The Matrix Resurrections: a surface level defense

Updated at 5:18AM on 08Nov2023.

Wachowski and Matrix media is VERY unsettling at first. I think the original Matrix film hit so hard because it was an easy pill for the average human to swallow.

Matrix Resurrections…? Not so much.

The Matrix was a movie that explored ideas about reality. The Matrix Reloaded explored ideas about control and domination. The Matrix Revolutions explored ideas about love and more broadly how we define the world around us. All of it from a very queer and trans lens. In a like vein, The Matrix Resurrections is about memory, trauma, and ultimately: healing. It also covers themes of dysphoria, dissociation, detransition, and conversion torture in a surprisingly universal way. For all the (white trans people, because it’s usually white) trans people calling for trans actors on the screen playing explicitly trans characters decrying this not happening in this specific film… that’s what Lana Wachowski has spent the last nine years begging for every time she got behind the camera. And explicitly trans characters as far back as The Matrix. It hurts to watch us rip into our own like it’s our fault that it’s not happening. Please give people space to be wrong (I need to work on this, too), because it’s probably not even them who’s in the wrong, but the paradigm we are forced to endure to create art.

From here, I’m going to cover the biggest complaints I’ve heard/seen.

~:aesthetic:~

We start with something familiar. The title screen. Raining green code. The code crawls up for Resurrections flashing in yellow. There’s a color theory to the original trilogy like so:

• Green
  • Matrix
  • Mind
  • Intellect & Ideas
• Blue
  • “The real world”
  • Body
  • Very cold here
• Yellow
  • Spirit
  • Emotions
  • This is big, because of The Animatrix, The Second Renaissance Part I, where the teacher says the Synthients (machines) were “endowed with the spirit of man”
  • Synthient city and beings registered to Neo as beings of light, as did Seraph
• My citation for the above is the philosophy commentary tracks with Cornel West and Ken Wilbur from the box set and subsequent releases.
• It is important to note this is a very different interpretation than the color theory idea presented by Tilly Bridges in her book Begin Transmission, but her aim is very different from that of West and Wilbur, as is mine here.

After that, we have a very cool shot of what looks like water running down a wall from our angle, and a SWAT boot smashing right in the middle of it (which means the water was actually running up the wall because REFLECTIONS, BABY!!!). Which should set our expectations for everything in the matrix world of this film.

Bugs gets caught. She introduces herself “as in Bunny, and tech that listens.” This is Wachowski trademark goalpost setting. Nothing is as simple as it appears on the surface in Matrix media or other Wachowski media. Why does it matter? Well, mostly because language has different meanings in different contexts to different people.

Also, this is a completely different matrix world. At the end of Revolutions, the green tint was gone in favor of an almost rainbow sky (or arguably, a trans pride flag). There are small touches of the matrix of the old films, but it’s that way for a reason. What is aesthetically very similar to the original films is the real world of the old films.

~:resurrections:~

The synthients resurrecting people in the lore of the Matrix isn’t as far fetched as it seems. In “Goliath” by Neil Gaiman from The Matrix Comics we learn the synthients can grow humans to their specifications. In The Animatrix short “World Record” we learn they can delete and possibly manipulate memories.

Sati’s father, Rama-Kandra, introduced himself as the “power plant systems manager for recycling operations” and his wife Kamala as “an interactive software programmer” at the start of Revolutions (please for the love of fuck do not start in with the conspiracy theories about VP Harris). It’s not a bold jump to go from there to “chief engineer of the resurrection pods at the Anomalium” in terms of sci-fi techno-jargon. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Analyst stole part of what he claims to know about the human mind from Kamala. It would totally be in line with the Architect downplaying the role of the Oracle in the creation of the matrix the way he did in Reloaded.

~:morpheus:~

The original Morpheus was a very dogmatic figure. Niobe was a foil for him (a foil, not the only foil), casting doubt not only on the plan to get Neo to the source in Reloaded, but the WHY of the plan. Niobe talks about the time between the Siege of Zion and what they had achieved in Io. How Zion was destroyed because of their dogmatic beliefs that it had to be humanity or the Synthients rather than humanity AND the Synthients. Thus, a different, non-dogmatic Morpheus who not only thinks outside of established parameters, but actively eschews them (“Limits are the domain of the limited”) and not just in terms of “obedience vs. disobedience” makes a lot more sense than viewers may realize on first viewing.

The other set-up for this is “System Freeze” by Poppy Z. Brite in The Matrix Comics Volume 2, where a human plugged into the matrix begins writing an AI. Agents take note as she is climbing Mt. Everest and falls. They give her a choice, freeze to death, or complete the AI. She says she will finish the AI, but the trauma of the whole experience has killed her inspiration for it, and… Read the comic and find out the rest of the story for yourself. It’s cool. Anyways, the important part is AI programmed by humans in a computer generated dream world made by AI programmed by humans.

~:villains:~

The villains were kind of clunky. But the villains we face in our every day lives aren’t so easy to pin down. Like Smith said to Neo toward the end, “Anyone could have been you, whereas I’ve always been anyone.” I want to point out a few key “upgrades”, though. Jude and the Analyst both engage in blatant misogyny. Considering how a lot of AI is programmed by cis/het men, and it influences the way AI does things… I think a big reason for the misogyny on the part of those two characters is that Lana Wachowski was well aware of the internet culture surrounding the first film. She and Lilly kind of called it with how Reloaded and Revolutions played out in Smith’s story arc.

I want to talk about the Morpheus of this film more here, though, since he started out in the role of a villain. This created an interesting tension. Morpheus starting out as an agent thinking he was Smith makes sense given the story that was being told. He had to figure out who he was and claim it, just like Neo, just like Trinity.

Boxes.
In boxes.
In fucking boxes.

Morpheus being a program written by a human who is able to move between the human and the machine world makes sense. He comes from Neo’s subconscious. Neo’s dreams. They all have to make the choice to live in truth. As we see, it is dangerous to do. The choice is an illusion, though… A lot of us make it without even thinking about it.

~:in conclusion:~

No movie is perfect (except Godzilla Minus One), but The Matrix Resurrections is a lot better than people are making it out to be. There are some people who are being unduly harsh because they just wanted the same thing as it always was, but there are others who actually did have legit complaints. Some of the legit complaints I’ve heard I’m not even touching here because they deserve a more intellectual approach than a nerd approach. And some of those legit complaints I’ve heard are going to have me going “yup. I agree. And let’s go deeper.” But I realized the sea monkey I loved to life was… getting a bit beyond my capacity to care for unassisted (no I’m serious, 13k words in ~72 hours which may never see the light of day because I have my own story to tell being a single parent to the kind of story telling I want to do is hard). So I need a break. In the interim, here’s this exhausted defense of a beautiful movie that made this traumatized autistic tranny feel very seen.