Transhumanism, Truth and Technocracy, Oh my! Matrix 4: Review
The year was 1999. Eleven-year-old me was rocking some sausage bangs, a fresh set of braces framed in magenta lipstick and a lime green Limited Too sweater. I was spending the night at my best friend’s house. Little Caesars was ordered… black olives only. We did what we always did, hung out on AOL chat rooms until her dad fell asleep. Then, when the coast was clear, we’d make a mad dash for his DVD rack, always stocked with the latest blockbusters, and grabbed every rated R movie we could get our hands on.
On this particular night, we watched The Matrix.
I’d never even heard of it when it was in theaters, but as we watched the opening scene where Trinity defies gravity and defeats a room full of attackers, our little preteen minds were blown.
We spent the next many months fantasizing about a leather-clad Keanu in our diaries and saying things to each other like “Dodge this” at any relevant occasion.
Something about that movie was world-changing before I could even fully process what it was about. Before the internet had infiltrated our daily lives, there was a thread of truth we just understood about it.
I can still watch it now, twenty-two years later, and get chills when Neo grabs that tow strap and swings it around his waist to save Trinity from the crashing helicopter.
It was a genius feat of cinematic production and a monument to prophetic science fiction. It’s a gnostic tale and a critique on society and progress that we just can’t seem to hear as loud and clear as we should. It’s a coded language amongst those who feel the creeping tide of the technocratic takeover. The original Matrix movie will forever be one of my favorite films and a pillar of sci-fi. As we are marched toward the metaverse, we may find this franchise is one of the best tools we have for framing the dangers of this drive toward uploading our consciousness into the cloud.
For research purposes, I thought I better give Reloaded and Revolutions another watch before I saw the fourth… Perhaps there was a grain of truth that I missed the first and only time I saw the sequels. Despite my detestation for the two films that followed, I gave them a recent rewatch and have decidedly come to the conclusion they are dog shit. The message is muddled and the nature of the power structure dwindles to a petty fight. The meat and potatoes that made The Matrix the stern warning it was is lost in overly CGI fight scenes, green-hued everything and brain-breakingly slow dialogue.
Still, I wanted to be ready to see the fourth and hoped we were going to get a better story more reflective of the original. I also went in with my expectations in check fully anticipating a fair amount of propaganda that softballs us on this idea of “well maybe the Matrix wouldn’t be that bad.”
And… I wasn’t wrong.
Matrix 4: Resurrections
While I will say Resurrections is a more digestible piece of cinema than Reloaded or Revolutions it has become abundantly clear there is no recreating the magic of the first. Even if you draw explicitly on the nostalgia of that first movie to lure in cynics.
There was a constant feeling of lack.
I missed the stiff rigidity of the original Neo. Keanu of Resurrections felt like a John Wick/Bill and Ted/Neo mash up. I missed Lawrence Fishborne, despite the attempt to keep his spirit alive. I found the “new crew” severely lacking in charisma. It felt like the movie could have also been called “Regurgitation” because for the most part the only things I liked were the nods to the original. And the coffee shop that was aptly named “Simulatte.” I’m a sucker for a good pun.
All that being said, there were aspects of the movie I thought were important. Nuggets of truth to be plucked up amidst the franchise’s carnage. Truth hidden in plain sight as it always is in Hollywood productions. Intent that has more umph in the real world than it did in the narrative.
The reason I examine sci-fi is for its future casting ability. For its philosophical suppositions about what world we’re headed towards. For the predictive programming aimed at softening us to ideas we may not be on board with. So I don’t have to love every second of a film or show to grab the grains of #scifiIRL goodness that lurk in even the least compelling stories.
[Here come the spoilers in case you hadn’t figured that out.]
Did they kill the franchise on purpose? Is this dilution?
There is little wonder whose side Hollywood is on. It’s not yours or mine. They work for big corporations and government and their own self-interest. There is little, perhaps nothing, organic about the messages delivered in today’s mainstream films.
While the CIA’s history of hovering over Hollywood is relatively common knowledge, I think it’s nearly impossible for us to understand just how deep the deception and propaganda goes. Entertainment is a tool of the elite. Perhaps even a weapon.
