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But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades. “The Matrix Resurrections” is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. But even more, it’s a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. As a movie, it’s everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. Wednesday saw the release of “The Matrix Resurrections,” a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed Lilly sat it out) - and also an answer to that question. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?
#Blue pill red pill matrix movie
Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films’ villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people “will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite.” When Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump tweeted about the “red pill” last year, co-director Lilly Wachowski instantly (and profanely) slapped them down.īeyond that, though, the Wachowskis have been largely silent about the “meaning” of their creation - a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. The Wachowskis, the sibling auteurs who created the franchise, both underwent a gender transition in the years after its release, and one half of the duo recently confirmed a long-standing fan theory that the films were partially intended as a metaphor for gender identity. The neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a Tucker Carlson guest and favorite of Steve Bannon’s, deployed it influentially on his blog Conservative YouTube star Candace Owens called her own conservative awakening the “ Black Red Pill.”ĪP21350839377978.jpegTo say this wasn’t the movie’s intention would be an understatement. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be “red-pilled” means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises.
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In the past two decades, the idea of a “red pill” has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right.
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In the movie’s pivotal moment, the protagonist gets a choice: Swallow a blue pill, which will return him to his comfortable reality, or take a red pill that will forever awaken him to “reality,” which happens to be an alien hellscape. The mind-blowing conceit of the original 1999 film - and warning, spoilers will be coming thick and fast here - is that the “real world” is a fiction, and a few chosen people get the chance to see behind the curtain. “The Matrix” is one of the most iconic, influential sci-fi franchises of the modern era, but one of its most lasting legacies is among the most unexpected: It changed politics, almost entirely by mistake.