Who owns The Matrix? Not the computer simulation meant to keep people in a complacent stupor; that’s pretty definitively owned by the sentient computers who, in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s grand 1999 vision, have enslaved humanity.
It’s a pertinent question for a number of reasons.
In The Matrix, if the messianic hero Neo chooses to ingest a red pill, he is accepting the bitter reality that the world he lives in is a lie, thus gaining the strength of purest clarity.
To take the red pill, in this usage, is to usher oneself into a club of people who see through the bullshit of political correctness and progressivism to grasp what’s really going on, thus better arming them for the fight to come.
This is a strange and damning legacy for The Matrix to have, and is surely far from what the Wachowskis—who have, in their subsequent films, shown themselves to be humanists and optimists above all else—intended.
Resurrections does this in broadly parsable metaphor, the details of which I am supposed to be coy about lest anyone be spoiled.
At the end of the third Matrix film, Revolutions, Neo and and his warrior love, Trinity , have sacrificed themselves for the greater good.
His unnamed therapist works with him to manage what they both insist are delusions, while Thomas’s slick and maybe menacing business partner, played with effective purr by Jonathan Groff, urges him toward a career direction he’s reluctant to pursue.
The new lore created by Wachowski grows ever more confusing as it goes—though maybe true devotees of the franchise will have a clearer idea of what the hell everyone’s talking about.
Wachowski realigns the hierarchy of her characters with triumphant defiance, asserting herself as the master of this world, as the one who gets to set its terms and invite in its desired audience of fellow positive-thinkers.
“This was never yours,” Resurrections seems to say to those who willfully misunderstood what the Wachowskis made, or worked to corrupt it.
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