The problem with the Matrix movies has always been that you can’t live in the future. This might be true on a philosophical level, but in cinematic terms there is a more immediate problem: the future world of the films has never looked or sounded like a destination.

Resurrections tries to rectify that, filling the desert of the real with a new harmony of metal and mulch, but this is not its main focus. For that to work, they would have needed to get Ursula K. Le Guin on scripting duties instead of David Mitchell; if she was still alive I doubt she would have been up for it, given her lack of interest in action movies. This amuses me, since Matrix Resurrections doesn’t seem all that interested in action either. Instead, most of the film deals with a problem we have perhaps never been more acutely aware of, namely how to live in the present – or remember the past – when there are so many systems trying to tell us how to enjoy them both appropriately at any given moment.

On a second watch through those early scenes of modern disaffection made me want to scream (a good thing). The simulation looks like a pre-loaded smartphone lock screen these days, rather than a flat packed parody of office life – every frame is so saturated in meaningless detail that it practically begs to be shared online with the word “cinematography!” above it. Likewise, the endless story-cycle of Marvel/Dan Harmon style dialogue is present, revealed to be nothing more than a slurry of references and witticisms sloshing round the drain without ever quite clearing. Everything in the first third of the film implicitly promises that you could be useful/be successful/have fun, and maybe even “INCREASE PRODUCTION!”, if you would only fix whatever it is that’s wrong with you. In those early scenes, the solution itself remains frustratingly out of reach. It might look like a creative breakthrough, or it might just be contact with another real life human. But whatever it is seems cosmically distant, something you can only connect with again on your next spin around the galaxy.

The movie comes to life when it starts to fixate on the breaks in this routine. Reeves and Moss perform their parts with a certain dreamy reluctance. Is it possible that we could be living better lives, more difficult maybe but also somehow more true? Do we even know what that means any more? (Trans legends and anticapitalists do; franchise filmmakers generally try to avoid the subject.) Watching the two of them sit across a table with each other, or face down desperate odds on a rooftop, I worried for the integrity of their hearts and their knees.

It was easier to enjoy the younger cast members this time out, knowing as I did how everything fit together. Jonathon Groff can’t quite convey the sense of debauched hunger that Hugo Weaving brought to the role of Smith, but Jessica Henwick and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II get over a sense of joy through action here. Since the film relies on recognition through the eyes of another, their cartoon bounce and fresh outfits are key – they make the game seem like it might be worth playing for a second time. If the game itself is less novel than what came before – the true aesthetic of the film is that of a Warner Bros cartoon; hell, Henwick’s character even introduces herself as Bugs Bunny! – then at least we’re not too distracted from what we’re actually looking at this time.

Part of me wishes that there was more disaffection with Neo/Trinity in the younger set. Wouldn’t this make sense, given that the latter grew up in the world left to them by the older generation? But then, this is the sort of grumble the Matrix movies have always left me with. This series has always been unsatisfying but hard to shake. Maybe I should write a book about it or something.

So, instead of a hard reckoning, we’re offered the contrast of older people who know the world is wrong but use that knowledge in the wrong way. There’s Niobe, so heavy with old age makeup she can no longer consider risk never mind manage it. And there’s the shit-flecked audience stand-in that is the Merovingian, complaining uselessly from the sidelines. Maybe these deflections are alright. Maybe sometimes, it’s okay for younger people to spend time with people twenty years older and see that it’s possible not to be destroyed. Maybe it’s helpful for the older people in question to remember that more than that might be possible. Maybe.

The first time I watched this film I found myself arguing that “Despite its efforts, The Matrix Resurrections cannot convince me that the love between two people is enough to change the world.” This remains true, but while I’m more likely to dream of new futures while reading Ursula K. Le Guin, this time round I was better able to appreciate another truth: that very little in this world is possible until you find something, usually someone, to confirm pain of the unchanging moment to you.