Category Archives: Keanu Reeves

The Matrix Resurrections review – Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss spark in utopian reboot

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A sunny new world beckons for Neo and Trinity in this self-aware but smart fourth instalment of the sci-fi classic

Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is the designer of The Matrix, a popular video game set in a virtual reality. His bosses have ordered a sequel; at an ideas meeting, his colleagues throw around a few ideas. PVC. Guns. Trans allegory. There is much winking and nudging in Lana Wachowski’s follow-up to the groundbreaking sci-fi films she co-created with her sister Lilly. Wachowski understands that in the 20 years since, their legacy has been boiled down to a catalogue of memes with lucrative franchise potential. Yet her newest chapter manages to be self-aware (at times overly so) without being entirely cynical.

Those foggy on the details of the trilogy’s plot will benefit from the exposition-heavy first act. Plagued by memories of his past, Anderson – also known as Neo – must once again choose whether to take the red pill offered by hacker Bugs (Jessica Henwick, whip-smart), and wake up, or continue to swallow his current reality. Carrie-Anne Moss’s Tiffany, a motorcycle mechanic and mother of two whom Neo remembers as Trinity, has a choice to make too. The romance between them has always been the molten core of the Matrix films; their power as a duo is what drives the story forward.

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The Matrix Resurrections: the bonkers visuals, the love story and the final reveal – discuss with spoilers

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Neil Patrick Harris and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II join Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in a fourth instalment in the franchise that is full of little treasures

  • This article contains spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections

There’s no need for a blue pill. The Matrix Resurrections is, by and large, an engaging and energetic motion picture, and worthy of being on the same shelf as the groundbreaking original from 1999. Unlike the soul-crushingly dull previous entry, The Matrix Revolutions, it remembers that mind-scrambling pseudo-intellectual yammering gets tiresome on-screen if there isn’t also some fun. Luckily, director Lana Wachowski, working apart from her sister Lilly for the first time, and her screenwriting partners David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, have included plenty of flashbacks. A rewatch isn’t absolutely necessary. But talking about the new one after you see it is.

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The Matrix Resurrections review – drained of life by the Hollywood machine

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Keanu Reeves is back as cyberpunk icon Neo but fans of the original will find this cynical reboot a bitter pill to swallow

Eighteen years after what we thought was the third and final Matrix film, The Matrix Revolutions, Lana Wachowski has directed a fourth: The Matrix Resurrections. But despite some ingenious touches (a very funny name, for example, for a VR coffee shop) the boulder has been rolled back from the tomb to reveal that the franchise’s corpse is sadly still in there. This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.

The first Matrix was a brilliant, prescient sci-fi action thriller that in 1999 presented us with Keanu Reeves as a computer hacker codenamed “Neo”, stumbling across the apparent activity of a police state whose workings he scarcely suspected. Charismatic rebel Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) brings Neo to the mysterious figure of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) who offers our reluctant hero one of the most famous choices in modern cinema: the blue pill or the red pill. The first will allow Neo back into his torpid quasi-contentment, the second will irreversibly reveal to him the truth about all existence. He swallows the red and discovers all our lives exist in a digitally fabricated, illusory world, while our comatose bodies are milked for their energies in giant farms by our machine overlords.

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‘I want to get as much done as I can’: Keanu Reeves on poetry, grief and making the most of every minute

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He is one of Hollywood’s hardest working and well-liked actors. As the next instalment of his epic Matrix series hits the big screen, Tom Lamont meets the famously thoughtful star

Keanu Reeves covers his face with both hands. Long bands of the actor’s straggly, jet-black hair flit from side to side as he shakes his cradled head. Reeves, who is 57, has a new Matrix movie out soon. It will be the first instalment in that famous sci-fi series since the turn of the century, when a visually splendid trilogy – The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions – shook blockbuster cinema to its foundations. I have just been telling him what an unforgettable outing that first Matrix movie was for me, back in 1999, when I saw it in a packed, noisy cinema full of people who couldn’t sit still for excitement. I’ve also just admitted to Reeves that, when The Matrix Resurrections is made available later this month, via various platforms, I’ll probably stream it at home, probably on a laptop.

I only intend this as a light prompt to get him talking about Hollywood in 2021, a curious time for showbusiness, with Covid precautions and advances in streaming tech combining to make so many movies available for home viewing at the same time as they appear in cinemas. But perhaps Reeves is someone who feels things more deeply than most, because suddenly he begins to plead with me, through muffling fingers: “Dude? Don’t stream that movie… Don’t you fucking stream that movie.”

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Matrix party ‘disguised as film shoot’ to bypass German Covid rules

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Keanu Reeves among 200 people at studio party where guests came as extras, says report

German health authorities say they plan to speak to the studio where the latest Matrix film was shot after a party allegedly attended by the Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves was held to mark the end of filming, despite coronavirus restrictions.

About 200 people were at the party disguised as a film shoot, with the guests invited to come as extras in an apparent attempt to bypass health regulations, according to the German tabloid Bild.

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