Nearly any interview he does reveals as much. After four decades in Hollywood playing versions of the same fundamentally decent dude-in-crisis, he's learned to stay in his cyberpunk philosopher/surfing FBI agent/action hero lane. In person, he's pleasant and playful, but he also holds back, calibrating his remarks just so. Is this why we like him so much? We don't know who Keanu Reeves is, not really, but maybe we don't want to know. Or maybe this is all there is to know.

Lilly and Lana Wachowski thrive on being complicated. As directors, their calling cards are mixing disparate genres and styles--American action, Chinese martial arts, Dicksian sci-fi, Hollywood romance, German experimental thriller; you name it, they do it. And they create these mash-ups sometimes coherently (at best), other times unintelligible (at worst), like they ripped what they enjoyed from each category and squashed it altogether willy-nilly. Take The Matrix franchise, undoubtedly the Wachowskis' best work: They're high-concept sci-fi movies, punctuated by bullets and kung-fu. The pair added a sheen of cyberpunk fiction over a first-year philosophy class conundrum, but they also personified hard rock music as men in slick duster coats and women in vinyl catsuits who shoot faceless goons in slo-mo as they strut.

In "The Matrix," from 1999, Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, who pops a mysterious red pill proffered by an equally mysterious stranger and promptly discovers that his so-called life as an alienated nineteen-nineties hacker with a cubicle-farm day job has, in fact, been a computer-generated dream, designed--I swear I'm going to get all this into a single sentence--to keep Anderson from realizing that he's actually Neo, a kung-fu messiah destined to save a post-apocalyptic earth's last living humans from a race of sentient machines who've hunted mankind to near-extinction. Neo spends the rest of the film and its two sequels bouncing back and forth between the simulated world, where he's a leather-clad superhero increasingly unbound by physical laws, and the bleak real world, laid to waste by humanity's long war with artificial intelligence. Like "Star Wars" before it, "The Matrix" was fundamentally recombinant, unprecedented in its joyful derivativeness. Practically every cool visual or narrative thing about it came from some other mythic or pop-cultural source, from scripture to anime. And, like "Star Wars," it quickly became a pop-cultural myth unto itself, and a primary source to be stolen from.

When a star's variety of hair styles is the real star of a movie, you know it's a sign of trouble. So it is, unfortunately, with "The Matrix Resurrections," which makes poignant use of hair cuts and color to mark the eighteen years separating the new film from the last installment in the "Matrix" trilogy. Little else in the new film is as moving. The action picks up where the last one left off. There, Neo (Keanu Reeves), having saved the last human city, the underground realm of Zion, died from the effort.

For the new sequel, "The Matrix Resurrections," filmmakers deployed much-higher-caliber technologies, including three-dimensional imagery made using artificial intelligence. But after 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. "We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise" in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three "Matrix" films; now he is making things for the metaverse. This year the movies presented us with a car slingshotting from cliff to cliff ("F9"); Ryan Reynolds running amok inside a videogame ("Free Guy"); and giant monsters crushing the Hong Kong skyline ("Godzilla vs. Kong").

As the millennium was about to turn, The Matrix arrived in theaters like a speeding bullet--or maybe a very slow-moving one, filmed with the then-novel extreme-slo-mo special effect that would become known as "bullet time." Digital technology played a much smaller role in most people's lives in 1999. The internet was still a novelty, used by most people mainly for sending and receiving email. Smartphones were nonexistent, music was still mainly listened to on CD, and Netflix was a two-year-old company primarily in the business of mailing movies on DVD to people's houses. The idea that all of humanity was trapped in a simulation, our physical bodies parked in life-sustaining pods while our daily lives unfolded in a virtual space run by distant evil overlords, still sounded like a cool science-fiction metaphor, not a description of banal everyday reality.