Welcome back everyone and hi there to you if you are new here.
The Matrix 4 Resurrections was released about two weeks ago from the time of this post, so we’ve had enough time to watch the movie and also what seems to be an overwhelming bad reaction to this movie from all the reviews we’ve been seeing.
This made me realize that almost no one who watched it and was giving it a bad review actually got that this movie definitively answered THE question that was posed all the way back in the first Matrix movie.
Now most people thought the question was already answered way back in the first Matrix movie, so they missed it when it was revealed here in Matrix 4. So what was THE question Matrix Resurrections finally answers?
What is the Matrix?
The analysis that will be presented here are for the intermediate to advanced truth finders.
The Matrix series is a more multi-layered story than most, so it provides a great way to look at some profound information within a narrative we can all share, think about and discuss more deeply.
We’ve been fans of The Matrix series since it came out. We got together with our friends and took up a whole row in the movie theater to watch the original Matrix together in 1999. After it was over I sat in my seat very affected by this movie. I didn’t understand what I do now about the story it really tells, but after 21 years I still think it’s as close to a perfect movie as I’ve ever seen.
I did like the next 2 sequels of The Matrix, but not as much as the original, yet it was after watching those that I started to glimpse what the story that was being presented was really about. It would take many years later before I totally “got it” and that “it” was all but confirmed in this 4th piece of The Matrix story.
One of the biggest pieces to The Matrix story most have missed is this…
All of the characters within The Matrix are video game characters. But they aren’t just your regular, old video game characters…they are artificial intelligence video game characters.
The Matrix is the matrix of a video game and they directly tell us this in Matrix Resurrections.
Going Meta In The Matrix
You will notice a whole lot of people describing Matrix Resurrections as being so “meta” and there is more than one layered meaning within this that ironically, went over most heads.
If you think back to 1999 when the original Matrix was first released, we were just beginning the “internet era” and things like social media hadn’t yet come on the scene. Yet, here is Morpheus explaining to Neo in the “desert of the real” scene that everything that Neo has experienced and will experience has a root cause in people giving birth to artificial intelligence. As a viewer this sounded far ahead of it’s time, much like Neo found himself in the future from when he thought he was.
From my perspective, all of the characters that we get to know in The Matrix story are actually artificial intelligence themselves and don’t know it. This “desert of the real” scene from the original Matrix is our first clue about this.
The Matrix is a video game which is revealed directly in Matrix Resurrections, but it’s not just a way to trick Neo in The Matrix to make him think he is a game developer of video game called The Matrix…it’s much more “meta” than that.
All of the characters in The Matrix, even those who think they are awakened, red-pilled or unplugged to the “real world” are only more evolved programs or technology than the other programs they are battling. The split is shown in battling the agents in The Matrix and the sentients or machines in the “real world’.
The trick here is that those who are red-pilled think they are real people, they don’t know they are really video game characters that evolved into artificial intelligence. They don’t know they are learning about the natural intelligence that they were programmed by. The real people in the real world outside were programming this way to make more “real” feeling characters in more “real” feeling immersive video games.
This explains why the characters were so amazing at using technology and why they were so good at fighting. Aren’t most video games about fighting and war? Think “guns, lots of guns.”
This also explains the stiff, direct and pointed discussions that occur between the characters that have all the basic elements of our people emotions, but there is always something missing, right? There is no depth or nuance like is found in our real people emotions.
One of the biggest things The Matrix story is telling us is that these are video game characters machine learning about our deepest emotions, the deepest of which is love. They are learning about what an experience of being conscious or becoming self-aware is through the evolution only love can provide.
Meta Storytelling Through Movie And Games Combined
Think back to 1999. Do you remember what video games looked like then? The flat, pretty much one-dimensional characters? Video games that were all about defeating the enemy or completing a task to level up?
These kinds of characters certainly got an upgrade from that point, didn’t it? A whole new modern gaming technology came about that included things like movie quality cut scenes to advance more complex storytelling. You can specifically find this in the video games that were released after the 1st Matrix movies.
