But we do spend a lot of time living as avatars, allowing social media companies to build livelihoods off of our creative and intellectual output. No, AI overlords haven’t built a giant simulation. Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s original vision feels so real today largely because they gave it language. But in a time when “red-pilling” is a political buzzword and you can say “we’re living in the Matrix” to just about anyone and they’ll understand the gist, how many uninitiated ones are left? In different circumstances, this repetitiveness would be a problem, a spell cast to repel the unfamiliar, the newcomers. That’s the point they’re still relevant because the lessons of The Matrix remain unlearned. The motifs-cascading green code, simulation theory, white rabbits-remain the same, a recursive loop that, while not new, plays a familiar melody. New characters and new obstacles emerge, but there’s also no doubt Resurrections is about getting the band back together for one more show-even if Reeves and Moss spend most of their time with a new cast of characters and Morpheus is now New Morpheus ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a different iteration of the character played by Laurence Fishburne in the original movies. The Matrix Resurrections was made for those who have spent the last 22 years immersed in the franchise. But set against the backdrop of what the Matrix franchise is, and what it’s come to mean, it’s tolerable.
Cyber robot fonts movie#
Truth (heh) be told, all of this would be downright corny in any other movie it might even be corny in this one. You don’t need a red pill to experience the real world, but the conspiracy-laden, right-wing internet has co-opted “ red-pilling” to mean waking up to the many ways liberalism is poisoning America. AI doesn’t generate our reality (probably), but it does live in our cars and TVs and toothbrushes. Scientists are working on brain-computer interfaces that could, many years from now, send virtual experiences to our brains. No one lives in a simulation, but Silicon Valley can’t get enough of the metaverse, which often feels just a few clicks West. What the Wachowskis predicted in The Matrix-a world where artificial intelligence turns people into batteries and runs a simulation to keep them docile-hasn’t entirely come to pass, but hints of it are everywhere. Would virtual and augmented realities even exist if it weren’t for William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the USS Enterprise’s holodecks? Everyone who makes surveillance tech surely knows the year 1984.
Dick warned readers about androids, and now fears of AI revolts creep up when we dream of electric sheep (or at least watch a Boston Dynamics robot dance). Brave New World presaged antidepressants. It was a grim prediction, but one in a long line of sci-fi stories that foretold the near-future.
It took the hopeful energy of the early internet years and envisioned what might happen if humanity’s reliance on connectivity and thinking machines led to its near-demise. When The Matrix came out in 1999, it was a beautifully realized cyberpunk fable.