Matrix was right: how the saga was always one step ahead of the times

"What is the Matrix": the question continues to haunt millions of moviegoers and seasoned fans. Everyone is waiting for the release of Matrix Resurrections (1), the fourth installment of the cult science fiction saga, to reunite with their heroes Keanu Reeves (Neo) and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity).

A visionary scenario

Twenty-two years ago, the first film of this dystopia made an impression, both for its visionary statement and for its iconic aesthetics. Matrix has become a phenomenon. The pitch? A clash between humans and machines governed by artificial intelligence, the first having to free themselves from the yoke of the seconds which keep their minds in a virtual reality, the famous matrix. The hacker Neo, surrounded by Trinity and Morpheus, tries to free humanity. When the movie comes out, we are in June 1999, a few months before what computer experts call the "year 2000 bug". Boris Yeltsin is preparing to appoint a certain Vladimir Putin as head of the Russian government, Kubrick has just died, and the trendy dream of buying a Nokia 8810, the latest in cell phones. Cautious film critics comment on the release of this film, which has already caused a lot of ink to flow across the Atlantic.

In video, "Matrix Resurrections", the trailer

A controversial saga

Arrived on American screens in March, Matrixis accused of having "reignited the debate on the fascination of young Americans for violence", as the correspondent of Liberation in Washington writes . In April, two teenagers opened fire on dozens of their peers at Columbine, Colorado, high school, and the media quickly made the connection with a scene from The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves goes through an automatic gate with heavy weaponry, before to machine-gun his opponents. In reality, the two young assassins were inspired by Born Killers, by Oliver Stone (1994), but the conservative press prefers to point the finger at this film which looks like a video game, the new obsession of film producers and worried parents. .

The whistleblower, messianic hero

“Symbolically, this film came out just before the turn of the millennium, and it felt like it was a synthesis of a number of fears or fantasies that were emerging at the time", explains Elie During, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre and co-author of the collective work Matrix, philosophical machine, published by Éditions Ellipses in 2003. Like the power of the machines that have enslaved humanity in the film and which refers to an allegory of capitalist alienation or to the inhuman world of digital business. But the most in tune with society was the political aspect, with the figure of Neo, the messianic hacker as a universal whistleblower. This surge of clandestine rebellion, beyond party apparatuses and even ideologies, resonates with reality when we have seen the formation of many spontaneous movements, not of revolution but of revolt or indignation, such as Occupy Wall Street or Podemos. »

Kung-fu in Plato's cave

In this dying millennium, this beautiful object of cyberpunk culture that mixes Eastern philosophies and references to the Bible or Baudrillard, allusions to Alice in Wonderland and theses dear to Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, by introducing for the first time "kung fu in Plato's cave" (dixit Elie During), seems to crystallize the issues that will arise in the following century. We are already talking about the climate crisis, with the evocation of a world ravaged by humans, compared by Agent Smith to a “virus” or a “cancer” for the planet. “It was not the first film to stage the ravages of the ecological crisis using apocalypse scenes, notes Elie During. But the strong idea of ​​Matrix is ​​to stage people who live in absolute unawareness of the real state of things. It echoes this idea that we are slowly ravaging the planet, but we don't want to see it. There's a very naive literal staging of this denial, but it works very well graphically. »

In video, a film in style: "Matrix"

Hollywood's first transgender sibling

Another thesis underpinned by the film, that of transidentity. At the time, the idea of ​​social or sexual norms was not questioned, transgender people were invisible. We still talk about transsexuals, a word from "transsexualism", a medical term that will only be removed from mental illness by the WHO in 2019. However, Lana Wachowski and her sister Lilly - Hollywood's first transgender sibling - who co-wrote the screenplay and co-directed the film when they were called Larry and Andy and had not yet completed their transition, will later affirm that the Matrix trilogy already evoked this notion. "It was our original intention, but the world wasn't ready," Lilly Wachowski said. But the metaphor has always been clear for trans people, and many of them have told me that these films saved their lives.”

Listening to the editorial podcast

A philosophical toolbox

A veritable philosophical toolbox, according to Elie During, Matrix is ​​transcended by breathtaking special effects, including the famous bullet time with its characters that seem to evolve in slow motion. And by its singular characters, the charismatic Morpheus, the undecided Neo or the powerful Trinity. The latter having inspired in 2014 to the American journalist Tasha Robinson an article evoking the “Trinity syndrome” which would strike the heroines of action films. These, presented as efficient and competent, would be reduced to the function of the right arm of the male hero. Like Trinity, whose final role is limited to playing the chilled lovers who bring Neo back to life.

Black leather, XXS glasses... The Matrix style on the catwalks

The Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

While The Matrix fails, according to Tasha Robinson, to be a feminist film, at the time it was already popularizing notions specific to science fiction literature, such as “metaverse”, these virtual 3D meta-universes, dear to Mark Zuckerberg, who wants to make it his new selling point for Meta, the former Facebook. "Zuckerberg's ambition remains a challenge, comments Julien Pequignot, lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University of Franche-Comté and author of Metavers, devices, uses and representations (L'Harmattan , 2015). Because there is an industrial problem in relation to its economic model: to access 3D worlds, the technical device is too heavy and the ecological impact of the servers, enormous. Either way, Matrix is ​​always one, if not three, steps ahead of the challenges posed by artificial intelligence to humanity.

(1) Matrix Resurrections, by Lana Wachowski, with Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss… Released on December 22.