The Matrix Revisited
Why the original film is better than ever, the sequels remain passable, and the new one is worse than I feared
Long flights will make you do weird things to stay sane.
Getting home from our honeymoon in Tanzania entailed five hours from Kilimanjaro to Doha, followed by sixteen more to San Francisco.
Somewhere over Ethiopia I started rewatching the original Matrix trilogy. After powering through it I finally watched the 2021 follow-up I’d skipped.
I did this because, while I never shut up about The Lord of the Rings, the truth is that The Matrix has quietly been my second favorite film since I first saw it in middle school.
Where did nine hours of Matrix content take me?
Straight to salvation then into the heart of madness.
Let me explain.
The Matrix (1999)
This is a perfect film.
It’s aged like a fine Barolo—bold, complex, and more rewarding with time. Rewatching it is pure pleasure, like sinking into a warm bath or slipping on the world’s most luxurious silk pajamas.
What makes it so singularly enjoyable is the kaleidoscope of influences it weaves together with visionary finesse: Hong Kong fight choreography, anime like Ghost in the Shell, the balletic gun-fu of John Woo, and literary nods from Alice in Wonderland to the Bible. What other blockbuster drops Jean Baudrillard references into both the dialogue and the set design?
In lesser hands, this could’ve been a chaotic collage. But the Wachowskis manage it with clarity, confidence, and genuine reverence. They know that the only way to make Plato’s allegory of the cave leap off the page is to dress it in leather and sunglasses and arm it with a machine gun.
All of this only works because the story is so propulsive. The Matrix is a master class in pacing. Every scene either teaches you something new about the world or advances the plot— often doing both stylishly. Neo’s journey resonates because it’s both mythic and deeply human.
The world remains a joy to explore. Downloading skills—like piloting a helicopter or kung fu—still feels thrilling.
The casting is also perfect. Keanu Reeves as Neo, Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, all deliver perfect performances. Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith is still one of my all-time favorite villains. His enunciation alone conveys an alien menace that’s both chilling and weirdly mesmerizing.
The Matrix is also a case study in how to do action right. Whenever people complain about gratuitous fight scenes or the noisy slurry of CGI at the end of every Marvel movie, I point to The Matrix and say: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Every action beat moves the story forward and reveals something crucial about a character or theme.
In The Matrix, how characters fight reflects who they are. Weapons aren’t just props—they’re expressions of personality. Trinity’s ability to disarm enemies and seamlessly repurpose their shotguns and throwing knives shows her creativity and lethal grace. The Agents’ oversized Desert Eagle pistols evoke fascist menace—brutal, intimidating, and excessive. Mouse’s dual automatic shotguns reflect his adolescent overcompensation and doomed bravado. The iconic lobby scene is both revered and maligned, but what’s impressive about it is that the violence isn’t just spectacle. Every bullet and every movement means something.
This movie is so rewatchable because of the astonishing attention to detail packed into every frame. Like Peter Jackson with The Lord of the Rings, the Wachowskis storyboarded every moment before shooting—and it shows. Every scene—whether a slow-mo action climax or a quiet cutaway—is composed with purpose and flair.
This is filmmaking with architectural precision. Like Psycho, Jurassic Park, or Parasite, The Matrix is one of those rare movies I wish I could watch for the first time again—just to feel the thrill of seeing cinema evolving in real time.
It didn’t just look different—it changed what movies could look like. Its use of “bullet time” slow-motion didn’t just launch a thousand imitations and parodies; it reshaped how action was choreographed and shot for decades.
All of this is why I didn’t just rewatch The Matrix once. I watched it twice.
The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions (2003)
Watching Reloaded and Revolutions back-to-back is like getting high on your own supply of philosophy and gunfire. Shot simultaneously like Lord of the Rings, they trade sleek precision for sprawling excess—tackling questions of free will, control, and destiny with a sincerity that’s both admirable and exhausting.
If the first Matrix proved that the Wachowskis love footage of people emptying the clip, the sequels prove that this is also how they operate creatively. The best and worst parts of these films stem from this tendency towards aggressive maximalism. Reloaded and Revolutions fearlessly fire more of everything at you: more action, more determinism, and lots of Zion.
What’s most glaring is how the philosophy and exposition, once seamlessly integrated, now feel clunky and overbearing. We keep meeting new characters with on-the-nose names—the Keymaker, the Architect, the Trainman, the Merovingian—whose main function is to explain things. If the original Matrix felt like a college lecture so zippy and engrossing you forget it’s about Descartes, the sequels start to feel like being stuck in a dorm room with a Philosophy major who won’t stop interrupting movie night to explain Descartes to you.
It’s a lot, but it reflects the Wachowski’s contagious enthusiasm for world-building. This is a universe where you don’t just get an army of mech suits—you see exactly how they reload in the heat of battle. However, if watching hovercraft captains in ratty flannel explain the logistics of EMP detonation bores you, you’re going to have a bad time.
