The year starts on January 1 with the arrival in the cinemas of Matrix Resurrections. This is the fourth installment in the saga of what is considered the greatest science fiction film ever made. In the US it is already out and the reviews are rave about.
It was 1999 when the first episode came out, which changed not only cinema but also our imagination. The vision of the future. Matrix in fact it’s a great movie about technology, with humanity trapped in a virtual reality built by machines that today we would call metaverse, but it is also a film about philosophy. On the meaning of life. In fact, the two authors of the saga, the Wachowski sisters (in 1999 they were two brothers, but that’s another story), they asked Keanu Reeves, who would be the protagonist as the hacker Neo, to prepare by reading the essay Icon and Simulacrum by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in which he speaks of the “desert of reality”, a world where reality has been replaced by the illusions of capitalism. And “desert of reality” is the same phrase that Commander Morpheus uses in the film when he introduces himself to Neo.
Everything revolves around the famous choice offered to Neo. They tell him: “This is your last chance, if you give up you won’t get any more. Blue pill, end of story: tomorrow you will wake up in your room and believe what you want. Red pill, stay in wonderland, and you’ll see how deep the white rabbit hole is. I’m offering you only the truth, remember that. Nothing more”.
In short, the choice between the red pill and the blue pill is the choice we make every day, between being content or moving forward, between being calm or exploring. Unfortunately the red pill in these twenty years has also become the symbol of all those who have stopped believing in science, of terrapiattisti, No Vax, conspiracy theorists, more or less dangerous extremists. But the real message of the film is instead in Neo’s final monologue in the first episode: “I don’t know the future and I didn’t come to tell you how it will end, but how it begins”. And the future begins with our choices.
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