Matrix Resurrections is a curious, funny, but disturbing adventure. If you’ve frowned more than once in the course of the feature film and still have lots of questions after the ending clap, here are some answers.
Don’t read this article if you don’t want the Matrix 4 storyline leaked. It seems obvious, but hey, we prefer to prevent.
1. In which matrix are we?
Matrix Resurrections is in matrix number 7, which has stood for over 60 years. She was created after Neo and Trinity died at the end of Matrix 3.
2. Who is The Analyst really?
The Analyst, played by Neil Patrick Harris, relates directly to the previous question. It is a computer program created by Machines and charged with the mission of recreating a new matrix (which must generate energy thanks to the humans who are connected to it to power the machines). Unlike the previous ones, this one is supposed to have absolutely no bugs, because the Analyst wants everything to be 100% under control.
To do this, he himself plays a central role in the life of Thomas Anderson by posing as his shrink. He also tasked Agent Smith (well, the new Agent Smith, whose memories have been erased, and which is contained by the Analyst) to keep an eye on him, as the villainous boss that Anderson is forced to deal with. to work.
The Analyst reportedly managed to achieve this stability in the Seventh Matrix by resurrecting Neo and Trinity in the “real” world and keeping them as close as possible, without them being able to touch each other.
3. What is a Modal?
It’s a word you hear a lot in Matrix 4, and it’s not that easy to understand. At the start of Matrix Resurrections, Neo is locked in a Matrix again in which he is Thomas Anderson, a genius developer who invented a video game, Matrix. Since the game’s runaway success, Anderson’s Chiefs have asked him to work on another, called Binary.
Thomas Anderson is struggling to move forward on his new project. In his spare time, he created a modal: a kind of virtual sandbox that belongs only to him and that uses the old code that had been used to make the video game. Matrix. A sandbox, in computer security, is most often called by its English name, sandbox : this is a place isolated from the rest where a developer can test things without risking impacting the rest of the system.
Here Neo’s subconscious prompted him to create this place, discreetly and without the Analyst realizing it. It is in this modal that the character of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the program nicknamed “new Morpheus”, was born and evolved, gradually gaining in self-awareness.
4. Where did Smith go?
Agent Smith, played here by Jonathan Groff, has certainly not disappeared at the end of this fourth installment. Throughout the film, we find the binary antagonism on which the first Matrix trilogy was based: Neo and Smith clash, one trying to save his beloved, the other wanting to maintain the stability of a matrix that once again allows it to exist (and to be free there).
At the end of Matrix Resurrections However, Smith turns on The Analyst and fights alongside Neo. This is not an altruistic decision, but a solution of survival. On the one hand, because Smith is free again in this matrix – until Neo awoke, he was controlled by the Analyst. On the other hand, because it is possible that if Neo were to die, Smith would risk dying too (a part of Neo has been in him since the Chosen One passed through him in the previous trilogy).
However, the final cafe scene hinges entirely on a dilemma: Trinity must choose whether to wake up or not. If she accepts, she can be eradicated from the matrix and Neo will have won. But if she refuses, the Analyst promises to enclose Neo in the matrix so that he can continue to make it work without pitfalls. This is why Neo’s allies, in the “real world”, are ready to disconnect him from the matrix (and therefore kill him) if he should fall back into the hands of the Analyst.
Smith then arrives to “save” him, but above all to prevent the Analyst from rebooting the matrix as he wishes. The alliance was short-lived, however, and the program resumed, explaining that it is ” anybody », In opposition to the Chosen One.
5. Is Trinity an Chosen One?
For much of the film, Trinity is stuck in the Matrix, playing the role of the mother of a family that Neo meets every day at the cafe around the corner. He’s madly in love with her, but she doesn’t know him. Then, as the movie progresses, he tries to convince her to trust him and remember who she is.
It is only at the end of Matrix Resurrections that she becomes aware of having been locked in this false world. She takes Neo on his motorcycle and, after a long chase, the two lovers find themselves on the roof of a building. They leap into the void to escape, hoping that Neo’s power will allow them to fly. A twist (by the way, as badly done as it was poorly filmed): it is in fact Trinity who levitates, and holds at arm’s length (literally) the one who was thought to be the Chosen One.
Several theories clash.
It is possible that there are in fact several Chosen: Matrix 4 keeps reminding us of the importance of a binary equilibrium (except when it comes to queerness), and the Neo / Trinity duo is the foundation of its entire plot. The Analyst himself finds that when the two touch each other, they exert too much power to be contained. This would be a way for Lana Wachowski to show her first trilogy from another angle: salvation was not made by one man, but by a couple.
The other hypothesis is that Neo would not be, or no longer, an Chosen One and that Trinity would replace him. This theory is relatively undermined by one of the end scenes where we see the two heroes and heroine spinning in the skies – Neo therefore has many more powerful powers than normal. However, it is true that Matrix Resurrections strives to shrink his hero, unable to levitate as in the old days, to stop a bullet that rushes towards his lover or to fight as before. Conversely, the wait for Trinity to “awaken” clearly echoes the days when Neo was still in the Matrix in the early days of Matrix. And pushes to wonder: can other people have powers in the matrix, from the moment they “see” it?
The last analysis may be more cynical, but it behooves us all the same to propose it: to try to roughly materialize a feminist discourse that would have deserved much more to be infused throughout the film. Trinity spends most of Matrix 4 while waiting to be saved, so that the character takes back, in the end, control of his own narration by force (a big motorcycle, big powers, a big slap, a throat cut (yes)). The feat leaves a bitter taste, like a botched solution that would miss his ambitions of empowerment, and does not even provide more explanations. Or … read on.
6. Are we the turkeys of a huge farce?
Lana Wachowski is a brilliant director and producer. So, it’s impossible not to wonder: is she openly laughing at us?
Matrix Resurrections is not a great movie. It’s not even, in reality, a good movie. But it’s a movie that warned us from the start that it wasn’t a good movie.
The first half hour is an anthology of meta references and fourth wall culling, where the characters themselves debate the relevance of The Matrix and her legacy. Where we listen to a group of men raving about the next opus of which they are inventing the plot, with great blows of nostalgic reminders, private jokes and “brain explosions”.
ThenWachowski unrolls the rest of a film that connects nostalgic, private jokes and brain explosions. BULLET TIME!
How to imagine that the director could have brought back the Merovingian with such a lack of subtlety and intelligence? When we hear (or rather, suffer) Lambert Wilson swear by swear words in French, we can only hope that this is a third degree parody of these films which only self-refer – in the dark room where we were, moreover, the laughter was only of short duration in front of the coarseness of the exercise.
How to think that adding “cute little machines” to help humans is not an open-mindedness? sidekicks so cute that now populate all the big franchises (hello baby Yoda)?
Can we even consider the fact that LanaWachowski could, without any hindsight, have used the mechanisms that she denounces in her work? The thought would do him no honor. So, we prefer to listen to the heart than to the reason: Matrix 4 is there to hurt us. A toy deliberately broken to force us to raise our heads and revolt us, IRL, against the industry of all that is fake : news, blockbusters, contemporary culture, emotions. And turn to the only absolute truth, the feeling of love. The heart has its reasons.