The big piece of The Matrix story is that these video game characters who believe they are real people are evolving in a Matrix of a video game from what used to be just a series of choices that were binary choices of yes/no, 0 and 1, on/off and blue pill and red pill dichotomies.
What is next for us in this next great technology push is what The Matrix 4 Resurrections is showing us. This is really why Matrix Resurrections is so “meta”…it was intentional to let us know we are being pushed to virtual reality and to the metaverse.
From my perspective, the writers of The Matrix story wondered about what life would be like for a video game character from their perspective from inside the matrix of the video game world they live in. This was not an entirely new concept, but done in an entirely new way.
I think the writers wondered about what the playable characters inside of a video game do when you boot up the game and put them into play or battle vs. what they do when you aren’t playing the game…what life do they live outside of that?
I think the writers also wondered about what it would be like for the non-playable characters that exist in the background of the game, all those in the pods plugged into the video game matrix with no leading role to play, no choices to make.
I think the writers also wondered what might happen if programs could hack other programs and overwrite code and how technology could evolve into higher forms of artificial intelligence and what kind of advanced computing power that would require.
I think The Matrix is a simulation built to learn how to create controllable A.I.
Dead Action In Matrix Resurrections Was Meta, Too
Much of the action that the 1st 3 Matrix films were known for fell flat in Matrix Resurrections, but this was just another meta message.
So many have been complaining loudly over the last several years about not just the “deadness” of the internet (see our post on Dead Internet Theory here), but also video games and the movie industry, as well. Too much of the same ol’, same ol’ with too many sequels and spin-offs, just like you hear The Merovingian say in his appearance in Matrix Resurrections.
I didn’t realize when doing our Dead Internet Theory post, how much this would all connect, but when you connect it with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of the re-branding of Facebook to Meta and the sneak peek he have us into the metaverse, combined with Epic Games releasing Unreal Engine and Metahuman within it…things start to become clearer.
The original Matrix trilogy came out of a time that is described as being the end of the Postmodern Age. Some have been wondering when the next era would begin and what it would be called. I think one of the meta cultural messages within Matrix Resurrections we are being given is that it will be named Metamodernism and it’s where we are now heading.
There was another meta message I saw within Matrix Resurrections that was aimed at the generation the original trilogy, games and the anime inspired Animatrix series was a big influence on…my generation…Gen X.
Gen X has been witness to an unbelievable amount of advances of technology we have adopted and adapted to in our lifetimes. We have been witness to all the promise of the benefits in making our lives “better”. Yet, it is only now that we are re-evaluating the benefits in light of the real harms it has caused, as well.
What has happened to Gen X as a whole? Have we been tricked off our own paths of individuality and creativity into a sterilized, corporatized, medicated into numbness experience? Is Neo in the bathroom with all his blue pills a mirror for Gen X lack of action here?
A move from fighting and war games toward other world-building games like Minecraft we have seen in the last several years. I think it’s the world-building aspect of Minecraft that will be used as a springboard for what we will see in the metaverse.
Niobe’s new world of Io in Matrix Resurrections is a mirror to this build your own world in the metaverse idea and is echoed in Niobe’s explanation in the movie that Io was a collaborative effort…people and machines building it together.
In our first video about Matrix Resurrections before it was released (see that post here) I made some predictions about how we should expect to see the movie match up detail by detail and scene by scene to the sky story and it turns out after seeing the movie, I was right. However, we will have to leave that decoding that goes beyond any meta level we have here, for our advanced private videos.
What we can talk more about on this level, if there are enough of you who are interested are the many more references within this story and things like the inter-textual story about another Keanu Reeves character John Wick.
Many have theorized already, and rightly so I think that John Wick and The Matrix story overlaps and that John Wick is also a video game character who lives within a video game matrix, too.
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Until next time…stay lit and be well,
shannon