The red pill movie movie#

The film’s screenplay is riddled with self-aware references, characters casting off winking bon mots like “nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.” Keanu Reeves returns in his leading role, as does Carrie-Anne Moss as his counterpart other characters, like Morpheus and Agent Smith, are recast with actors made to resemble their counterparts.

On the most superficial level, the defining characteristic of “The Matrix Resurrections” is its familiarity. 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?

The red pill movie 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. To say this wasn’t the movie’s intention would be an understatement.