The first trailer for The Matrix Resurrections was released last week, giving us our first look at returning leads Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in action.
Both characters were actually killed-off in the final part of the original trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, and while we still don't know how they'll be brought back, director Lana Wachowski has now revealed why she decided to resurrect the franchise's heroes.
While speaking at a screenwriting panel for the International Literature Festival Berlin (via /Film), Wachowski explained that great personal loss was the impetus for her bringing Neo and Trinity back to the land of the living.
"My dad died, then this friend died, then my mom died. I didn't really know how to process that kind of grief. I hadn't experienced it that closely ... You know their lives are going to end and yet it was still really hard. My brain has always reached into my imagination and one night, I was crying and I couldn't sleep, and my brain exploded this whole story. And I couldn't have my mom and dad, yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life."
"It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again," she continued. "And it's super simple. You can look at it and say: 'ok, these two people die and ok, bring these two people back to life and oh, doesn't that feel good.' Yeah, it did! It's simple, and this is what art does and that's what stories do, they comfort us."
It sounds like making this fourth Matrix film was cathartic for Lana, who clearly went through a lot prior to production.
The trailer suggested that Neo, aka Thomas, may have been plugged back in to The Matrix, while a brief shot of Trinity seemed to hint that she may actually be a computer programme, and not a resurrected version of the character we knew. Have another look at the footage below, and be sure to share your theories in the usual place.