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We are living in a computer programmed reality
and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed
and some alteration in our reality occurs.
If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others.
When the cult science fiction writer Philip K. Dick imagined
that the whole world was a computer program
and that we were actually living in a simulation,
he anticipated the storyline of one of the most influential sagas
of the last 20 years:
The Matrix.
And today, reality has caught up with this idea, has it not?
Computers have become an extension of ourselves,
our avatars provide us with a second life in a virtual world
and the very term Matrix has entered our vocabulary.
It makes you wonder if we're not already living inside the Matrix...
Over 4 films, The Matrix has transcended the realm of cinema
to become a cultural and societal phenomenon.
The series captured the challenges
and anxieties of our digital age in an unparalleled fashion.
And it had a huge influence on our generation.
A connected, hybrid generation that ceaselessly questions reality...
to the point of paradox.
We come from the 80s, brought up on TV and the first video games,
but without cell phones or the Internet.
As teenagers, many of us found ourselves drawn to the melancholy grunge of Nirvana
or the rawness of Rage Against The Machine,
protest bands critical of the American way of life.
So when The Matrix was released we were suspicious,
expecting a mindless action movie, yet another formulaic blockbuster.
But what we discovered was a truly enigmatic piece of cinema.
When we left the theater, everyone had their own interpretation.
Like Neo, we wondered what had just happened to us:
the film was a real aesthetic shock, and it challenged us.
On top of that, it had a soundtrack from our generation, which we really liked!
When it was released in March '99, people feared a major computer breakdown.
The so-called Y2K bug threatened to plunge the planet into an apocalypse,
simply because computers were unable to pass into the third millennium.
Even though nothing came of the Y2K bug and machines didn't take over humanity,
it was the first time that digital technology had the capacity
to derail our reality on a global scale!
The Matrix was directed by the Wachowskis.
It depicts a dystopia in which artificial intelligences enslave humans
by "farming" them for energy.
The machines keep humanity at peace in the Matrix
by creating a simulated reality, an illusion.
To combat this system, a group of rebels, stranded in a ruinous world,
hack into the virtual world to regain control of reality.
We are in.
The story focuses on the awakening of Neo, a computer hacker played by Keanu Reeves.
His spiritual guide, Morpheus, presents him with a difficult choice:
whether or not to question what he has always been told is real.
You take the blue pill, the story ends.
You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland
and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more.
This isn't real.
What is real? How do you define real?
Through the trajectory of its hero,
the film questions the relationship between humans and their machines,
and the porosity between reality and the virtual.
Neo never ceases to untangle truth from falsehood.
Is he the One as suggested, or just another individual?
Are the machines the embodiment of evil, or just like him?
The film was a worldwide success.
Awarded 4 Oscars, The Matrix spawned a series of animated shorts
featuring the best directors in the genre...
Animatrix.
The film led to two sequels,
Reloaded and Revolutions.
And the Matrix universe kept expanding with the addition of comic books
and video games.
Conceived as a transmedia project, the works complemented each other.
The Matrix became an extended universe, just like its illustrious predecessor...
But most of all, the two sagas both tackle major philosophical themes
through heroes on a quest to discover themselves.
There is no try.
Just as Star Wars evoked the Cold War,
with its battle of Good against the Evil Galactic Empire,
The Matrix reflected an era in which technology
leads to both the best and the worst outcomes.
The 90s were full of technology-related anxieties.
In the film Strange Days, people could use a device to record videos of criminal acts
directly from their own cerebral cortexes.
The Lawnmower Man plunged us into the first excesses of virtual reality.
Like the main character in The Truman Show,
who was trapped in a reality TV show from birth,
the more we are assisted by machines, the more we lose control of our lives.
But there's something very singular about The Matrix.
A little like Neo, who uses software to teach his avatar to master martial arts,
The Matrix is a kind of augmented film,
infused with the popular culture of the time.
- I think he likes it! - Yes.
The Wachowskis' saga was influenced by cyberpunk science fiction,
starting with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, adapted from the beloved Philip K. Dick.
