The Matrix: Generation (2023) Movie Script
1
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 Mlies, 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:
Dj vu...
It means the machines have
spotted the rebels.
Dj 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
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'tat.
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 abme,
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.
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 Mlies, 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:
Dj vu...
It means the machines have
spotted the rebels.
Dj 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
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'tat.
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 abme,
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.