If you haven't seen the original films, or it's been a while, the premise goes something like this. Ronald Siemoneit/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix. The Matrix Resurrections is here to take it back. It’s been taken away from those who it was written by and for. That’s why it’s so gut-wrenching that, 22 years later, the film’s biggest and most lasting contribution to the English language - the phrase “taking the red pill” - has become a shorthand for radical anti-feminism and alt-right conspiracy theory.
THE MATRIX RED PILL FREE
Many viewers also realized - years before the Wachowskis came out publicly as transgender women - that the film’s themes resonated strongly with the hope and fear, dysphoria and euphoria, of rebelling against one’s gender assigned at birth.įor millennials who were coming into adulthood in an already bleak world, The Matrix offered a hopeful promise: If we put in the work, we can free ourselves from any number of different prisons and become more truly ourselves in the process. The film’s villains take the form of government agents, and anyone who stayed for the closing credits heard Rage Against the Machine shout about the evils of imperialism and white supremacy. Its hero, Neo ( Keanu Reeves), begins the film in a soul-devouring corporate office job. The Matrix wasn’t shy about which systems it was alluding to. Those systems seem as unbreakable as the laws of physics, but they’re only clever illusions - and if we can do the hard work of waking up, we can become more powerful than we ever imagined. But if any one thing made The Matrix so popular and so compelling, it was the message of empowerment at its heart: We’re all living inside systems of control and exploitation. The film rapidly became a cultural phenomenon, sucking audiences in with its unbearably cool, green-tinted goth aesthetic and its groundbreaking use of “bullet time” and sticking in their minds with its philosophical undertones.
“F*ck both of you.” That’s how Lilly Wachowski replied when, in May 2020, Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump publicly bonded over taking “the red pill.”Ī lot has happened since 1999, when Lilly and her sister Lana Wachowski released The Matrix, introducing the concept of the “red pill” into the popular vernacular.
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