Deckard battles a replicant, an android created in the image of a man.
Neo, on the other hand, battles Agent Smith,
who takes on a human form when he is in fact a computer program.
The films also draw on visual references taken from Tech Noir,
which blends science fiction and film noir,
Dark City is a prime example of the genre.
Some of its sets were reused on the set of The Matrix.
There were also references to comic books,
notably illustrations from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles,
which was a direct inspiration.
The Matrix also drew inspiration from Asia.
It was the first major film to borrow so openly from Japanese anime,
in particular Ghost in the Shell,
which inspired graphic motifs,
themes and the interplay between the organic and the mechanical.
The 2017 live-action version retained the spirit of the original masterpiece.
In The Matrix, too, the body is a shell that can transform and change.
Lastly, the references to Hong Kong action cinema are obvious.
The characters seem to be masters of time.
They can speed it up or slow it down, much like in the films of John Woo,
the master of the genre.
The famous slow-motion shootouts of The Killer,
Hard boiled and Face/off
take on a new stylistic dimension in The Matrix, with its weightless bodies.
In fact, Yuen Woo Ping, a leading figure in Hong Kong cinema,
was asked by the Wachowskis to choreograph the video-game-style superhuman fights.
In 2003, Charlie Rose, PBS's leading cultural journalist,
devoted a special program to the saga,
even before the release of the third installment.
The 3 main actors and the producer discussed The Matrix phenomenon,
and in particular its unprecedented approach to martial arts in Hollywood;
in the films the actors performed their own martial arts.
Each character has their own distinctive style.
What's the Scorpion Kick?
It's my... Will Ping gave me this kick called the Scorpion kick,
which is the last kick I do when I reach the guy's legs and I kick him over my...
He gave us all moves. He gave each character a signature move.
Agent Smith is very aggressive and he's punching.
Keanu has a triple kick that he does.
He goes up and there's always a triple kick.
I have something called an eagle where I go up in the air like this.
So it was also defining for all of our characters.
The great achievement of The Matrix lay in interweaving two distinct universes
into a perfectly coherent whole.
A feat that culminates in a visual and sound aesthetic that would become iconic.
The Matrix ushered in a new era of computer-assisted cinema in the 2000s,
following on from Terminator 2's terrifying T1000 CGI
and Steven Spielberg's realistic dinosaurs.
Like the hero of Jurassic Park,
the film plays on our ambivalence towards technology.
We are ready to try again.
I hate computers.
Feeling's mutual.
The Matrix was shot on a limited budget of $60 million,
when other blockbusters of the time, such as Armageddon,
cost more than twice as much.
The film explored innovative techniques such as the "bullet time" effect,
which was to become its trademark.
The Matrix inspired a host of films.
These films also manipulated time and space using digital technology:
Charlie's Angels,
the Spartans of 300,
the suspended bullets of Wanted.
Or Lisbeth Salander from the Millenium saga,
who doesn't seem so different from Trinity:
both are punk rebels, experts in computer hacking as well as flying.
Combined with parody nods from Scary Movie, The Simpsons and Shrek,
the film was established as a pop culture classic.
And 23 years later, in Babylon, the Matrix entered the pantheon
of the 7th art alongside Mélies, Chaplin, Bergman, Kubrick and Cameron.
Damien Chazelle, born in 1985, brings us his version of cinema history.
With a vast ultra-referential universe, an erudite story and a dazzling aesthetic,
the impact of the trilogy was phenomenal.
The Matrix succeeded in bringing together a generation's taste for comic books,
martial art films and philosophy.
Joel Silver is an iconoclastic producer.
It was the power of the unusual trio he formed with the two filmmakers
that enabled The Matrix to revitalize the action genre
and become a pioneer in intellectual blockbusters.
When Charlie Rose asked him the question
that was already on everyone's mind at the time,
Silver explained how well the Wachowskis had synthesized
the influences that had shaped them.
Why do you think this movie had such an impact?
A movie that set the direction for the future?
