There's a lot that looks familiar in the fourth "Matrix" movie, but this time,
Neo has no idea how much things have changed. If you were blinded by nostalgia,
you may have missed these small details in "The Matrix Resurrections."
"A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix."
During the montage of Tom Anderson's day to day life, we see him eating noodles
at a restaurant several times. In a small nod to the series' past,
the location directly parallels a line from the first movie — and provides a
maybe subliminal clue to the audience that Neo has indeed gotten plugged back into the Matrix.
After Neo is sent back into the Matrix for the first time,
he's driven down a familiar street with Morpheus and Trinity. At one point,
he points out the car window and identifies a restaurant he used to like. He then spends
some time pondering how they never actually happened and how his memories aren't real.
"God."
"What?"
"I used to eat there. Really good noodles."
Fast forward 22 real life years later and who knows how many in-universe years, and Neo is
back in a simulation again — and dropping hints about it by eating those really good noodles.
After meeting up with Bugs and the New Morpheus, Neo is informed that he sees himself differently
than everyone else — literally. He's put in front of a mirror and shown that, due to technological
shenanigans, most people see him as an old man with white hair and a white beard. This part
is pretty shocking — provided, of course, you missed the fact that we saw it already.
"If you want the truth, Neo, you're going to have to follow me."
We're definitely given at least one somewhat obvious hint,
when Bugs recalls seeing a man who looked nothing like Neo but was clearly Neo.
We're also given a much less obvious hint, one that requires a keen attention to detail. Pay
attention to scenes when Tom Anderson is in his bathroom, especially when he's not looking at the
mirror. The Tom everyone else sees — the gray, haggard man — is shown in the reflection. It's
brief, but it's there, and it's a neat clue for either observant viewers or those doing a rewatch.
"Where are we?"
One of the first big revelations of "The Matrix Resurrections" is that the machines
never returned Neo's body to humanity after he sacrificed himself. It's certainly an intriguing
plot point, but one nobody would bat an eye at ... unless they were familiar with "The
Matrix Online," a massively-multiplayer online game active in the late aughts.
The game was meant as a follow-up to the original trilogy, with the Wachowskis not
particularly intent on making a fourth movie at the time. In a 2005 interview with IGN,
the Wachowskis said that they wanted an MMO because — like their movies — it required
people to be active participants rather than passive observers:
"Those are the people, the people who thought about it, who worked at it, who we ultimately made
the trilogy for and it now makes perfect sense to us that they should inherit the storyline."
Sounds like proof that this was canonical, right? Nope. Ben Chamberlain,
the last full-time developer to work on "The Matrix Online," told Eurogamer in 2021,
"I don't think we ever worried about whether our game was canon.
I don't think anyone who worked on it ever thought that anything we were doing would
be regarded as canonical in the same way that the movies were."
This is just a way of saying that the game is not canon,
despite massive speculation. The game infamously saw the assassination of Morpheus,
but in "Resurrections" we find out that Morpheus instead lived on as a leader of humanity
and died of other causes, leaving a much-older Niobe to take his place.
But there's one detail that carried over from "The Matrix Online," and it's the
inciting incident of the game: Neo's body was never returned by the machines, and interested
parties want it back. It's hard to imagine that Lana Wachowski didn't have that in mind.
"Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia."
The first "Matrix" movie introduces the dangers of deja vu via a black cat.
"What did you just say?"
After Neo sees the same cat twice, he's informed that deja vu is a sign of a glitch in the Matrix,
an indicator that something's wrong.
It's hard not to get a sense of deja vu in the fourth movie, which is by design — after all,
"Resurrections" is both textually and subtextually about making another "Matrix" movie.
As such, there's at least one overt reference to this:
The Analyst's black cat named Deja Vu, who Tom Anderson does not like.
But there's one more instance of deja vu that's easy to miss,
unless you're paying close attention.
During the montage showing Tom's day-to-day life, we see a cluster of birds flying through the sky
multiple times. They fly forward before swooping backwards. What's easy to miss is that the exact
same birds fly in the exact same loop outside the exact same window — they're a glitch. It's not a
coincidence they show up around the same time as Bugs and Morpheus, and it's certainly not a
coincidence that we watch a similar group of birds dissolve mid-swoop towards the end of the movie.
"I remember this."
It was obvious from the beginning that the Analyst was keeping Neo
placated as Tom Anderson. After all, he was — in perhaps the least subtle
part of "Resurrections" — the one prescribing the blue pills.
There's also another striking detail about him: the blue frames of his glasses.
We don't find out that the Analyst is the one behind the new Matrix until most of the way
through "Resurrections," at which point he removes his glasses for most of the rest of the movie.
His glasses act as his personal blue pill in a way — he gets to see the artificial world he built.
When he needs to get aggressive, he removes his glasses, as if to demonstrate that he's
not hiding anymore. We do see him wearing the blue glasses one more time — at the very end,
after Neo and Trinity break into his residence and reveal that they've taken over the Matrix.
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