There are two movies ensconced within The Matrix: Resurrections. The one is, as HBO Max describes it, "the long-awaited fourth film in the groundbreaking franchise that redefined a genre." The other is, for lack of better words, The Matrix: Resurrections.

As Yet Another Sequel to a movie best known for kung fu, robo-dystopias, and deep thoughts about society keepin' us all down, Resurrections is lackluster. The kung fu—if you want to call it that—is pointedly subpar. The dystopia has slightly de-dystopianized. (The Matrix has got a new perky color scheme, while the "real world" has plant life and cute anime robots.) As for the deep thoughts... well, it's hard to look past the scene set at a corporate meeting where a bunch of well-paid marketers argue about which meaning in the original Matrix was the deepest.

It's hard to look past a lot of things, really. This is a movie that opens up with a replica of the original film's opening scene, as new characters offer commentary from the peanut gallery. When we meet the new Agent Smith—played by a decidedly un-Smith-like Jonathan Groff—we're given frequent flashes of Hugo Weaving's original performance. And when the new Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, replacing Laurence Fishburne) decides it's time to repeat his original's iconic red pill/blue pill scene, he does it beneath a giant projection of Fishburne's character going through the same motions two decades ago.

It is disconcertingly on-the-nose—which is of course the point. Thomas "Neo" Anderson, without explanation, is back alive, working at a game company which designed The Matrix as a video game. He meets his dead ex Trinity, calling herself Tiffany, at a coffee shop called Simulatte, where she tells him that she always thought she looked like Trinity from the games. (Her husband Chad disagrees.) Thomas wants to work on a brand-new game called Binary, but his boss, Agent Smith, tells him they're making a fourth Matrix m—uh, game, instead. And we're treated to the aforementioned montage, set to White Rabbit, in which Thomas's life reiterates and regurgitates itself, as a bunch of irritating twentysomethings debate whether bullet time or cryptofacism matters more.

Somehow, The Matrix has surpassed even Fight Club as the 1999 movie that most got picked up and re-appropriated by violent reactionary thugs. "The red pill" has become a phrase to describe an awakening to a decidedly right-wing version of the "truth," namely that women are bitches and Donald Trump is good. At the same time, as the Wachowskis publicly came out as trans women and made a series of increasingly queer-centric films, they became icons for the progressive left as well. And while all this was happening, the aesthetics of the franchise were strip-mined to form the basis of a broad swath of popular culture. Leather and latex and sunglasses, kung-fu fetishized via special effects, hellscapes defined by mass collective ignorance, and even the black-on-green color palette became the signifiers of a new wave of action filmmaking, sci-fi, and "heady" thrillers. No Matrix, no Christopher Nolan—and that means The Dark Knight as much as it means the more-obvious Inception.

Of course, the original Matrix trilogy did plenty of legwork demonstrating that it might be interested in more than just kung fu. The Matrix Reloaded, after a series of increasingly cartoony showdowns, climaxes in Neo's confrontation with The Architect, who tells him that all his fighting was not only futile, but an intentional part of the Matrix's overall design. And The Matrix Revolutions, which remains the most critically-scorned part of the series, attempted to deconstruct its original hero's narrative so thoroughly that it's still a little difficult to parse. At the time of its creation, The Matrix was an impregnable, enigmatic masterpiece, its creators so cool that they became symbols of cool itself. That overwhelming success, ironically, was what freed them to make a series of increasingly ambitious, increasingly weird movies that defied the corporate filmmaking conglomerate that their film had become one of the definitive cornerstones of.

There is The Matrix as it exists in pop culture, and then there is The Matrix as a part of its creators' overarching artistic vision. There is "the philosophy of The Matrix" as can be extracted directly from the text, then interpreted however you see fit; then there is "the philosophy of The Matrix" as the thing the Wachowskis were ultimately trying to say. Two seemingly-identical movies, two seemingly-identical narratives, one hidden by the other, which in turn seems malevolently determined to eradicate its purported "nemesis."

It's either very strange that the story of The Matrix perfectly mirrors the story of what happened to The Matrix, or it suggests that The Matrix was onto something after all.

The Matrix: Resurrections does something very funny and subversive by paralleling the narrative of the original film almost point-by-point. The Matrix: Resurrections is, once again, the story of Neo, who is freed from The Matrix, discovers that he is "the One," and proceeds to save humankind. The Matrix: Resurrections is simultaneously the story of people watching The Matrix: Resurrections from within it, commenting on how similar it is to The Matrix, and occasionally cosplaying as its original characters. (Abdul-Mateen's "Morpheus" is such a fanboy of the original that he occasionally tries to repeat Fishburne's lines verbatim, then immediately breaks out into a goofy smile and destroys the ambiance entirely.)

