Film fans are given their first full taste of the fourth installment within the Matrix franchise during a trailer that reintroduces Keanu Reeves’ hero Neo. The Matrix Resurrections are going to be released in cinemas and on the HBO Max streaming service in December. The original Matrix movie came to call in 1999, and therefore the first two sequels were both released in 2003. The series involves a computer game constructed by a futuristic AI to enslave humankind. Returning co-star Carrie-Anne Moss also can be seen within the trailer, which had its online premiere on Thursday.
Here are five things we took far away from the primary check out what’s already one among the year’s most eagerly-awaited blockbusters. The trailer opens with a bearded Reeves seeking guidance from a bespectacled psychiatrist, played by Neil Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother fame. Reeves’ character says he’s having dreams that appear to allude to Neo’s past because the Messianic figurehead of a resistance movement at war with the AI behind the Matrix.
Reeves, whom Harris calls Thomas, seems oblivious to the reality Neo learned within the first film – that the planet he knows may be a sophisticated simulation cooked up by computer.
But he discerns that something is up as he takes an elevator, studies his reflection during a mirror and sits during a bathtub with a plastic yellow duck perched on his head. Given Neo seemed to die at the top of 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions, we’re led to ponder if Reeves is playing a special or alternative iteration of his original character. The same can also apply to Moss’s resistance fighter Trinity, who doesn’t appear to recognize Reeves once they meet and greet during a cafe . Then again, Thomas/Neo could also be trying to dam out memories of the person he once was – possibly by swallowing handfuls of tell-tale blue pills.
In the original film, Neo was offered a pill of that color that might allow him to return to and continue his simulated existence. Neo, of course, chose to require a red pill that, within the words of Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, let him “stay in Wonderland and [see] how deep the rabbit burrow goes”. Alice in Wonderland by Carroll may be a recurring motif within the Matrix universe and appears again in book form within the new three-minute trailer. A rabbit tattoo that alludes to Carroll’s White Rabbit is seen on the arm of another character, played by British-Chinese actress Jessica Fenwick. The backing music, meanwhile, is Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, a psychedelic 1967 anthem itself inspired by Carroll’s writing and imagery.
