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Eighteen years after Neo bent the spoon, Warner Bros. bet the whole franchise on a Christmas Day return.
The Matrix Resurrections arrived December 22, 2021, dropping simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max as the fourth chapter in a series that hadn’t produced a new film since 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions. Lana Wachowski directed solo this time, co-writing with novelists David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, and brought back Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as Neo and Trinity. What she delivered split critics and lifelong fans right down the middle within hours of release.
- The film hit theaters and HBO Max the same day, 18 years after Revolutions and 22 years after the 1999 original.
- Only two original leads returned — Reeves and Moss — while Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stepped in as a new Morpheus and Jonathan Groff took over as a new Agent Smith, replacing Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving.
- The plot leans heavily on meta-commentary, casting Reeves’ Thomas Anderson as an award-winning game designer being pressured by his own corporate parent, Warner Bros., to build a sequel to his hit trilogy called “The Matrix.”
A Franchise Resurrected on Two Screens at Once
Warner Bros. didn’t just bring the Matrix back — it changed how the sequel reached audiences. Releasing day-and-date on HBO Max alongside its theatrical run, Resurrections picked up eighteen years after Revolutions closed out the trilogy, with Neo and Trinity believed dead and now living as separate individuals, unaware of who they used to be, inside a rebuilt version of the simulation. Anyone curious how the series got here should check the fan breakdown in Matrix 4: The Greatest Lie! | Mind-Blowing Theory, which digs into the timeline questions the new film raises.
Neo rediscovering his identity and the truth about this new Matrix drives the plot forward, and Reeves and Moss both turn in commendable performances carrying that thread. The script around them, though, spends a lot of its runtime looking backward — leaning on flashbacks and reused footage from the 1999 original rather than pushing the mythology into new territory.
Old Faces Missing, New Faces Stepping In
Of the four original leading roles, only Neo and Trinity carried over with their original actors. Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus and Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith are gone, replaced by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jonathan Groff, respectively, alongside Jessica Henwick’s new operative character, Bugs. Abdul-Mateen II earns the “Morpheus?… Yeeeessssss” energy in his scenes and makes the recast work, though the role itself gets less screen time than the character who once explained the entire concept of the Matrix to Neo — and to audiences — in one of the trilogy’s most iconic sequences.
Groff’s acting as the new Agent Smith is genuinely strong, but the fight choreography built around him doesn’t match what the second and third films established. Where Reloaded and Revolutions leveled up the action with new tricks — shooting upside down, longer takes, bigger stunt work — Resurrections largely repeats what’s already been seen, more than two decades later.
A Movie About Making a Movie
The film’s central gag is that Thomas Anderson is an award-winning video game designer who created a trilogy called “The Matrix,” and Warner Bros. — the actual studio releasing the actual movie — is pressuring him to make a sequel he doesn’t want to make. Critics on both sides of the reaction split agreed the device is deliberate. David Sims of The Atlantic praised Wachowski for using that framing to reject cheap nostalgia and take a direct shot at franchise reboot culture, while IndieWire’s David Ehrlich and Variety’s Peter Debruge both pointed out that the movie spends much of its runtime self-consciously justifying why it exists at all.
That self-awareness is clever on paper, but in practice it crowds out the kind of big-idea conversations that defined earlier entries — Neo’s dialogue with the Architect, or the exchange with Sati’s father about love in a train station. Those ideas got room to breathe. Here, the philosophical material is compressed into brief exchanges, and the introduction of Neil Patrick Harris’s new villain character never gets the depth the series’ past antagonists carried.
Critics and Fans Split Right Down the Middle
Reception on December 21 and 22, 2021, proved sharply divided. Some reviewers and fans praised the Neo-Trinity romance at the film’s core and admired Wachowski’s willingness to swing big conceptually. Others zeroed in on the extensive flashbacks to the 1999 original, jarring comedic tone shifts, and action sequences that fell short of the standard the trilogy itself set decades earlier.
The Matrix Resurrections gets a C- from me.
The introduction of new characters felt forced in places, and the movie’s attempt to serve both longtime trilogy die-hards and a new generation unfamiliar with the franchise never fully resolves who the film is actually for. It’s an ambitious swing that doesn’t land with the same force as the ones that came before it. Readers looking for what else is on the calendar in the genre can find more in The Best Upcoming SCIENCE-FICTION Movies 2021 (Trailers).
Warner Bros. got its day-and-date release and its meta-commentary on franchise fatigue delivered right on schedule, but the box office and streaming numbers over the holiday stretch will end up telling the real story of whether audiences wanted a fifth trip down the rabbit hole. For now, the debate over whether Neo should’ve stayed retired plays out the same way most Matrix arguments do — loudly, and with nobody fully agreeing on what just happened.
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