Emerging from The Matrix Resurrections, once again walking through the high-rises of global capital, I realised a month earlier I had been looking at the world through green-tinted glasses, immersed in nostalgia. It created a visual aesthetic and vocabulary that we can’t seem to outpace. But, equally as inescapably it seems, the current cultural moment has been created in its image cast in its hypercool, cyberpunk, black-leather shadow. The original Matrix is, inescapably, a millennial cultural product. Watching Lana Wachowski’s neo-Neo creation, it is impossible not to realise that, rather than The Matrix (1999) ageing well – still somehow fitting or reflecting contemporary reality – it is contemporary reality that has resisted ageing at all.

But then, almost exactly a month later, I went back to the same cinema to watch The Matrix Resurrections (2021), and this feeling was punctured, revealed as pure fantasy. Instead of over two decades ago, it seemed as if it could have been released that very day. It had aged so well, we said afterwards, as we walked through the business district, joking about seeing green numbers cascading down the skyscrapers. It had been remastered in 4K and when Keanu Reeves clawed through his slime egg, writhing in wires and harsh reality, it felt like his hands were bursting through the screen.

At the beginning of December, I went to a cinema in London’s Canary Wharf to watch a re-issue of The Matrix (1999).

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