A Simple Plot Change To Neo And Trinity Would Fix 'Matrix Resurrections'

The Matrix Resurrections might be the first big-budget Hollywood movie that argues against its own existence. Most of the first half is about why there shouldn't be more Matrix sequels, at which point you can feel the movie sighing and going, "Ugh, fine, let's get this over with, I guess." Like Neo, the franchise itself didn't seem too thrilled about having had its corpse dug up and glued back together like an old laptop with broken hinges. We're probably not the first to point out that the scene where the Analyst talks about how hard it was to bring Neo back is pretty much just Lana Wachowski griping about the film's production. 

This line, in particular, seems to reflect the tortured process of breaking the film's story: "We worked for years trying to activate your source code. I was about to give up when I realized ... it was never just you." Like the Analyst, Wachowski apparently decided that the only way to make the story work was to make it so Neo wasn't the only "The One." Turns out Trinity can do some pretty crazy crap, too, because the love she and Neo share is so intense that it makes the Matrix glitch out like an un-blown Nintendo cartridge. And that's actually a pretty interesting idea, especially given how played out the "Very Special Boy Saves The Planet" trope is at this point, but ... why stop at Trinity? 

See, one problem with this movie (and arguably the Matrix sequels in general) is that everything Neo does is supposed to be in service of liberating "the people" from the yoke of the machines, but we rarely see those people. Sure, there are plenty of regular schmucks standing in the background while the main characters find inventive new ways of causing vehicular damage, but they are non-entities -- even more so in this movie, which reveals that a ton of them are just zombies that Neo can mow down without a second of hesitation. 

So why should we give a crap about a bunch of faceless sheeple who serve no real role in the story? "What role could the literally sleeping masses serve?" you may ask. Well, look at Neo: he started as a regular office drone before a series of circumstances, and personal decisions led him to kung-fu punch evil computer programs on rooftops. Trinity, too, was presumably an average customer service representative or something in her past. What if instead of revealing that there are two "The Ones," Resurrections revealed there are none -- and billions at the same time. Neo was never special: he was simply the first to unlock his full potential. Trinity's flight scene could be the moment when we realize that the same reality-breaking powers are hiding inside all humans, not just the ones Neo has had sweaty cave sex with. 

At that point, Neo's quest to "wake up the sheeple" would become a more pressing matter, and that nameless crowd would finally serve a purpose other than standing by and watching their cars get wrecked. And if the implication that no one is truly superior to anyone else pisses off a certain subsection of the audience, all the better. At the very least, this twist would have set a more positive message for this movie than "Some people aren't really people, go ahead and run them over with your bike if you want!" 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Warner Bros. Pictures