#REDDIT MATRIX RED OR BLUE PILL MOVIE#
#REDDIT MATRIX RED OR BLUE PILL SERIES#

(This part of the movie also includes a lot of funny, meta commentary about videogames, sequels, and the fact that they’re making yet another Matrix movie.) Personally this was my favorite part of the movie, since I am always a sucker for intellectual ideas and weird experimental forms of media.

The first part of the movie is a twisty and disorienting story about philosophical questions and cultural criticism. Neo is struggling to tell what’s real - he can’t decide whether to believe he’s trapped in the matrix-simulation or believe he’s a game designer struggling with severe mental illness.

Matrix 4 pretends to be about the original theme of bravely choosing truth over lies, but secretly it is about choosing the colorful emotional drama of human feelings and narrative over the boring technicalities of realism.

The basic theme is something like: “true reality vs familiar illusion”.īut in Matrix 4, the “human world” of 2020 San Francisco is cartoonishly oversaturated - the bright colors symbolize how the matrix has been redone as a narrative-friendly dreamworld. Only the “machine world” has a reasonably even (albeit drab) color balance. In the original Matrix movie, the “human world” of 1999 New York is tinted a sickly green - besides giving the movie a distinct visual style, green is associated with the green text of old-fashioned computers and thus symbolized the fact that the matrix-simulation isn’t the real world. The therapist explains that the reconfigured simulation has been setting new productivity records - the machines can extract more energy per person, and ironically people are less likely to question the veracity of a dream-world that panders to human psychology than they are to question a realistic simulation of a coherent human society. The therapist reveals that the matrix-simulation has been re-configured under his new management - instead of aiming for the “fussy facts and equations” of a perfectly realistic simulation of human society, the new matrix-simulation is a deliberately incoherent dream-world designed to stimulate maximum emotional drama by dreaming up dramatic stories and conflicts: “can you catch the bullet in time”? Partway through “The Matrix: Resurrections”, Neo’s therapist is revealed to be the villain of the movie and the current controller of the matrix-simulation. Matrix 4 asks if we prefer nonfiction-style realism versus fiction-style emotional narrative. Matrix 1 was about “true reality” versus false simulation.

This is distinct from my writing about videogames, where all my analysis is completely serious.

#REDDIT MATRIX RED OR BLUE PILL SERIES#

This is the first entry in “ Overthinking It ”, a series of blog posts where I joyfully read a little too much philosophy and politics into movies of questionable quality.

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