Stop your spoon-bending! Variety has just confirmed Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss will return to their iconic, turn-of-the-century characters Neo and Trinity for a new sequel of The Matrix, written and directed by Lana Wachowski:
Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures will produce and globally distribute the film. Warner Bros. Picture Group chairman Toby Emmerich made the announcement on Tuesday.
“We could not be more excited to be re-entering ‘The Matrix’ with Lana,” said Emmerich. “Lana is a true visionary — a singular and original creative filmmaker — and we are thrilled that she is writing, directing and producing this new chapter in ‘The Matrix’ universe.”
In addition to Wachowski, the script was also written by Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell. Wachowski is also producing with Grant Hill. Sources say the film is eyed to begin production at the top of 2020.
The fact I’m still using my silly moniker, 20 years after the original film came out and forever changed the Sci-Fi genre –and despite the fact the “red pill” concept has been hijacked by ‘alt-right’ pendejos— shows how much of a fan of the series I still am. Yep, even Reloaded and Revolutions – heck I even bought Animatrix and played Enter the Matrix! — so I’m taking this bombshell news with… trepidation. Hooray for Lana being behind the wheel on this one, but where’s her sister Lilly? (The last time we heard of her, she was pulling out of the Netflix series Sense8 she was co-directing with Lana, to “focus on her well-being” after coming out as transgender). Awesome that Carrie-Ann will play Trinity (um, didn’t she die in the 3rd one??) but you can’t have a proper Matrix movie without Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, dammit!
There’s also the issue that the world is a much different place than when the Wachowskis first invited us to jack into their philosophy-rich exploration about the nature of Reality, and the complicated relationship between human beings and Artificial Intelligence. In these two decades the idea that we may very well be living in a computer simulation has turned from improbable science-fiction to a legitimate scientific discussion. We’ve also seen A.I. jump from something only nerds and geeks would worry about in comic book conventions to an issue already starting to affect our daily lives (from Facebook algorithms to Uber driverless cars) in ways that will exponentially increase in the years to come –if the last Cold War was about who had the most nukes, the next one might be about who gets to control more data and which heuristic digital tools gives you the most dominance over your commercial competitors… and your population.
20 years ago, Virtual Reality still seemed far away in the horizon, but with the advent of Oculus Rift and similar head-mounted display systems, it looks like “soft” VR for the masses is already here, if you have the means to afford it. Of course, these technologies are not immersive enough for a true virtual reality experience in which the synthetic world is indistinguishable from the real one, but that’s when biomedical interfaces like Elon Musk’s Neuralink might come in.
Speaking of being unable to distinguish between a real image and a synthetic one, the rapid rise of “Deep Fakes” is a disturbing reminder that our feeble grasp between reality and simulacra is only getting thinner.
And with a concept that also didn’t exist back when The Matrix was released —the Mandela Effect— it’s no wonder that perfectly sane individuals (at least on a functional level) begin to wonder whether their reality has been suddenly switched by some evil programmer with an unhealthy fixation with 80s cartoons.
I mean, let’s be honest here, you guys: When you wake up in 2019 and check your social media only to discover that belief in a Flat Earth is on the rise, US Navy pilots are going on the record admitting they’ve engaged in dogfights with giant Tic-Tacs, and the president of the most powerful nation in the world is bitching over the fact he can’t buy freaking Greenland, anybody can be excused for fleetingly entertaining the possibility that maaaybe the Matrix has gone gaga and is in desperate need of a restart. If the script addresses all of this from an intelligent and engaging perspective, instead of trying to fill in all the logical gaps left by the original trilogy, then Matrix 4 has a solid chance of being another modern classic — but seriously, get a hold of Fishburne, people! Matrix Rebooted. How about it Warner Bros? Don’t bother with sending me a check, just invite me to the red carpet so I can have a bullet-time selfie with Carrie-Ann.