It's because these two guys who really are gifted in how they've been able
to put together all of these influences that over their lives just created
a sense of them that there was a new way to do things,
there was a new way to tell a story,
a new way to use visual effects hadn't been done yet.
And that the audience out there was looking for something more
than just a dumb action movie, which, I have to say,
I'm responsible for making a lot of them.
The Matrix fascinates because it calls out to us, because it resonates with us.
You have to let it go, Neil.
Just like for Neo, experiencing the film provokes a genuine revelation.
Free your mind.
It encourages us to free our minds, reinterpret reality,
transform it and even transcend it.
The prefix "trans" is not trivial when it comes to the first transgender filmmakers.
After all, those not yet called Lana and Lilly made their transition
after the third Matrix film.
But above all, "trans" means going beyond,
beyond what is taken for granted, what is preconceived.
And it is in precisely that kind of spirit that the Wachowskis grew up in the 70s.
In general, we're children of the 20th century
and that means that we're drawn to originality.
Originality was always the primary draw.
It was always the thing that made you excited to see something different,
see something that you hadn't seen before.
And if you think of, like, Star Wars and Raiders and Alien and Terminator,
and they have the fact that they're original material written for the movies,
written to be a movie.
We grew up sort of in that culture
where we're attracted to things
that haven't been told before or seen before.
The Matrix is directly linked to the 1960s and 70s.
Young people were emancipating themselves,
breaking away from past shackles,
and counter-cultural movements were imagining new relationships
with other people and with the world.
I'm Peter Fonda.
We've just finished making a movie dealing with the most talked
about subject of the day: LSD.
The resulting psychedelia invited us to rethink reality,
notably through the use of drugs such as LSD and mescaline.
Through hallucination, dreams and reality could merge.
In the opening moments of The Matrix, Neo has barely woken up
and already a character is offering him a trip,
claiming that mescaline is the only way to get high.
Did you ever have that feeling
of you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?
All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.
And the next shot shows us a white rabbit tattoo,
like the one Alice uses as a guide in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
I'm late!
Lewis Carroll's novel, adapted by Disney in 1951,
is a benchmark work of psychedelia.
- I simply must get out. - But you are outside.
- What? - See for yourself.
That's me. I'm asleep.
It narrates a series of hallucinations,
a waking dream that can ultimately raise our consciousness and set us free.
Please wake up Alice! Alice, Alice!
The entire Matrix saga quotes this literary masterpiece,
conceived as a tale of learning,
as Neo literally steps through the looking glass to discover reality.
How do you know the difference between the dream world and the real one?
Psychedelia influences science fiction,
and in particular a major work for the young Wachowskis: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In addition to its acid trip finale,
Stanley Kubrick's cult film
already foreshadowed the nightmare scenario of The Matrix,
with its supercomputer that betrays humans, the notorious HAL.
Hello, Hal, do you read me?
Open the pod bay doors. Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Philip K.Dick, who readily confessed to writing under the influence of drugs,
went even further in a lecture he gave in 1977 to a stunned audience:
the underlying idea was that when reality goes off the rails,
it's confirmation that it's just an illusion.
We are living in a computer programmed reality
and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed
and some alteration in our reality occurs.
What is that?
This change of variable, this glitch in the matrix,
is perfectly illustrated when the same black cat appears twice in a row to Neo:
Déjà vu...
It means the machines have spotted the rebels.
Déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix.
It happens when they change something.
If psychedelia reinterprets reality through drugs,
computer technology reinterprets the world through virtual reality.
And LSD was a crucial element in nurturing the spirit of Silicon Valley.
At the time, computer art pioneer John Whitney
was generating visual poems using computers.
In 1970, he produced a series of films for IBM and Caltech,
which he entitled MATRIX.
Psychedelia and the computer revolution are intimately linked.
Essayist and LSD guru Timothy Leary even saw the PC, the personal computer,
as the religion of the future.
I think that the new confrontation with God always produces a new form of art.
Now, the new form of art,
the new religious language in the future is going to be electronic.
