Announced at The Game Awards, The Matrix Awakens, or to give it its full name The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, is part tech demo and part marketing material for The Matrix Resurrections that is partially successful on both counts. Where it succeeds is in laying to rest any doubts you might have with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss returning as Neo and Trinity.
With only a week to go before the next Matrix movie, those of us who were around the first time have been nervously awaiting and anticipating the new film. While the chorus of “Reloaded and Revolutions are actually good movies” has grown over recent years, for many of us blown away by that first movie, the idea of another sequel/reboot/legacyquel seemed like a bad idea.
Amazingly The Matrix Awakens app for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X, which amounts to a demonstration of how the Unreal Engine by Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, can be used for the creation “next gen,” aka “shit-hot,” video game worlds, did far more to make me excited to see Keanu and Carrie on screen together than convince me of anything related to next gen “grafix”(sic).
The Science Bit
To get the tech side out of the way, the demo is impressive, I guess. As with any tech demo, it looks nice now but will probably look sad and outdated in about a year or two. The sections with Keanu and Carrie are great, but the actual video game sections are pretty ho-hum.
When the player is eventually asked to interact with the action, the result is a series of glorified quick time events with about as much interactivity as Dragon’s Lair. While Trinity drives a car through the city, the player aims a reticule at the handy circles that mark the tyres of cars containing agents that are pursuing them. In the “pinnacle” of the demo, the player has to move one circle into another, using their thumb stick, before the timer runs out in order to trigger the big finale explosion.
Hardly the future of interactive entertainment.
The City and the City
Admittedly, the far more impressive part of the tech demo arrives after this sequence, which places the player avatar in the city through which they just raced, and leaves you to it. Like an early Grand Theft Auto demo, only without missions, or the combat, and only some stationary cars to be stolen. The traditional game content of this demo matters little, as it’s just an excuse to show off the impressive tech that went into the creation of the city and its inhabitants. There are plinths to be found, dotted around the city, that provide factoids on how the world was created, or impressive statistics about the numbers of cars/pedestrians generated, but honestly, if you want to find out more about that sort of thing you’re better off elsewhere.
So, after zooming around in the camera mode, looking at some of the info and playing with settings, I immediately went back to the best part of the demo, watching Keanu again.
“Hi, I’m Keanu Reeves!”
While Keanu’s choice of films (Always Be My Maybe, the John Wick movies, Destination Wedding), and the occasional public appearance over the past few years, have reinforced his image as “Nicest/Coolest Guy Alive,” it’s difficult to express just how much joy it gave me watching “Keanu as Neo” wax philosophically about what he is doing in the construct from the first Matrix. I lost it, however, when “Keanu as Keanu” appeared in a mirror and said, “Hi, I’m Keanu Reeves,” and started talking about the first Matrix film and how technology has evolved since its release. While the transition from real life Keanu to Unreal™ rendered Keanu isn’t quite seamless (at least I *think* I could tell the difference) Keanu’s charm and voiceover propel the whole thing along. And that was before we get to Trinity and Neo joking around about Marketing.
Is this the real life? 
Or is this fantasy? 
Caught in a landslide 
No escape from reality 
LOL 
Groan 
Yeesh 
We are legion
While the first trailer for Resurrections whet my appetite, I don’t think anything could have made me more excited for The Matrix Resurrections than CGI Neo, looking slightly better than his burly brawl counterpart, admit to CGI Trinity, that he “sometimes misses this version of us.”
I’m pretty sure there’ll be far less fourth wall breaking quips in the final film, although who knows based upon what we’ve seen so far, but I would happily watch Reeves and Moss do this kind of banter until the sun grows cold.
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