I think Matrix might have been too advanced and too original for its time. I think it slid past the gatekeepers with the first-of-its-kind special effects and managed to deliver a truth that has lasted decades. It is a metaphor for our tech-centric world if nothing else and continues to pose the question “What is reality?” I don’t think that’s a question controllers want us asking.
So my first feeling towards the fourth movie is that this was an attempt to put the final nail in the coffin. It was a hail mary hope that we’d let go of the first movie by diluting the message in all its sequels. And maybe for some it will. Not me. But I’m sure most people will just walk away from it, leaving all its poignant questions behind.
We just can’t live without tech. Fall of Zion
While I didn’t take notes during my viewing, so my memory is a little shaky, I think the fall of Zion (and Morpheus with it) was meant as a dig at all the luddites who would rather see no tech than tech gone awry.
From what I gleaned, Morpheus and crew didn’t have the capacity to see the potential in machines, so they fell during a civil war in which the machines were fighting each other. Essentially, he put too much faith in Neo (mankind) and failed to see the future (machine/human merger). The new human settlement Io (seems like an odd nod to iOS), uses sentient machines to propagate their colony of free humans.
I’m perhaps ultra sensitive to this messaging. I myself grapple with it. I believe tech as it is now is a huge threat to our society, especially our kids. But I can’t help but hold hope that there is some sort of magical balance that can be struck between utilizing technology without being overtaken by it.
Still, the message of “evolve or die” seemed like the theme for the fall of Morpheus and Zion. Those entities represented hope in humanity. And both were lost.
Turning something meaningful into something trivial.
“Where better to bury the truth than in something as ordinary as a video game?”
Perhaps my favorite point of all was found in the metaphor and subsequent dialogue about how Neo’s experience (movies 1-3) were reduced to a game he designed in this new and improved matrix. His entire existence and the existence of the matrix was boiled down to a trivial piece of entertainment, making even the idea of his world being fake seem silly and crazy to Neo.
Therein lies the deepest truth of the movie buried by a bunch of muck. Movies themselves are a way to trivialize and weaken big concepts. When we think of time travel, we think of fun, adventure romps, not the fact that physicists believe it’s mathematically possible to some extent. Or when we think of life on another planet, we think of little green men and not the fact that if creatures can survive in the darkest depths of our oceans, odds are pretty good life can exist off this planet too.
Neo’s memories and intuition are buried by the fact that his experience has become everyone’s collective entertainment through the video game. It disarms him and makes him feel as if he’s insane rather than leading him down a thoughtful exploration of his intuition. It’s only in his subconscious mind that he’s able to explore the possibility that the matrix is real and that his storyline for the game comes from a deeper place.
Honestly, I ponder that concept around writing fiction. All the time. Are the stories I write my imagination gone wild or am I tapping into a deeper knowing? When pieces of a narrative fit together so clean and you write something intuitively that you later discover has real world context, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve crafted this art from an intelligence buried in your subconscious.
This, to me, is the ultimate testament to my overarching philosophy which is that “creativity is the most direct path to truth.” Artistic expression of an idea that’s tugging at your mind is an exercise in exploring, creating and discovering reality.
Neo both fortified himself in and unlocked himself from his own prison through an artistic endeavor. That right there, is my jam.
In order not to fall victim to Neo’s opening reality, I think this quote is a poignant one:
“[The Matrix] weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us.”
We see this all the time in the corporate capture of organic movements. A pure, heart-centered idea becomes a tool for manipulation among the corrupt if the creators don’t hold onto it tight and protect its meaning.
Simulations within simulations and lives born to tech.
Again, this may be a point I’m looking for rather than seeing explicitly in the storyline/dialogue. But at one point the ragged, exiled Merovingian mocks the current culture and their “beep bop boop” text interactions versus real conversation and experience.
The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris… who was my first crush in case anyone was curious a la Doogie Howser, M.D.) also makes a point to explain how few people are even interested in being freed in his “new matrix.”
And I get the feeling the implication is that they’ve buried the simulation under layers of simulation. Entertainment, Handlers (aka people who steer the minds of those plugged in, versus the forceful agents of yesteryears), technology within the technology, just keep people more pacified and distracted to the point where fewer and fewer people even notice that their world is fake.
