The Matrix Resurrections is teasing both the return of Keanu Reeves’ Neo and his newly resurrected skills of martial arts in a new promo which you can watch right here.
The new TV spot features an appropriately kickass new original track, “Back to Life,” by Quantrelle.
The Matrix Resurrections is being touted as a continuation of the story established in the 1999 original The Matrix, reuniting Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity in an expansion of their story.
As with the original film, Resurrections looks to be centering around people being awakened from a digital dream world that is indistinguishable from the real thing and controlled by malevolent artificial intelligence overlords who are harvesting human beings to be used as batteries to power their machines.
In the new clip, we see a montage of images from the new film that contain a number of callbacks to the 1999 original The Matrix. This included a swat team confronting a leather-clad resistance fighter, a police officer morphing into one of the insidious program enforcers called agents, and the squid-like sentinel machines doing battle with the hovercrafts helmed by the human resistance still holding out for a last-ditch effort of survival and liberation in the real world, a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by a century-long war between people and machines.
We also get a taste of some of the wall-crushing hand-to-hand combat that was such a highlight of the original, including a double punch by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Morpheus being blocked by Neo in a digitally rendered dojo.
In terms of the action, Resurrections seems in trailers and clips we’ve seen so far to be bringing back more of the gritty martial arts combat from the 1999 original. At the end of the promo, we see Neo confront several people in a warehouse, flinging one of his opponents clear across the room with an open-handed strike. “I still know kung fu,” Neo exclaims in the clip, in another callback to the original film.
Watch The Matrix Resurrections when it comes out in theaters and on HBO Max on Dec. 22.
