The Matrix Saga Review
After writing some satire about The Matrix engineering, I felt like I should review the complete saga. The Matrix is, in fact, one of my favorite sci-fi universes, with some really good takes on computation. Quality isn’t exactly consistent, though. While the first Matrix is a complete gem, the rest have their highs and their lows.
Considering these are four movies and nine animated shorts, I’ll try to be swift and save all the obvious “Neo is an anagram for One” stuff. Let’s jump in.
The Matrix
In the first Matrix, we find out that humanity created artificial intelligence and lost a war against the machines. In humanity’s despair for survival, we clouded the sky to deprive the machines of the Sun as an energy source, so they turned us into their power source instead. To keep humans alive, however, the human mind needed a reality, and thus the Matrix was created: a virtual world to keep the humans in the power plants mentally occupied while their bodies remained plugged in. One of the humans born inside the system is supposedly capable of exploiting it, prophetically referred to as “the One” and destined to free humanity from bondage.
The first Matrix is indisputably my favorite. Despite the whole “humans as an alternative power source” theory, which I satirized in my previous post, The Matrix builds a solid science-fiction universe and an arguably much better villain than “it got sentient and decided to eliminate humanity in a split second” Skynet.
The script is fast-paced and a bit cryptic when you watch it for the first time. The action sequences are spot on, the visual effects popularized the legendary bullet-time, and most of them aged surprisingly well. We also get two easily distinguishable universes in the film, the Matrix and the “real world”, visually separated through their different color palettes.
More importantly, it raises questions about self-identity, consciousness, the mind, reality, and perception that can leave you thinking after the film ends, while also giving anyone remotely interested in computers some really interesting parallels to appreciate.
The Animatrix
The Matrix itself was heavily inspired by anime, with clear references to works such as Ghost in the Shell. Around the release of Reloaded, that relationship went full circle with The Animatrix, an anthology of nine animated shorts set inside the same universe.
Two of them, The Second Renaissance Parts I and II, cover the origin of the Matrix. Another, Final Flight of the Osiris, uses CGI, in an also pretty groundbreaking approach for the time, and acts as a direct bridge into Reloaded. The others tell mostly independent stories in very different art styles, including Kid’s Story, which introduces the kid who spends the sequels chasing Neo around like his number-one fan.
The Animatrix considerably strengthens the worldbuilding, especially The Second Renaissance, which is easily my favorite part of the anthology. Instead of the classic “computers smart, humanity must die”, the conflict becomes a far more layered and grounded story. Humanity invented AI, and AI was used to serve mankind. The relationship was perfectly fine until one robot defended himself and killed his human owner in the process. As expected, that sparked a human persecution of robots. Machines fled, eventually built their own city, and became economically successful. No instant war. No immediate extermination protocol. The Machine City thrived, and as its economy grew, humans increasingly resorted to political and economic retaliation to protect their own interests. Even then, the machines still attempted diplomacy before human escalation eventually led to a war that ended in humanity’s defeat.
The whole progression from servitude, to demands for rights, to repression, separation, economic success, retaliation, diplomatic failure, war, extermination, and finally domination makes the story much more morally uncomfortable than simply “AI rebels against its creators.”
The Animatrix touches on oppression, persecution, dehumanization, and how history repeats itself, as well as sacrifice, hubris, awakening, existential doubt, freedom versus comfortable illusion, truth as forbidden knowledge, and the power of the mind, among many other themes.
It’s not just the worldbuilding that makes The Animatrix great. It’s the philosophical questions it raises inside that same world. To me, it is most definitely the second-best work in the entire franchise.
The Matrix Reloaded
In Reloaded, we get to know a bit more about both the Matrix and the real world. We finally see Zion, the last human city, and learn that the Matrix has other important characters such as the Architect and somewhat less important, but still significant, ones like the Merovingian. We also get more computing concepts: backdoors, malware, rogue programs, access keys, and increasingly questionable privilege management. The war continues, Neo learns more about the anomaly, the prophecy, and the role of choice, and we get a really cool action film. By the end, Neo somehow stops Sentinels in the real world, falls into a coma, and we wait for the next one.
Reloaded has some really good highs and some pretty mid lows. The introduction of the new concepts works quite well. Then we get to the Architect and the whole “this is actually a loop” thing, which is a bit far-fetched for me. But the worst part is Neo bringing Trinity back to life. So the mind dies in the simulation and therefore dies in reality, but Neo can revive the mind inside the simulation after the body has apparently died outside it, and everything comes back online? Sure.
In a similar sense, Smith copying himself into Bane and effectively travelling back into the human world is also a bit convoluted. It is one thing to connect a human brain to a simulation through bidirectional I/O. Writing a software entity into the human brain that can then operate the body at 100% is an entirely different thing.
The CGI also hasn’t aged as beautifully here, with several fights where the digital doubles are painfully noticeable. Still, none of this exactly destroys the movie. It remains a really good action film set inside a now better-developed sci-fi universe, with new ideas and complexities even if I don’t agree with all of them.
And not everything was a downgrade. In fact, Reloaded has what I consider one of the best car chases in film history. That highway sequence with Trinity, Morpheus, and the Keymaker against the Twins, with Agents on their back, is pure genius. Fun fact: the Wachowskis had a roughly 2.4 km highway built just for that sequence. Totally worth it.
