Somewhere over the digital horizon, down the rabbit hole and straight on til morning, a new Matrix episode is brewing. After handing us three deeply average (at best) sequels to the majestic original 1999 film, studio Warner Bros has decided to hand the keys of the Nebuchadnezzar to Drew Goddard, whose writing credits include The Martian, The Cabin in the Woods, and Cloverfield. It’s probably a good idea, because the series’ creators, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, have clearly run out of ideas if 2021’s completely superfluous The Matrix Resurrections is anything to go by (although to be fair, Lilly did not even get involved in that one).
Resurrections joined the ranks of belated sequels to science fiction and fantasy totems that never quite live up to the standards of the original, yet somehow still keep coming. Next year we are due a new Tron movie, Tron: Ares, which will star Jared Leto, Gillian Anderson, Evan Peters and Greta Lee. These are all actors who have done fine work, and director Joachim Rønning is an Oscar nominee who made a passable effort on 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, yet there is at least a 50% chance the movie will carry all the cultural weight of a new Lighthouse Family album. There is also a new Alien movie in the works, which does at least look promising. And it can only be so long before somebody in LA drags Arnie out of retirement for one last Terminator retread.
How many times have we seen these films enter the limelight with a flurry of promotional activity, raising the desperate hopes of ravening fans before the inevitable bad reviews kick in and the unfortunate entry slips sheepishly through the back door of the Odeon fire escape, never to be seen again? Terminators three, four and five (six was OK); Alien vs Predator; Prometheus; nearly every movie with Star Wars in the title since the original trilogy … I feel as if I have spent half my life hoping these episodes would recapture the wonder of the films that inspired them in the first place, only to be disappointed when it becomes clear something is missing. It’s the hope that kills you.
And yet every few years, a sequel comes along that bucks the trend: a Prey or Blade Runner 2049, which opens up the creative architecture and makes us believe again. And this is the best we can look forward to, because unwanted new follow-ups to genre classics will seemingly always keep coming, for the same reason that each a brand of McDonald’s or Burger King is much less likely to fail than the wonderful new independent bistro that just opened up down the road.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky enough, the new Matrix movie will be one of these outliers. Goddard is at the very least an ideas man, rather than the kind of hired Hollywood hand who often taking charge of these sequels. And that is clearly what the project needs. The world imagined by the Wachowskis in 1999 was an endlessly open creative sandbox, but clearly it needs a major revamp if it is to have any credibility a quarter of a century on.
Goddard’s first task is to work out exactly what the essence of The Matrix is. Is it the screen chemistry between Keanu Reeves’s Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity? Evidence from the lukewarm reaction to Resurrections would suggest not. And yet if Goddard junks the original cast entirely in favour of all-new adventures in the real and digital futures, how does he do so without basically writing off the last three movies? We were always told Neo might not be “The One”, but if it turns out he actually isn’t, then a hell of a lot of screen time would seem to have been wasted.
Perhaps the film-maker could pull an old Hollywood trick and bring back the one Matrix alumnus who didn’t make it into the most recent sequel: Laurence Fishburne. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who replaced the venerable actor as a younger version of Morpheus, failed to capture the imagination, and if Goddard does plan to feed off nostalgia, there is no one better to capture the spirit of the original 1999 entry. On the other hand, Resurrections’ failure to resonate with audiences hints that if there really is anything left to be harvested from this aching old sci-fi franchise, it is probably not more glossy-eyed nostalgia. If we’re really going to get excited about taking the red pill once again, the director might be better off choosing a different rabbit hole altogether this time around.
