The Matrix Ressurections is just three weeks away. Keanu Reeves will soon be on the promotional trail—the profiles have already started. Over the last decade, as popular opinion of Keanu The Actor and Keanu The Movie Star have been revised upward, Keanu press tours have become highlight reels of Keanu’s enduring popularity. He just never gets flustered, never gets spiky, never complains, he’s always open and fun and dorkier than you presume the #1 Living Hollywood Mystery will be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Keanu Reeves is a secret dork and it’s a big part of his appeal. With Resurrections, he’s revisiting one of his most iconic characters, so the press tour is bound to be a nostalgia free-for-all and I can’t wait to see Keanu navigate it. He never falls into the nostalgia trap. Watching him navigate other people’s nostalgia for Neo is going to be fun.
Speaking of nostalgia, one of the worries built up around Resurrections is that, based on the trailers, it looks like a rehash of The Matrix. A new trailer, though, makes it obvious the similarities are deliberate, invoking the idea that déjà vu is a sign of the matrix resetting after a change. I don’t invest in fan theories, especially before a movie even comes out, but it’s pretty clear Neo is trapped in a new matrix, maybe even a matrix-within-a-matrix, and the way he’s being kept there is by having his real memories overwritten with new, fake ones. Thus, all the déjà vu, the matrix is constantly resetting his world as a means of control. I am so curious to see how Lana Wachowski reimagines the matrix now, twenty-two years on from the first movie. I hope she avoids the nostalgia trap, too, because this is the perfect time for a movie about self-selecting reality and the danger of delusion.