To me this is a paradigm of our current existence. We can turn a blind eye to pain and suffering and violence and deterioration of society because we can turn on Netflix, Instagram and Xbox. We don’t have to care that the economy is brought to a screeching halt because white collar workers have Zoom. And we don’t have to think about attending a concert in loving, harmonious oneness because we’ll just catch Beiber in the metaverse.
We are numbed. Ignorant. Submissive. And I think there is some implication in Matrix 4 that that is in great service to the machines.
And whether you think we’re headed towards a technocratic apocalypse or not. You can rest assured that this passivity tech has created works in the favor of our current, presumably human, controllers.
Agitation Generates Energy and Feelings are Devices for Control
Some of the best lines were delivered by NPH. The Analyst, as he’s called, is a far more tolerable mastermind than The Architect. One of my favorite things about all the Matrix movies is the way in which machine-based characters (Agent Smith, The Oracle, The Architect, The Analyst) dissect the human psyche and hold a mirror up to the human condition. There are always some very effective points made during a program/machine’s diatribe in all the movies.
While I can’t remember each line verbatim, I know that one of The Analyst’s points revolves around the energy generated by holding us in an agitated state. He describes hope and despair as code that looks nearly identical. He implies that it is to the benefit of the controllers that we’re never quite content. Always wanting more while being unable to appreciate what we have. Always craving and needing and filled with despondency.
Again, I think this has application now. How can we raise our children well if we can’t be present? How can we create art if we’re only ever concerned with making a dollar? When we do something great, commercial interest tells us it’s still not good enough. As long as we are left wanting and wishing and despairing, we have no time to think, to live, to breathe, to enjoy, to be free, to love.
“What validates and makes your fiction real?” the Analyst asks. “Feelings. Here’s the thing about feelings: they’re so much easier to control than facts.”
This is why, just so you know, all news appeals to your heart and your emotions, not your intellect.
Transhumanism is all up in it.
There is going to be a nearly endless onslaught of transhumanism in mainstream sci-fi. They want us abundantly comfortable with the overlap of man and machine. They want us to not only accept, but invite the tech into our bodies and eventually, surrender ourselves over to it entirely.
From Neo and Trinity’s dead bodies being remade by the machines as a power source for the new matrix to instilling the spirit of Morpheus and Agent Smith into a program which is then transmitted into the real world, there is a constant message of “machines and mankind together is what’s best for.”
This is in complete defiance of the original’s message. It was our hubris, our unending, unstoppable arrogance for improvement that led to the destruction of the world and the creation of the matrix. It was AI gone rogue that caused our end, but in Matrix 4, with Priyanka Chopra’s character and the aid of other sentient machines that the world is saved?
Sorry this does not pass my BS filter. The attempt to flip the entire point of the first movie and drive us towards the idea that microchips in our body are a good thing, the metaverse is an escape from the dangerous real world and all of us should be grateful to have our brains upgraded (“I know Kung Fu.”) is not lost on me.
With this movie they tell us to embrace AI, use tech to our favor and trust that everything will work out in glaring contradiction to the message of the first. And I’m not the least bit surprised. The likes of Ray Kurzweil and Klaus Schwab are quite pleased I’m sure.
Love is still the key
Despite how cringey just about EVERY SCENE Neo and Trinity shared together was, this plot, like most sci-fi plots, held on to one point: Love conquers all.
Love was the key to saving Neo. Love was the key to saving Trinity. Love was the key to saving Zion. Love was the key to saving the matrix. And love was the key to overcoming it once again.
It’s almost overkill, but I think it’s an unavoidable point that humans just can’t help but conclude on. It really is the most significant force in the universe. It defies power and money and technology and science and even our drive for self preservation. It’s stronger than anything else we can put our finger on and it is incalculable in its reach and reason.
In all arenas, where we can find love we can find a way out. In the most desperate of times in the most hopeless of scenarios, love gives us strength and courage. Our love for our children, our spouse, our parents, our planet, our humanity, our own existence is the key to freeing us from the apparatuses that seek to control us. If we can remember that love is so much more fulfilling than the tech conveniences, maybe we still have a shot.