When the 80s rolled around,
the cyber world was the source of all our fantasies and hopes.
The Macintosh advert, for example, takes its aesthetic from George Orwell's 1984,
again with Ridley Scott at the helm.
Here, the totalitarian prophecy is reversed,
with the promise that computers will liberate us, not enslave us.
On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
The utopia of a digital revolution seemed to have a bright future.
In the same year as the release of The Matrix, Tim Berners-Lee,
the founder of the Web, spoke to Charlie Rose
about the fundamentally humanist nature of the Internet.
According to him, the web as we know it could never have existed
if it had been conceived as a private system.
When you ask everybody in the world who has information
to give it one of these little funny http things with these URLs
you're asking them whatever information it is, please just give it one of these.
That's a lot to ask of itself.
That's what you have to ask for it to be in a universal space.
You say, if it's important information, I must be able to link to it.
You can't ask something as general as that and also put constraints.
You can't say, and oh, by the way, this is a private system I own.
It just wouldn't have happened.
This space for exchange and sharing,
free and accessible to all, makes protest possible.
In 1999, just a few months before the release of The Matrix,
the Battle of Seattle broke out.
As the 3rd conference of the WTO, the World Trade Organization,
was taking place,
demonstrators rose up against the injustices of economic globalization.
Seattle was among the first mobilizations
internationally coordinated mainly via the internet
with 400.000 people taking part online.
The birthplace of grunge, as well as the giants Microsoft and Amazon,
Seattle saw the emergence of the first movement
to be so widely shared via the Internet.
It was the start of alter-globalization,
which dreamt of a responsible and equitable capitalism.
Fight Club echoed this with its schizophrenic,
paranoid and hallucinated hero...
You met me at a very strange time of my life.
...who wanted to eradicate consumerism and wipe banks off the face of the Earth.
The Wachowskis' cinema has a political dimension.
It depicts the struggle of minorities against their oppressors.
That's what racing is about. It has nothing to do with cars or drivers.
All that matters is power and the unassailable might of money.
I will not be subjected to such abuse.
Stand out. Stand out.
In 2006, V for Vendetta, directed by their assistant director James McTeigue,
depicts a popular uprising against a fascist state.
The film became an emblem of citizen disobedience,
and gave a new face to the Anonymous hackers.
Inspired by the spirit of the 70s and the technological mistrust of the 90s,
the Matrix trilogy was born in the midst of the digital revolution.
And by encouraging us to be wary of the established order and to doubt reality,
the trilogy produced a range of contradictory effects,
which were amplified tenfold in a world whose future
was becoming increasingly uncertain.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now.
I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end.
I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.
And that I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see.
I'm going to show them a world without you.
A world, without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries.
A world, where anything is possible.
Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
Between the release of The Matrix I and II,
the new millennium dawned with a clash of fire and steel.
On September 11, 2001, jihadist terrorists hacked two planes
and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center,
the symbol of American power.
The worst disaster movie ever conceived didn't hit the screens,
it happened for real: reality surpassed fiction.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.
Arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction.
The fight against the notorious "axis of evil" justified anything,
even outright lies: the weapons of mass destruction supposedly present in Iraq
were in fact a pretext to dislodge Saddam Hussein.
The surgical war resembled a virtual one.
It was almost filmed like a video game, with infrared images
with a greenish hue reminiscent of the screens of The Matrix.
Between the falsehoods and the truth, conspiracy theories began to emerge.
Just a few hours after the attacks, the first rumors spread across the web.
Thanks to forums, blogs and social media,
anyone could publish information.
All you needed was an opinion and an audience:
it was Internet 2.0.
The Matrix trilogy became a cult classic,
a cryptic series perhaps holding answers to the questions of the time.
And if you looked hard enough, there were prophetic messages to be found.
As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Anderson.
For example, Neo's passport expires on September 11, 2001.
We might wonder about the name of the building in which Morpheus is being held,
it bears the letters MMI, meaning 2001 in Roman numerals...