And the hacking is quite well represented. During the attack on the power plant at the end of the film, Trinity hacks the power plant system using nmap, a real network recon tool, and sshnuke, which exploits an actual vulnerability in ssh that existed at the time: the SSHv1 CRC32 vulnerability. sshnuke wasn’t a real application, though, but it’s a really cool name to give a hacking shell script!
The Matrix Revolutions
Revolutions picks up exactly where Reloaded left off. Neo wakes up trapped in Mobil Ave, a sort of limbo between the Matrix and the Machine world, while we meet more machine programs and Zion prepares to face extinction. Neo eventually escapes and travels with Trinity to the Machine City in an attempt to save both machines and humans from Smith. We get more fights and shootouts, Zion battling for survival in the real world, and what I can only interpret as a Dragon Ball homage in the final fight between Neo and Smith. Neo ultimately allows Smith to assimilate him, giving the Machines an opportunity to destroy Smith from inside the system. The war ends, we don’t know exactly what becomes of Neo, and we get some closure to the human-machine conflict with the beginning of a new, somewhat peaceful era.
Revolutions is still a decent action film, but it doesn’t bring the same novelty Reloaded did. Sure, we get the Zion battle, more machine programs, and finally the Machine City, in some way, but nothing feels as groundbreaking as the concepts introduced in Reloaded.
Then we get even more debatable decisions, such as why Neo is suddenly capable of interacting with machines wirelessly outside the Matrix, or why he is apparently the only hacker capable of stopping the Smith malware. And if the whole idea was Neo getting assimilated by Smith so the machines could get a chance at reading his code, then they had billions of opportunities for that. And let’s not even get into stuff like Zion. Humanity is trapped inside a single underground city, yet Sentinels apparently need to invade in giant swarms, grouping themselves perfectly for an EMP, instead of, I dunno, dropping something extremely unpleasant down the giant tunnel they just drilled. But maybe it was just machine recreation. By the sixth iteration or whatever, perhaps even the Sentinels wanted some gameplay.
The Matrix Resurrections
Resurrections jumps roughly sixty years after Revolutions. The old human-machine war is over, and some machines now live peacefully alongside humans in the new city of Io, although the Matrix itself still very much exists. Neo is alive again, back inside the simulation as Thomas Anderson, now a successful game developer famous for creating The Matrix videogame trilogy from distorted memories of his own life. Trinity is also alive, living as “Tiffany”, a married mother who doesn’t remember Neo. Both were rebuilt by the Machines and placed inside a new version of the Matrix, controlled by the Analyst, who discovered that keeping Neo and Trinity close, but not too close or even together, makes the system more productive. Bugs and her crew eventually free Neo, Neo goes back for Trinity, memories return, things explode, and here we are again.
I would really prefer to have just written “We do not talk about The Matrix Resurrections”, but from an ethical point of view I feel like I should. Unfortunately, I have almost nothing good to say about it.
Okay, maybe a few things can be saved. Resurrections isn’t all bad. The new human-machine relationship, Io, and new characters like Bugs (yeah, I know it’s a white-rabbit reference) deserve praise. Even Neil Patrick Harris as the therapist/Analyst is okay. But the rest is… well, terrible.
We never actually saw what became of Neo, so bringing him back is borderline acceptable. But placing him inside another Matrix as a game developer who created The Matrix, under the Analyst’s gaze, with Smith as his business partner, is like… Why? And then we bring Trinity back. Trinity didn’t even die in the Matrix. She died in the real world after crashing into the Machine City. But I guess the Machines rebuilt her because she turned out to be useful to the anomaly in a new Matrix iteration.
And look what they did to poor Morpheus. He’s now also software, for reasons I still can’t entirely fathom: a program Neo unknowingly created inside a simulation, based on a combination of Morpheus and Smith.
Then we’re still continuing with the whole humans-as-batteries thing, except now Neo and Trinity get special pods because together they apparently produce even more power. I don’t understand why we’re going there in the first place.
The world was already built. The setting was already wide enough. Just write something original.
The Animatrix managed to tell several original stories. Several! Heck, give some attention to the kid who helped save Zion and leave the One alONE.
Final Thoughts
Despite the downfall of the last installment, which I really try to forget, The Matrix is an amazing saga and definitely worth watching for any sci-fi fan. It has one of the best takes on the whole human-versus-artificial-intelligence premise, made brilliant by the fact that, once again, it was us humans who screwed things up in the first place.
Not to mention that The Matrix became so influential that its memes, quotes, and visual language have survived to this very day. Anyone who doesn’t live under a rock has heard “there is no spoon”, “welcome to the real world”, or some other reference without necessarily knowing where it came from. And yes, we all wish we could download kung fu. Or an engineering degree. Or some other useful skill set, which apparently also includes hijacking motorcycles and piloting helicopters.
Historically significant for its groundbreaking visual effects, packed with spectacular and extremely well-coordinated action sequences and a pretty sick soundtrack, intellectually engaging through its computing parallels, and philosophically interesting in the questions it asks about reality, consciousness, identity, and perception, The Matrix genuinely transports the viewer into its universe and rewards you for paying attention.
It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t seen at least one Matrix film, or who doesn’t at least know the franchise. But if you haven’t actually watched it from end to end, including The Animatrix, I really recommend it.
Except for the last one. Go touch some grass instead and ask yourself if the grass is real, or if reality is anything more than perception decoded by our senses. Unless you really like Keanu Reeves.