There’s also a lot of council meeting scenes, which many found tedious. I didn’t mind—especially since they cast Cornel West as a council member, which felt like if the Star Wars prequels had the guts to give Bernie Sanders a seat in the Galactic Senate.
The original’s production design is immaculate, but by the sequels, veers into self-parody. As Honest Trailers put it, the inhabitants of Zion resemble “sweaty cave ravers.” Or, in the words of my college roommate: “like they’re living in the musical Stomp.” Meanwhile, every outing in the Matrix now looks like they’re headed to a BDSM orgy—or Folsom Street Fair with automatic weapons.
That said, a few set pieces in the sequels still absolutely rock—most notably the iconic freeway chase in Reloaded. To shoot it, the Wachowskis built a 1.4-mile, three-lane highway loop from scratch on a decommissioned Navy base in Alameda, California. It was the first freeway ever constructed by a Hollywood studio—at a cost of $2.5 million—and demolished immediately after filming. The result was one of the most kinetic, inventive action scenes of the 2000s.
The sequence works not because of what it packs in, but what it withholds. Neo becoming a flying god at the end of film one is cool but saps tension from every slickly choreographed fight he appears in. Keeping him out of the chase until the end reintroduces vulnerability and stakes into a world where one character is invincible. Trinity and Morpheus must rely on skill, instinct, and fast reflexes to survive.
Sadly, the third film loses this inventiveness and fun, mostly taking place in the gloomy, poorly lit underworld of Zion. Gone are the slick costumes, green tint, and stylish gunplay—replaced by blue lighting, a bluer mood, and biblical symbolism about apocalypse, sacrifice, and resurrection. The third film is super bleak, which, as the new Planet of the Apes trilogy taught us, makes for an emotionally taxing way to end a trilogy. The sheer amount of physical suffering they heap on Neo and Trinity makes this an exhausting watch—only heightened by the cutaways to Zion, where guys in mech suits unload clip after clip into an endless horde of robots that resemble malicious calamari. The final showdown between Neo and Agent Smith is dazzling but weightless, like watching a 5 year old slam his action figures together.
By the end, the questions bouncing around your head—Why did they recast the Oracle and Tank? Couldn’t Neo have sacrificed himself without all that flying around? What, exactly, was Monica Bellucci’s character there to do besides serve heaving cleavage?—start to feel like someone else’s problem, not burning loose ends.
Still, you feel grateful for such a uniquely stylish ride.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
The original trilogy had so much—at times too much—to say.
This one immediately settles for a tired, reluctant replay of the hits.
Something felt off from the opening scene—a shot-for-shot remake that crash-landed in the uncanny valley between reboot and rerun. Then come re-skins of Neo’s office call, first Morpheus meeting, and the dojo fight. While the beats are all there, the soul isn’t.
The Matrix Resurrections suffers from atrocious pacing, forgettable new characters, sidelined legacy ones, and action scenes that—like the story—lack stakes, style, or substance. Worst of all, it tries to patch its flaws with a winking, self-aware angle that acknowledges reboot problems while refusing to address any of them.
Twenty-six real years and sixty Matrix years later, the biggest change is that they enter The Matrix through mirrors instead of phones now. Meanwhile, in the real world, the machines had a civil war and some are friendly—but instead of building a new story around these genuinely interesting new ideas, the movie just retreads old ground.
Neo is now a disillusioned game designer who looks contractually obligated to be here, trying to rescue Trinity mostly because he, like us, remembers liking her in the originals.
Just when you realize how bad this movie is going to be, it attempts some meta-fictional jiu-jitsu via dialogue: “Our beloved parent company Warner Brothers has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy. They informed me they’re going to do it with or without us.”
That is likely how Lana Wachowski felt about making this—but self-awareness isn’t the same as making a good movie.
It’s like being served a burnt pizza by a waiter who explains, in detail, how the oven broke, why the chef is sad, and why pizza was a doomed proposition from the start. That’s... thoughtful. But why not just make better pizza—or serve literally anything else?
As the Honest Trailer put it, “it’s like they invented bullet time but for dodging criticism.”
Then, as if to taunt you, the film keeps cutting to footage from better Matrix movies, reminding you how much the original Matrix was taut, bold, and stylish and this one is flabby, sluggish, and dull.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the action scenes, which are limp, incoherent, and pointless. The original made every action scene count—visually stunning, but also character-driven and theme-rich, always pushing the story forward with urgency and real stakes. In Resurrections, we get a tedious brawl in a generic wooden room that looks like a recycled Hamilton set.
They even cast Jonathan Groff—King George in Hamilton—as the new Agent Smith. It’s like Disney remade The Lion King but cast a golden doodle as Mufasa. Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith was a career-best performance—one of the most iconic villains in film history. Groff’s Smith, by contrast, has all the menace of Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother.
Speaking of which, Neil Patrick Harris plays the other forgettable villain: Neo’s therapist, who is revealed as the real antagonist 90 minutes in—far too late to care.
Instead of bringing back Fishburne and Weaving—or writing new characters—they recast Morpheus and Smith with new actors doing awkward impressions of them. It’s an obvious downgrade of two of the franchise’s most iconic figures, guaranteed to disappoint fans and confuse newcomers.
