Now, with a fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, released 22 December, the franchise returns to a context that it played no small part in creating: a world riddled with the feeling of tumbling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, waiting to wake up. Though two 2003 sequels ( The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions) failed to reach the same heights, the thrill of the franchise hasn’t faded. More than two decades on, The Matrix remains eerily relevant to our world. According to Kanye West, The Matrix is “the Bible of the post-information age” – this is among the pop star’s more credible claims. “There is no religious text more foundational to the internet than The Matrix,” the critic Max Read wrote in 2019, marking the film’s 20-year anniversary. More remarkably, through the sheer force of the movie’s prescience and popularity, they shaped those tensions. The directors, Lilly and Lana Wachowski, foresaw contemporary tensions online: between the internet’s tendency towards freedom and conformity, anarchy and authoritarianism. On the other, once aware of the simulation, people have the power to plug back in and bend reality to their will. On the one hand, the eponymous computer simulation is a sinister mechanism of control that hides from humans the true source of their oppression. The Matrix presented an exhilarating kind of dystopia, tailor-made to the paradoxes of the digital age. Today, its influence is everywhere: from fashion and philosophy to the shape of our technological anxieties, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the political tumult of the past five years. The Matrix instantly became both a Hollywood blockbuster and a cult classic, with four Academy Awards and an unusually devout and diverse following. Machines plug humans into the Matrix to blind them to this unbearable existence: the virtual world keeps them passive.įor Neo and the movie’s huge fan base, reality was never the same again. Neo takes the red pill, and we see how deep the rabbit hole goes: into a bleak future where, sometime late in the 22nd century, humans are confined to womb-like pods that line metal skyscrapers, harvested as an abundant energy resource that machines live off. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” he says. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) belongs to a band of rebels determined to free humanity, and believes that Neo is the one (or rather “the One”) to do so. Neo (Keanu Reeves) doesn’t know it yet, but he is living inside “the Matrix”: a computer simulation of the year 1999, designed by machines to enslave the human race. In the most iconic scene from The Matrix, released in 1999, Morpheus holds out his hands and, with a coloured pill in each palm, offers Neo a choice.
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