Beneath the repetitions, a new story slowly emerges: one of Thomas Anderson at a coffee shop, staring at that woman who looks so familiar to him, trying to get himself to speak to her for no other reason than that she seems like she might save his life—and there's no reason for him to think that, for that matter. This Thomas Anderson has a therapist who's well-versed in the language of modern traumas: Anderson's frequent realizations that he's still trapped in the Matrix are merely signs that he's been "triggered," and represent anxieties and stresses in his life: they mean anything, in other words, but their most literal truth. And even after this Anderson is freed from the Matrix, becomes Neo, and is required to attend a mandatory "kung fu with Morpheus" seminar, he's still just thinking about that woman from the coffee shop. When he ends the fight with Morpheus, all without throwing a single punch, he does it solely because Morpheus reminds him that rescuing Trinity is what this is all about.

But this isn't a savior narrative, exactly. In fact, Neo was never really much of a savior. He spends most of the original Matrix completely failing to live up to his potential—and, if anything, Trinity saves him. He spends Reloaded being told that he was never a savior; he spends Revolutions serving as an emissary from one fighting force to another, and "saves the world" by losing his final showdown with Smith. Now, his save-Trinity mission hinges, not on any agency he has, but on one simple question: does Trinity actually want to be saved?

The Matrix uses the chasm between skyscrapers as a recurring image that reflects certain ideas. Early on, Thomas Anderson is asked to make a daring escape from his workplace, and fails to in large part because of his fear of heights. Later, he's asked to jump between buildings, tries, fails, and faceplants in comic fashion. Towards the end he starts leaping properly, climaxing in the last shot of the movie, where he flat-out flies.

These images are each repeated in Resurrections, but their meanings have changed. The first time we see Neo in this new movie, it's in a new character's recollection of him, as he's on the verge of jumping to his death. That, despite his success as a renowned game designer in the new Matrix. If anything, his success is precisely what puts him on the brink of a nervous breakdown: how can he possibly be this miserable, when everything about his life is so good? More to the point, how could he possibly sacrifice all this, in the name of a feeling he can barely articulate and can't be sure means anything whatsoever?

In The Matrix, that leap represented the escape from rules, whether those rules were corporate drudgery or gravity itself. The leap meant non-conformity; making the leap meant proof that Neo was special enough to make it. It was interpreted by various would-be elitists as a calling sign of their sad little so-called rebellions, in which they typically embraced oppression and divisiveness and called it human progress. Here in Resurrections, that leap is recontextualized. It is a literal leap of faith: to jump is to believe, not in yourself, but in what you're jumping for. More specifically, it is a leap that Neo makes for love—and the most terrifying part of the leap, the climactic hinge of the movie, is not professing his love for Trinity but waiting to hear whether she feels that love back, and feels it enough to risk everything else she has.

Opposing this poorly-defined sentimentality is the new Matrix, which is defined more than anything as definition itself. It is not as grim or as desolate as the original artificial reality; instead, it seems propelled by a constant categorization, an endless reduction of signifiers to signifieds, genuine experiences reduced to weightless analysis. Lives are just a series of data points, whether it's Tiffany's husband and children signifying her "happiness" or Thomas's throngs of adoring coworkers signifying his. Thomas's therapist, who inevitably is revealed to be his newest nemesis, fights Neo not by oppressing him but by "helping" him, reducing powerful and desperate emotions to toothless narratives about how good this is for him. And the question is asked again and again: how can you possibly put your faith in something just because it feels right? How can you trust yourself at all? Why would you rely upon the least-quantifiable parts of you, when you could just look at the parts we have data for, listen to our interpretations, and trust us when we say that the rest will all take care of itself?

It's no accident that this Matrix manifests itself, in-text, as Warner Bros itself, who we're told has decided it'll be making a fourth Matrix movie game with or without the consent of its original creator. There is certainly a level on which Resurrections is a movie about corporate reduction of bold artistic experiences to financial formulas. That's not a pithy tangent here: it's one and the same with Resurrections' battle for its own soul. Thomas, we're told, created The Matrix as part of his restless search for something deep within himself; he's working on Binary as a continuation of that search. But The Matrix was boiled down to its unique elements, and seen as valuable precisely because those elements are no longer unique, and therefore can be commodified; a new Matrix is not only necessary, but must not deviate from echoing itself, because anything new would be a leap of... well.