This epitomizes the film’s identity crisis—caught between wanting to be a safe, beat-for-beat reboot like The Force Awakens or a bold reimagining like Mad Max: Fury Road. Unwilling or unable to choose, it stalls out in a no-man’s-land of stale imitation.
Most inexcusable is the story, or lack thereof. The actual plot doesn’t kick in until about 45 minutes before the credits roll. For all the flaws of Reloaded and Revolutions, even their worst scenes weren’t as dull as the best scenes in Resurrections’ sprawling 158-minute runtime.
The climactic heist in Resurrections is a slow, muddled affair that could be mistaken for an awkward Tinder date at a coffee shop were it not for the SWAT team present. Then, just when Trinity finally gets to kick ass—Neil Patrick Harris freezes time to monologue, dragging the already glacial pacing to a full stop.
At this point, I felt like risking being kicked off my Qatar Airways flight mid air to shout at the screen: “Why can’t this film get out of its own way?!”
The final showdown—set on the streets of San Francisco—is barely visible, as if the filmmakers have forgotten not just how to stage action, but how to light it, too. The villains are a horde of agents that make this feel more like the final level of a forgettable zombie video game than the end of a Matrix movie.
By now, the sheer number of cinematic own-goals being scored felt almost awe-inspiring.
It all ends with a re-skinned version of the original’s final shot, complete with a tepid cover of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up.” By this point I wanted to howl at the sky and rinse my eyes out with bleach, but settled for rewatching Pitch Perfect 2 as a palate cleanser instead.
Now that’s how to do a satisfying sequel.
The clearest meta-commentary on all is that The Matrix Resurrections is—literally and likely intentionally—a hollow simulacrum of the original, less a sequel than a mournful, defiant refusal to play the studio franchise game.
Yet watching it still gave me the same depressing feeling I felt during the Star Wars and Jurassic World sequels, every live-action Disney remake, and those putrid Hobbit films that I refuse to talk about. It’s a uniquely dispiriting form of déjà vu—which, as we learned in the first Matrix, is a very bad sign that something’s been changed by malicious agents and our humanity is now in grave danger.
The most charitable read is that Resurrections, like Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, is a self-aware exercise in futility—art commenting on art’s collapse. But even critical, self-referential art must still be coherent and creative to land its message. Otherwise, it’s not commentary—it’s just collapse.
This is the rare film that fails on nearly every axis by which you might justify its existence. It’s neither a good hard reboot like Batman Begins nor soft reboot like The Force Awakens, nor a thoughtful legacy sequel like Creed or Top Gun: Maverick. It’s not an effective use of meta-commentary like The Cabin in the Woods or Scream. It’s not even a successful cautionary tale about franchise fatigue, only because the box office has been carpet-bombed with the booming intensity of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer by duds like 2010’s The Last Air Bender, 2013’s The Lone Ranger, 2015’s Fan4stic, 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence, 2017’s The Mummy, 2018’s The Predator, 2019’s Dark Phoenix, 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy, 2022’s Lightyear, and 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
You probably already forgot about these boondoggles but I haven’t.
Each one hurt me like a paper cut to the brain.
But this one stung more—because the original Matrix remains one of my favorite films of all time. Watching Resurrections felt like Lana Wachowski either forgot—or refused to apply—the very principles that made the original so great.
There were so many better ways to revisit this world.
Why not show Neo grappling with the burden of becoming a mythical savior? Why not show Neo mentoring Bugs or center the story on Trinity to give us a fresh, feminine perspective? Why not give us a new, urgent take on the rise of AI—a threat that’s no longer theoretical? Why not trust the audience to want something more than just a timid echo?
Resurrections isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system. Neo and Agent Smith would agree: it was inevitable. It’s the end result of creative stagnation, where studios keep mistaking nostalgia for narrative and meta-winks for meaning.
It’s also inevitable because the Wachowskis—brilliant, maximalist weirdos—have never played the studio game. Instead of checking out and cashing in on their big hit, they followed The Matrix with projects that got messier, riskier, and more personal. Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Sense8, and Jupiter Ascending— were all defiant, wonky swings for the fences.
It’s tempting to read Resurrections as an act of sabotage, or maybe surrender. But the truth is simpler and sadder: some worlds just aren’t meant to be revisited— not because they’re sacred, but because they were complete.
So if you’re craving more Matrix, don’t reach for a reboot. Go back to the original. It still rips.
Or go watch something comparably bold and original—like Sinners!
The Matrix endures because it didn’t just break the mold—it obliterated it with the audacity few films even attempt. It asked us to see past illusion. Resurrections has already faded away because, like so many sequels, it asked us to mistake déjà vu for depth.
I gave it a shot—because, like so many of us, I still want to believe in heroes, in stories, and in the possibility that the next one might surprise us.
Hope, as the Architect once warned, is the quintessential human delusion.
But maybe it’s not delusional. Maybe it’s just human.
And maybe that’s the real tragedy.