Is that Morpheus? What are those blue pills for? And will this be the same old story told for a fourth different time?
The original Matrix trilogy climaxed with Keanu Reeves’s Neo sacrificing himself to save both the human and machine civilisations from the nefarious Smith (Hugo Weaving), after the latter threatened to take down both warring parties. That always struck me as a bit of a cop-out, particularly as it is heavily hinted that our hero will be back at some point in the distant future. Now he is and, in the first
trailer for The Matrix Resurrections, it seems that when the Matrix was rebooted at the end of 2003’s middling third instalment, the Neo we once knew also seems to have been wiped from existence.
In his place is a beardy, incredibly well-aged fiftysomething who looks a bit like John Wick, or possibly that brooding weirdo from The Gift. He meets Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity in a coffee shop, but fails to recognise her despite all their adventures down the digital rabbit hole. Later he’s seen training in what appears to be a dojo with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s unnamed character, who appears to be fulfilling the Morpheus role of martial arts mentor and guide to the Matrix. Is Abdul-Mateen playing a younger version of the human resistance leader, and if so couldn’t they just have digitally de-aged him, given the entire movie probably takes place inside Adobe After Effects anyway?