Art as love, freedom as love. Even that's a bit reductive, isn't it? The Analyst sneers at this, towards the movie's end, as "sentimentalism," and insists that nobody will go for it. And of course it's not "about" love, plain and simple. Perhaps the cue telling us this occurs during the movie's only "real" kung fu sequence, which takes place (implausibly) between Neo's squad and the Merovingian's. In The Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian is a hedonist and aesthete, perfectly happy under his oppressive regime so long as there's cake to eat and women to fuck. Here, he's reduced to a snarling, half-sane mess, hissing about how Neo is to blame for teenagers texting, Facebook, and the decline in quality and originality in films, literature, and the arts. (I am not making any of that up.)

Critiques of modernity tend to go hand-in-hand with regressive social mores. The folks who loudly hate on modern architecture tend to also hate women's suffrage. Criticizing the direction technology has taken is one thing; criticizing technology itself is another. There is always a golden yesteryear to yearn for, one where things were simpler because people knew their places. Typically, the yearning is done by the sorts of people who were freer to exploit others, though plenty of people fetishize the thought of their own subjugation.

The Wachowskis, by contrast, are hardly anti-futurist. All of their films have attempted to break narrative, technological, and artistic barriers. I think frequently of Lana Wachowski, talking about her and her sister's approach to composing Speed Racer, which was critically derided before it gradually came to be seen as a classic:

The recurring theme of restriction or oppressiveness is no accident. The Matrix may have been a critique of modern society, but it also looked to technology and futurism as an escape—and Resurrections is a response, in part, to how technology and futurism have become the new modern society, and have turned into straitjackets just as oppressive as the ones they once existed to defy. The exciting breakthroughs of computer-aided special effects have given way to the endless same-ification of CGI Disney-franchise films. The idea of a small haven for humanity amidst a robot-eroded future has turned into a narrative of rich men whining about the women who wish they'd assault women less, or complaining about transgender people for having the audacity to exist. The technology that once felt like a way to escape convention became a brand-new way to analyze data and generate endlessly lucrative new revenue streams, whether it's Netflix allegedly calculating the composition of its films and TV shows down to the last quirky cat or the neverending revivals of old nostalgic franchises that forced The Matrix: Resurrections to exist in the first place.

The Merovingian's complaints ignore that we got to where we are because we wanted to escape from "there" in the first place. His nostalgic, traditionalist sense of the arts—it is so weird that this movie has me talking about the artistic opinions that a minor character spouted in the middle of a kung fu fight—goes hand-in-hand with his former role as a smug date-rapist of a man: his idea of "better" is just another flavor of elitism, the same as rejections of "low-brow" or just plain new culture are often little more than rejections of the unfamiliar in favor of the familiar.

So it's derivative to reduce the message of Resurrections to "love conquers all," in part because Resurrections actively gives us Tiffany and her shit husband and shit kids as a refutation of love as a narrative that adheres to convention. Love, in Resurrections, is not easy. And its difficulty has nothing to do with robotic overlords or waves of police or guns going off everywhere. Love is difficult because it requires courage, not from one person but from two. Love requires faith. And that will never stop feeling like an impossible leap, the sort that feels impossible up until it happens.

In the end, love itself is a reflection of uncertainty. And the antagonism of The Matrix is redefined as something subtler than control: it is the need for certainty that eliminates all certain things. In the original Matrix, it was repeated over and over again that humans are unpredictable, whereas machines favor predictability. You can interpret that to mean that human unpredictability is what makes humans powerful, in that classic rip-off-your-shackles kind of way. But here, the emphasis is placed less on the power of unpredictability, and more on our ability to choose what we're not fully sure of. It's less that we are unpredictable, and more that we are capable of more than just making the safe bets. We are capable of valuing more than mere safety. And our oppressors aren't those who force us down, restrain us, and rob us of control: they're the people who offer certainty as a trade-off for control. The ones who let us choose, while implying that it's not really a choice. There is the sane option, in which we find happiness being powerless, and then there's the crazy option, where we decide to do something else for no reason other than that we feel that we should.

The Matrix, of course, kicked off with that iconic choice between the red pill and the blue pill: liberation, we were told, or oblivion. Here, we get that scene again, but with a twist: the secret, new-Morpheus tells us, is that there was never any choice at all. There is the thing which we know we must do, and then there is the thing we do only because we are afraid. What the Analyst presents as a choice between sanity and madness instead becomes the choice between simulacrum and humanity. It's the difference between the "safe choice" that leads nowhere and the uncertain choice that is the only possible path towards something more.

Is it insane to make a sequel to a sci-fi martial arts movie that strips out virtually all of the martial arts? Absolutely. Just as it's insane to make a movie that's this loud about how parallel it runs to the original movie, or to recast two of your most iconic characters while showing constant clips of the original performers. It is a little bit crazy to add cute chirping robots to your dark and miserable overworld, when "cute" and "chirping" are two aesthetics that never would have worked with The Matrix's sense of cool. And it's insane to develop a brand-new technique for shooting film, then use it exclusively for scenes where one character monologues, while emphasizing that this new camera technique could never make for interesting hand-to-hand combat.

