As promised, the first trailer for The Matrix Resurrections is here, and it looks very cool. Yes, there’s a lot of slow-motion action and a thematically relevant song (“White Rabbit,” of course), but there’s also a single shot of Keanu Reeves in a bathtub with a rubber ducky on his head, which is alone worth the price of admission.
Resurrections takes place sometime after The Matrix Revolutions, but it seems like nothing has changed: Thomas Anderson (Reeves) goes about his days, goes to his therapist (Neil Patrick Harris), takes little blue pills. But he has “dreams that weren’t just dreams” about his previous existence as Neo. And then he meets a woman in a coffee shop who asks if they’ve met, and a man in some very distinctive sunglasses, and everything starts to change. Again. Alice is going back to Wonderland.
The Matrix Resurrections is directed by Lana Wachowski, this time writing with novelists David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss return as Neo and Trinity, and Jada Pinkett Smith is also back. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen) and Jessica Henwick (Iron Fist) join in what are clearly pretty pivotal roles. Jonathan Groff (Hamilton) is in there too, along with Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Quantico), Christina Ricci (Speed Racer), and several actors from Lana and Lily Wachowski’s Sense8 (Eréndira Ibarra, Max Riemelt, and Brian J. Smith).
I’m not going to make any claims that Abdul-Mateen is playing some version of Morpheus, because this is a Wachowski film and who knows, but he is dressed a certain way that’s certainly supposed to make us think of Laurence Fishburne’s character. We’ll just have to wait to find out why—and to find out why it seems like the end of The Matrix Revolutions made no difference in the world.
The Matrix Resurrections will be in theaters and on HBO Max on December 22, 2021.
