year gap between Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters Afterlife , or 35 years between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 .
There have been many apt comparisons of The Matrix Resurrections to Wes Craven's metatextual New Nightmare, but I was also struck by its similar thematic threads to Joe Berlinger's much maligned (and much misunderstood) Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a film that acknowledges the existence of its hugely influential predecessor and seeks to interrogate its own societal impact.