Untangling the twisty ending of Matrix Resurrections (2024)

The Matrix Resurrections ending spoilers follow

The Matrix Resurrections is as twisty, intense and fascinating as the rest of movies in The Matrix saga, which will have you endlessly debating and looking for hidden meanings.

This fourth instalment, released in 2021, brings back Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) as they face a new challenge in this dystopian reality.

Sadly, other iconic characters like Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus didn't come back for this movie, as stars like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Priyanka Chopra, Jonathan Groff and Neil Patrick Harris join the cast for the first time.

Set sixty years after The Matrix Revolutions, the story follows Neo's seemingly ordinary life as a video game developer, but soon the boundaries between fantasy and reality start to blur. Directed by Lana Wachowski, the movie can also be interpreted as a meta commentary about the state of Hollywood today.

It's a movie that on first viewing, you'll be left with plenty of questions which is why we're here to help by solving all of the major mysteries.

So we're here to help with a deep dive into The Matrix Resurrections which means we have to go into some major spoilers.

The movie opens with a recreation of The Matrix's opening scene where Trinity wipes out a police squad.

However, there's something a bit off about it as Trinity is played by Ellen Hoffman and Agent Smith is played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

Bugs (Jessica Henwick) is watching it all unfold after she hacked into this modal, a simulation used to evolve programs. 'Trinity' is captured by the Agents, leading Bugs to intervene and she's in trouble until 'Smith' intervenes and saves her.

After they escape into a recreation of Thomas Anderson's room from the first movie, they talk about how they both know it's not the real world. Bugs offers 'Smith' a red pill and he understands the truth: "I am Morpheus and I have to find Neo."

As they escape into the real world, we cut to Thomas (Keanu Reeves) in his office as he gets an error message from The Matrix game. He's a game developer who created the celebrated Matrix trilogy at his company Deus Machina, founded with his business partner (Jonathan Groff).

Unfortunately for Thomas, he started to believe what his games were telling him and that he wasn't living in the real world. He once tried to commit suicide by jumping off a roof, so now he has regular sessions with a therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) who assures him that The Matrix is just a game and prescribes Thomas blue pills.

Thomas is working on a new game called Binary, but it's late and over budget. In a meeting with his business partner, he's told that their parent company Warner Bros want him to make a "sequel to the trilogy". As Thomas starts working on it though, he slowly starts to lose his mind.

One day at the office, the fire alarms go off and Thomas meets Morpheus, who offers him the red pill. Thomas refuses as he thinks Morpheus can't be real as he coded him and after cops arrive, they open fire on Morpheus. In the chaos that follows, Thomas's business partner picks up a gun and awakens his real identity: Agent Smith.

Before Smith can shoot Thomas, he suddenly finds himself back in his therapist's office who again assures him it's not real. The games were just inspired by things in his life such as Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), the person he has a crush on, being the inspiration for Trinity.

Of course, we know he's lying and after Thomas again tries to fly by jumping off a building, Bugs interrupts him. It's revealed that even though he thinks it's only been 20 years since the trilogy, it's actually been 60 years since his sacrifice.

Neo has been hidden in the Matrix by the machines all this time and while we see him as Thomas, to everybody else he appears with a totally different look. It's why he gets flashes of him looking like an old man in the early section of the movie, and why it took so long for Bugs to track him down.

They get Neo out of the Matrix and back into the real world (after one last-ditch attempt by his therapist to keep him there). When he wakes up in his pod, he sees just one pod opposite his containing Trinity's body.

As Bugs and her crew get Neo to adjust to the real world as he's been in the Matrix a long time, he chats with Morpheus in the ship's network. It's revealed that Neo did create this Morpheus from his memories of Morpheus with a splash of Agent Smith, so this Morpheus is a program who chose to break free from the Matrix.

When the Matrix was rebooted, the Oracle was purged from the system by the new creator, The Analyst, who was Thomas's therapist and trying to control him. The fiction of the Matrix games was part of this because, as Bugs says, "If we don't know what's real, we can't resist".

While it seems like Neo's sacrifice was for nothing, it turns out that there was peace between the humans and the machines. He sees it for himself when he's taken to the new city IO, ruled over by Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), which was built by the humans and the machines together.

However, this peace came at a cost because as more humans freed themselves, the machines started a civil war over the scarcity of power. During this, The Analyst rose up to take control and start on a new Matrix. The OG Morpheus didn't pay attention and Zion was destroyed as a result.

Niobe is worried what the return of Neo will do to IO and tries to imprison him, but Bugs frees him. Neo persuades them to head back into the Matrix to rescue Trinity, only for them to run into Smith and some exiled programs, including The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson).

Smith doesn't want Neo to find Trinity as it could lead to The Analyst realising that Smith is free too. Neo eventually overpowers Smith and goes to talk to Trinity who tells him that she's dreamed of him. Before we can learn more, The Analyst arrives and resets the scene, trapping Neo with bullet time.

It's revealed that The Analyst resurrected Neo and Trinity in the real world as he realised that they could be the source code of the new Matrix. It took several versions to get it right because any time they got together, it destroyed the Matrix. So he decided he needed to keep them "close, but not too close" to keep the Matrix going.

The Analyst is essentially the new version of The Architect, but with a splash of the Oracle as he understands the importance of human emotion. By using desire and fear to control people, he realised the "worse we treat you, the more energy" they get. He makes it clear that if Neo doesn't plug himself back in, he'll kill Trinity and leaves Neo to stew.

Back in the real world, Niobe takes Neo to see Sati (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) who wants to help him free Trinity. It was her parents who built the resurrection pods that brought them back to life, so she knows how they work. What's more, The Analyst purged her parents, so she wants revenge.

Because Neo got out, the Matrix's failsafe was triggered to make it reset. The Analyst paused it as he's confident Neo will plug himself back in willingly, but this just gives them an opportunity to free Trinity.

As Bugs, Sati and Morpheus go to free Trinity from her pod in the Anomalium (true name), Neo meets The Analyst in the Matrix and strikes a deal. He wants to offer Trinity the chance to leave and if she refuses, he'll plug back in. It looks like Trinity will refuse, but she changes her mind at the last minute.

The Analyst reneges on the deal and goes to shoot Trinity, but Smith arrives and shoots The Analyst instead. Smith departs, leaving Neo and Trinity to deal with the lockdown "swarm mode" that The Analyst initiates. It turns everybody in the Matrix into a mindless bot, essentially, so they have to battle free.

As Neo and Trinity escape the swarm, they head to the roof of a nearby building. "I remember us," Trinity tells Neo, and they both take a leap of faith off the roof. Neo can't fly, but Trinity can and she takes them to safety.

It's implied that in this new version of the Matrix, both Neo and Trinity together form The One, the anomaly in this iteration. It explains why Trinity has the power to fly now and Neo has fancy new powers that are basically the Force push.

The final scene sees Neo and Trinity back in the Matrix as they confront The Analyst. Despite his failures, the Machines haven't purged him as he's the only one who knows the system. "The sheeple aren't going anywhere," he taunts. "They want to be controlled."

Not if Neo and Trinity have anything to do with it as they tell him they're going to make some changes in his Matrix and since they were the source of it, they can do whatever they want.

They're going to be freeing some more humans, whether he likes it or not – and we don't fancy The Analyst's chances.

Yes, it does.

But don't go expecting an MCU-esque tease for a new movie as it's just a comedic scene. You can read more about it here.

The Matrix Resurrections is arriving on Netflix UK on March 9, 2024. The movie is also available to watch on Max in the US, and to rent or buy on Amazon, Microsoft Store, iTunes and other digital retailers.