Everything became a sign, and everything could be meaningful.
The mystery was compounded by the fact that the Wachowskis
didn't comment on their work.
On the set of Charlie Rose, their absence was striking,
especially given the colossal success of the films.
The film crew become their spokespeople, respecting the posture of the directors
and their desire to never dictate reductive messages to viewers.
Time magazine did a cover story and they wouldn't talk to Time magazine.
They want people to think for themselves, too. They don't want to...
Lead them.
Yeah, they want people to have their own imagination,
because you get so many different things,
different people get different ideas about the film.
And I think that's important to them.
That's important to them for people to really take what they want.
They don't want to have to define it for people.
They want people to define it for themselves.
The interpretations went so far
that the revelations of the 2nd and 3rd episodes were unnoticed.
That's impossible. The prophecy tells us...
It was a lie, Morpheus.
The One was never meant to end anything.
It was all another system of control.
And yet we discovered that the One, the revolt,
and the prophecy was all just another illusion.
I'm sorry.
A program generated by the Matrix to maintain human hope and order.
Yet the era took hold of the story.
After everything that has happened, how can you expect me to believe you?
I don't. I expect just what I've always expected.
For you to make up your own damn minds.
All the more so as, at the same time, real political scandals were unfolding
and getting an unprecedented reach thanks to the Web.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange shared secret US military documents
revealing war crimes.
Then a mysterious whistleblower, living in exile in Hong Kong,
exposed the existence of a gigantic American and British surveillance system:
Edward Snowden, whose struggle is chronicled in Citizenfour.
Like Morpheus, he had seen and lived inside the System,
in this case, the CIA and the NSA, and he was trying to wake us up,
to open our eyes to the fact that the system
was tracking us through our connected devices.
Isn't that worth fighting for?
What he described to Guardian journalists in 2013 sounded like a dystopia.
There's an infrastructure in place in the United States and worldwide
that NSA has built in cooperation with other governments as well,
that intercepts every digital communication,
every radio communication.
- It's so opaque... - It's not science fiction.
The collaborative and fraternal Internet
exists alongside its nightmarish equivalent.
While the democratization of information enables
a formidable collective intelligence, it also creates the opposite phenomenon:
the sanctification of convictions to the detriment of facts.
Truth becomes mere opinion.
If the Web unifies and placates, it also fosters division and dissent.
So one of the biggest questions we're facing
is in a world of a million speakers, how do you find what's good?
Like Snowden and Assange, who were forced into exile,
Aaron Swartz was to suffer a heavy price in 2011.
For having put millions of scientific articles online free of charge,
this defender of free culture was prosecuted by the American justice system,
risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Crushed by the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26,
a month before his trial.
Berners Lee would pay tribute to the man who tried to extend the initial,
libertarian spirit of the web.
Aaron is dead. In this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we have one down. We've lost one of our own.
And even what seemed so clear is becoming murky,
like the messages behind the red pill and the blue pill.
Values are reversing, and it's now the American far-right that's embracing them.
CNN Journalist Laurie Segall revisited the famous scene from The Matrix
in which this alternative truth is said to originate.
The red pill has become a code for masculinists who believe that men,
rather than women, are discriminated against in our societies.
What started out as an advice forum on seduction became radicalized.
To swallow the red pill is to accept
that everything you've been told about society,
about gender, race, politics is a lie.
Our world has become a chat room. I think in many ways we have become our avatars.
We have become offline the people that we are online.
Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and the other Silicon Valley behemoths,
people are free to express themselves and speak their minds.
Everyone is in their own corner, in their own bubble, in their own matrix...
The apotheosis was the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.
Born into the world of business, he became a reality TV star with The Apprentice.
- Hello, fellas. - Hello, Mr. Trump.
You're fired.
He became the 45th President of the United States largely thanks to social media.
With him, the confusion between truth and lies reached its peak,
turning the concept of fake news against the mainstream media.
- Don't be rude. - Can you give us a question?
Don't be rude.
I'm not gonna give you a question. You are fake news.
