![]() ![]() Still, not much here is different other than some of Reeves’s facial creases and salt-and-pepper hair. A less happy addition is Neil Patrick Harris, who delivers an unhelpful, one-dimensional performance as the Analyst. Instead, a silky Jonathan Groff now prowls around menacingly, his boyishness having been nicely weaponized for his role as a sly trickster. Alas, missing in action are both Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne, who added gravitas and much-needed wit. There have been some significant cast changes since the third movie. He also meets a mysterious figure called both Agent Smith and Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, whose velvety, sepulchral voice adds shivers of danger). Speaking of which: As before, he also has an apparent choice to remain ignorant about his existential condition or embrace its painful truth. ![]() (You don’t need to revisit what happened earlier in the cycle, the movie does it for you.) Once again, Anderson is in dreamland writing code, this time for his role as a video game designer working on a project called Binary. What follows plays like a loving, narratively clotted tribute video to the “Matrix” cycle itself complete with innumerable bullets and almost as many flashbacks to the younger Neo. In the series’ wittily perverse take on the circle of life, these machines keep human bodies - Anderson’s included - imprisoned in goo-filled vats, using the energy from these meat puppets to power the Matrix. Here, human avatars go about their business believing themselves free. Anderson’s world resembles our own (though airlessly art directed) but is a software program called the Matrix that’s run by artificially intelligent machines. Once again, Reeves plays both Thomas Anderson and Neo, who exist in separate yet conjoined realms. The series resumes in “The Matrix Resurrections,” which nudges the cycle forward even while it circles back to swallow its own tail. It also provided grist for reams of articles, dissertations and scholarly books (“The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real”), taking its place as one of contemporary pop culture’s supreme interpretive chew toys. The chase continued and at times seemed never-ending as it endured through two sequels, comics and video games. the One (Keanu Reeves, cinema’s ideal savior), reads on his desktop monitor, shortly before doing just that. The series first invoked Lewis Carroll’s elusive bunny in the first movie, the 1999 genre game changer that was jointly directed by the Wachowski siblings and soon set audiences’ heads on fire. You may find yourself asking much the same question while watching the fourth movie in “The Matrix” series, as it alternately amuses and frustrates you with its fantastical world. As she walks through the hall, Alice wonders how she’s ever going to get out. There are doors up and down the passageway, but they’re all locked. After she chases the White Rabbit down a very long tunnel, Alice enters a low, dim hall. ![]()
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