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.
Now that, in the 18 years since the release of the last Matrix movie, the films’ writer-directors have come out as trans women, that radicality takes on a different dimension in the fourth chapter of the franchise, Matrix Resurrections, directed for the first time ever by only one of the Wachowski sisters, Lana.
But the real-life memories that inspired that game, Thomas seems to have compartmentalized as delusions, symptoms of his own mental illness; when he spots his long-lost love Trinity who is obviously, from the jump, way too malevolent to be Doogie Howser, M.D.
I stopped trying to fathom exactly what each of the rebels’ separate missions into and out of the Matrix was meant to accomplish, or for that matter why Jada Pinkett Smith’s rebel leader Niobe, who appeared to be somewhere in her 30s the last time we saw her, is now a frail crone in octogenarian-looking age makeup, while Neo and Trinity appear to have only barely aged.
As virtual online life has taken over day-to-day existence, the man-vs.-machine struggle that characterized so much science fiction up to the turn of the 21st century has mutated into something harder to schematize: We are our machines, or they are living extensions of us, in a way that requires rethinking what exiting “the Matrix” might mean.
Matrix Resurrections’ pointed barbs about the way the series’ mythology has been appropriated by some of the most dangerous actors in contemporary political culture demonstrate that, however familiar some of its visual iconography may have become, this is a franchise that has always kept its eyes wide awake and trained on the present day.