The principle is simple: "Fake news is news I don't agree with".
Trump was so polarising that he managed to embody everything and its opposite.
To his opponents, he was a successful Agent Smith:
Mr. Anderson, welcome back.
Like Neo's sworn enemy, a programme that took control of the Matrix.
But for his fans, he's actually Morpheus, the one who guides Neo,
promises the end of the system
and galvanises the crowd at the start of Matrix Reloaded.
Tonight we are not afraid.
And what was bound to happen eventually did: on January 6th 2021,
completely hooked on red pills, Trump's supporters staged a coup d'état.
We're going to walk down to the Capitol
and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.
Because you'll never take back our country with weakness.
You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
Convinced that Joe Biden had rigged the presidential election,
they stormed the Capitol.
It was the culmination of 20 years of anti-system counter-culture
and a distorted re-reading of The Matrix.
Suddenly, you're filled with doubt:
what if Donald Trump and the far right owe something to the Wachowskis' films?
What if this rebellious, progressive trilogy had,
in spite of itself, given fuel to the alt right?
If it's our time to die, it's our time.
All I ask is if we have to give these bastards our lives,
we give him hell before we do.
Worse still, don't some of us prefer lies to the truth?
Like the character Cypher, the traitorous villain from the first film.
I know this steak doesn't exist.
I know that when I put it in my mouth,
the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
You know what I realize?
Ignorance is bliss.
Just like in the cyberpunk fables,
aren't the big technology groups not only accomplices,
but the real winners of the chaos?
After all, wasn't Elon Musk, the tycoon behind Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter,
an early supporter of Trump?
The same Elon Musk who extols the virtues of transhumanism,
meaning the augmentation of humans through technology,
and who jokes with his mum on the set of Saturday Night Live.
You turned that video game about space into reality.
Unless you consider that our reality might be a video game
and we're all just computer simulations
being played by a teenager in another planet.
That's great Elon.
Like his ultra-rich colleagues in Silicon Valley,
he is still planning for the apocalypse, and fantasising about a luxury bunker.
You never know...
So when Musk and Trump's daughter argued on Twitter,
using the red pill as an emblem of their opinions and their heartfelt battle,
it was Lilly who broke her silence on behalf of the Wachowskis
and reacted with a tweet that had the virtue of being clear.
This would not be the last word from the two sisters,
nor their last artistic gesture.
The Matrix was completely appropriated,
right down to the advertising for a car brand broadcast
during America's biggest sporting event, the Super Bowl.
Let me tell you why you're here.
It is the world of luxury that has been pulled over your eyes
to blind you from the truth.
We just want to get our car...
Take the blue key, you go back to the luxury you know.
You take the red key and you'll never look at luxury the same again.
So, Lana directed the final episode of what became a tetralogy,
continuing her sister's defiance of the misappropriation of The Matrix values.
It was Matrix: Resurrections, released in 2021.
Now what? Things have changed. The market's tough.
I'm sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers,
has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.
What ?
I know you said the story was over for you, but that's the thing about stories.
They never really end, do they?
Just like in the real world,
the film takes place twenty years after the previous instalment.
This time, the Matrix was reprogrammed in a cooler, more pop,
much less cyberpunk style in order to control humans even better.
The soundtrack remained psychedelic, with Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit'.
Resurrected and depressed,
Neo is now a video game programmer for a subsidiary of Warner Bros.
And the trilogy we know is nothing more
than a series of very popular games inside the Matrix.
So popular, in fact,
that the parent company wants to force Neo to produce a fourth episode...
Revolutionize gaming again...
I thought it would be fun to weave some of myself
and my own experience into poor Thomas Anderson's experience.
The colourful look of the analyst,
the computer geeks...
I'm a geek! So where is my machine?
...the sockless loafers of the new Smith...
Mr. Anderson!
...the diversity of Deus Machina employees, the marketing hipsters...
- Obviously the Matrix is about... - Transpolitan...
Crypto fascism.
- It's a metaphor... - Of capitalist exploitation.