The Wachowskis have been criticized endlessly, ever since the original Matrix, for being something other than the original thing they were pigeonholed for. There is sometimes a palpable sense of shock or betrayal, as if they've failed to give "their fans" what those people were looking for. Other times, there's a snideness to the critiques lobbied against them, as if they were once killer filmmakers who have since lost their way. To some extent, both reactions are understandable: we think of art, and movies more than other mediums, as a kind of business transaction, in which we expect a certain bang for our buck. Somebody who consistently defies expectations can also be seen as someone who, time and again, "lets us down," as our preconception of what a movie might be is dashed by the reality of what that movie actually is. And it makes sense that the Wachowskis come under fire for this more than similar risk-taking filmmakers, not only because they created one of the era-defining blockbusters but because they have a love for sheer entertainment for entertainment's sake, for wit and thrills and striking compositions and big ideas. It's strange that directors with such virtuosic command of virtually every aspect of filmmaking—directors who proved that command with The Matrix, which was so startlingly good in every way that it couldn't help but inspire plagiarism on every front at once.

But the Wachowskis have also spent the rest of their career making it clear, time and time again, that they have no interest in making anything other than exactly what's on their minds. They have a strange knack for finding the uncanny valley between pop culture and the genuine avant-garde: part of the backlash against them, I think, is that every movie they make convinces audiences that this movie will be the straightforward crowd-pleaser, then whisks them away to predictably off-the-wall places. And they buck the trends in ways too contradictory to easily reconcile: they're too silly to be edgy, too heartfelt to be cynical, and entirely willing to flat-out make a movie about a guy who cares less about robots regrowing him in a vat and torturing him for eternity than he cares about striking up a conversation in a coffee shop. What they do is too formally strange to appeal to people who want love stories, and too sincerely invested in love as a radical quality to appeal to snobs who believe themselves to be above such claptrap.

The results are not always satisfying—and sometimes I'm left genuinely unsure whether I am satisfied for months or years after the fact. (Hell, I'm still too much of a coward to watch Jupiter Ascending a second time.) But they are frequently delightful, and always joyous. Sometimes, what delights is the sheer audacity of what they are attempting: fully half of the scenes in Resurrections feel like implausible feats of imagination just for being what they are. Other times, the delight comes from recognizing that these are directors who are so stupendously smart and ambitious that they will make the stupidest fucking moves in order to do what they think they ought to do.

On some level, Resurrections is a movie about Neo's realizing that, when Trinity called him the One, she meant he was the one for her. That's his grand epiphany here: that she is the One where he's concerned, and that he doesn't need to rescue her so much as show her that he's placed all his faith in her. It's yet another subversion of Neo as savior, one where his grand act of heroism is simply admitting how much another person matters to him. It's a deconstruction of a certain kind of masculine icon, so much so that it relocates the source of his guns-and-karate machismo in the most feminine place possible. (Though it's worth pointing out that Neo never so much as touches a gun in this new movie.)

On another level, though, Resurrections is a movie about interpreting and re-interpreting a text. It literally exists, not for its own sake, but because of The Matrix; it is a movie about watching The Matrix, reaching conclusions about The Matrix, and maybe missing the intended point. Because what's astonishing about Resurrections is not just that it exists despite being so damn weird: it's that it so thoroughly re-explores the original movie, finding a new thread within its original meanings, that watching it changes the meaning of the first Matrix too. Without editing a single line of the original movie (a la George Lucas), Resurrections turns The Matrix into something different. Rather, it reveals that The Matrix was something different all along, or could have been, while simultaneously locking a particular vision of the movie into place. It doesn't alter canon in any way: it merely explores the themes of the original movie so deftly that it becomes hard to see as anything else.

There are two movies ensconced within The Matrix: Resurrections. The one is, as HBO Max describes it, "the long-awaited fourth film in the groundbreaking franchise that redefined a genre." The other is The Matrix itself, the movie as it existed before the franchise, the movie whose "franchise" fought like mad to avoid doing what every other major motion picture franchise has shamelessly done ever since. Both are films about a rescue mission, but in Resurrections, the rescue is of The Matrix as much as it's of Trinity. It's an attempt to return to what made The Matrix resonate, not in the typical back-to-roots sense, but in the sense of continuing to push bravely towards something exceedingly uncertain, whether you define that uncertain thing as an artistic pursuit or a social message or an expression of love itself.

It is also a movie about Agent Smith really, really wanting to kiss Neo really badly, like on the lips and everything. I mean like holy shit.