Rating: 3.5/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 51/52 | Someone holds a cat
Love is the genesis of everything.
Bugs looks through the code and finds a Modal. She enters and sees a scene reminiscent of the beginning of The Matrix, but it’s different. The agents spot Bugs, and she runs, only to be pulled aside by one of them. They realize they are in Thomas Anderson’s apartment. The Agent goes over his awakening and realizes that he is Morpheus and has to find Neo.
The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.
Thomas Anderson works at Deus Machina on a game called Binary. On his desk is a Game Award for The Matrix, a game trilogy he developed in 1999. He still has a monitor running old Matrix code, running a Modal experiment. Modal is how Anderson develops game characters. It’s throwing an error he doesn’t understand. At Simulatte, a cafe Anderson frequents, he sees Tiffany, a married mother on whom he based the Trinity character. His coworker Jude tries to get them talking. When Tiffany and Anderson shake hands, they have a sense that they’ve met before.
We can't see it, but we're all trapped in these same repeating loops.
Anderson’s boss calls him up. He’s one of the Agents we saw in the Modal. His boss is worried about Anderson and wants to ensure he continues his therapy. Anderson experiences “episodes” in which he cannot distinguish between reality and dreams. Warner Bros. is making a sequel to The Matrix with or without Deus Machina. The experience rattles Anderson, and he discusses it with his psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst reassures Anderson and refills his medication prescription, little blue pills. Anderson swallows one. In his reflection, we see a balding older man, but that isn’t what Anderson sees.
I know you said the story was over for you. But that's the thing about stories—they're never really over, are they?
Will Neo be able to escape The Matrix again? Will Bugs and Morpheus find him? Why did the machines go to such lengths to keep Neo alive and hide him?
The rumor train spoiled this movie for a lot of folks. Most notably, people believe that Lana Wachowski made this movie at gunpoint, afraid of letting anyone else touch the project. This theory contradicts The Matrix’s history, as The Animatrix was primarily other people touching the project and the subsequent video games. Yes, Warner Bros. was entertaining treatments written by others in hopes of making a reboot, but the studio wanted the Wachowski’s blessing. Yes, Warner Bros. constantly approached the Wachowskis, asking them to make another Matrix movie, but they had declined until 2019, when their parents died, as well as a close friend of Lana’s. This script was her way of processing that grief—by bringing back Neo and Trinity, she could experience a rebirth impossible in the real world. For Lilly, revisiting these characters seemed like the opposite of what she needed in this time of grief. Yes, the film lambasts the idea of revisiting The Matrix, making several jokes about the nature of reboot culture in Hollywood. And yet, here the film is.
The special effects look awful. For a movie worth $190 million, this is a step back from where The Matrix was. I can give a canon reason why that would be the case, but the fact remains.
Folks are upset that the movie abandoned martial arts in favor of the Heroic Bloodshed style, which was always present in the movies but not the sole means of fighting. I think the problem is that the fight choreography isn’t that good. Again, this is a step back for the series. We get a recreation of the kung fu scene from The Matrix, and it tells us everything we need—the actors aren’t up to the task.
But I don’t care that much about effects and choreo. I care about the story. And the story is Lilly’s chance to make what was implicit in The Matrix explicit. In 1999, she was still an egg. While trans people recognized the prominent themes present in The Matrix, the vast majority of audiences saw yet another Gen X “escape the capitalist system” narrative. Which it was, too, but it wasn’t only that. The film discusses people’s perspective on what the movie “is” as though it was only one thing—hence, the red pill subreddit and so many fragile male egos sopping up the opposite message.
They took your story, something that meant so much to me, and turned it into something trivial. That's what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea, every dream—everything that's important to us.
That’s the lesson this movie hits us with—it’s not a binary. Few things ever are, even choices. Because choice is an illusion when you know what the right choice is.
I remember wanting a family, but was that because that's what women are supposed to want? How do you know if you want something yourself or if your upbringing programmed you to want it?
So many have lived their transition not in the real world but through games like Second Life and other MMOs. But as more and more of those spaces go dormant, so too does the life sublimated. The detransition back to the world is painful and all too common. So, the film also says to them, “It’s not too late to try again.”
We didn’t have to revisit The Matrix—or maybe we did. It doesn’t live up to the original experience—it never could. Regardless, this is probably the best way we could have returned to this world.
Jessica Henwick is too cool. Want her? Want to be her? Why the binary?