They too are from the Matrix generation.
But they have chosen to be complicit in the system.
With these multiple mise en abîme,
Lana expresses the raw truth: we're up to our necks in the Matrix!
They took your story,
something that meant so much to people like me
and turned it into something trivial.
To what the Matrix does,
who weaponizes every idea, every dream,
everything that's important to us.
But above all, the film is an opportunity for Lana to reaffirm
what has always been at the heart of The Matrix,
but also of the Wachowski sisters' entire filmography: the value of Love.
Love that unites human beings, whomever they may be,
while at the same time being a weapon of emancipation and revolt.
Have we met ?
The rebellious love of Trinity and Neo in The Matrix can be found
in all of the Wachowskis' films: in Bound, their first film,
it is the passion of the two heroines, Violet and Corky,
that enables them to escape a male-dominated world
and overcome their condition.
I want out.
I want a new life.
I see what I've been waiting for, but I can't do it alone.
In Speed Racer, the adaptation of a cult Japanese anime
turned into an experimental film,
Speed and Trixie join forces to fight the destructive power of money.
You're the ones who are saying I better drive than most of WRL.
- Now's not the time to prove it. - Why not?
It's too dangerous.
Too dangerous for me, but not for you, right?
These same themes are found in the rebellious couples
of their great choral film Cloud Atlas, and the many combinations they create.
It's Jupiter and Caine from Jupiter:
The Fate of the Universe fighting for the survival of humanity.
And it's the 8 characters in their Netflix series, Sense8,
fraternally connected across space and time.
What you decide to do, just know you won't have to do it alone.
Even machines and humans can merge.
Matrix Revolutions, the third instalment,
leads to a truce, an armistice between humans and machines.
The directors are not so much suggesting transhumanism as 'trans' humanism.
Trinity's rescue in Matrix Resurrections
takes this 'trans' philosophy to its logical conclusion.
- Are you ready? - Yes.
In an alternating montage, the heroine is saved by the combined forces of humans,
programmes and machines, acting in perfect symbiosis.
No!
Stop them!
Transgender as much as transgressive,
the Wachowskis' films have been imbued
with the 'trans' prefix since their inception,
and the Matrix tetralogy is the emblem.
There's a critical eye being cast back on Lana's in my work
through the lens of our transness.
This is a cool thing because it's an excellent reminder
that art is never static.
And while the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components
in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.
Lana and Lilly never cease to tell the story of a fluid,
protean love that subverts social codes. To the point of upending values,
like Trinity's famous kiss to Neo, reminiscent of the well-known fairy tale.
Do you hear me?
I love you.
But this time it's the princess who wakes up the sleeping beauty.
Matrix: Resurrections reunites Neo and Trinity one last time,
the electronic, androgynous heroes whose mad love had already derailed
the machines in the first episodes.
The two actors, Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves, have aged.
And the way they gaze at each other is touching in a way that is beyond fiction.
You almost get the feeling that they're mutating,
that their physical bodies are giving way to digital versions of themselves.
It's as if, over time, they've brought a bit of the matrix back with them.
Their half-digital faces take on a dimension of eternity.
On several occasions, the two heroes observe a group of birds
flying in close formation.
These swarms, reminiscent of sentinels, have a particular structure:
the more numerous they are,
the less influence each individual has on the group
and the less likely they are to disrupt it with a marginal movement.
Lana, Lilly, Neo and Trinity are inviting us to shake up mass behaviour,
to take a giant leap into the void in order to destabilise the Matrix
and rethink our digital world.
It remains to be seen what the next generations will make of reality.
I was having dinner at a friend's house, and he had some kids.
They hadn't seen the film The Matrix.
So I start to say, well, there's this guy who's in a kind of virtual world,
and he finds out that there's a real world,
and he's really questioning what's real and not real.
And he really wants to know what's real.
And the young girl was like, why?
And I was like, what do you mean? She was like, who cares if it's real?
And I was like, what, you don't care if it's real?
And she was like, no.