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Episode Studies by Clayton Barr

enik1138-at-popapostle-dot-com
The Matrix Resurrections The Matrix Resurrections
Movie
Written by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
Directed by Lana Wachowski
Released December 22, 2021

 

Neo is mysteriously resurrected in the Matrix. But can he become the man he once was?

 

Notes from the Matrix chronology

 

The story of The Matrix Resurrections takes place about 60 years after Neo's death at the end of The Matrix Revolutions.

 

Didja Know?

 

The movie was shot largely in San Francisco, CA. Shots of the city skyline, the bay, and the Golden Gate and Bay bridges are seen frequently throughout the film. The story also takes place in the Matrix version of San Francisco, as evidenced by the presence of San Francisco police cars (though the "San Francisco Police" logo seen on the cars here appears to be a variation based on that of the city of South San Francisco).

 

Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

 

Bugs

Sequoia (Seq)

General Niobe

false Trinity

SWAT officers

cops

Agents

Agent Jones

Agent White

Agent Smith-Morpheus

Echo

Neo (Thomas Anderson)

police lieutenant

Bobbi

Jude Gallagher

Trinity/Tiffany

Brandon (Trinity/Tiffany's older son)

Donnie (Trinity/Tiffany's younger son)

Chad (Trinity/Tiffany's husband)

Callie (Trinity/Tiffany's daughter, mentioned only)

Smith (head of Deus Machina)

the Analyst

Gwyn de Vere

Deus Machina employees

Scott

Zen

Sati

GJ

Fiona

Skroce

Kush

Déjá Vu (black cat)

the Oracle (in flashback only, purged)

Bots

Lexy

Berg

Ellster

Merovingian

Persephone (in flashback only)

Roland (mentioned only, deceased)

Cybebe
Octacles
Lumin8

Hanno (Mnemosyne pilot)

Dozer (mentioned only, deceased)

Freya

Quillion

Sheperd

Exiles

Kujaku

Rama Kandra (mentioned only, purged)

Kamala (mentioned only, purged) 

 


 

Didja Notice?

 

The film opens inside the Modal. "Modal" is a computing term in graphical user interfaces for a window or other graphical element that temporarily disables the main window until the user provides input (such as yes/no/cancel or other input). The Modal here is an overlay to the Matrix video game created by Thomas Anderson, allowing him to experiment with different actions in the game; Bugs tells an Agent that a modal is a simulation used to evolve programs.

 

As Bugs and Seq hack into the Modal, Seq tells Bugs to "drop a pin." This phrase generally means to mark one's current location on GPS. Here, it must mean to mark a virtual location in the game.

 

At 2:11 on the DVD, the SWAT officers have busted into a room of the Heart O' The City Hotel, the same hotel in Mega City in which The Matrix opened. SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) is a special forces team of the police department.

 

The SWAT officers are armed with Heckler & Koch HK416D rifles and M4A1 carbines.

 

The police cars outside the Heart O' The City Hotel appear to be Ford Crown Victorias.

 

At 4:21 on the DVD, a neon sign in the Modal reads "Sabor a Mierda". This is Spanish for "taste of shit".

 

The Agents are armed with their traditional Desert Eagle pistols, as seen in previous Matrix movies.

 

At 6:11 on the DVD, Bugs falls off the building and roughly slides down the sign of a restaurant called Anderson's. This is likely Thomas Anderson referring to himself in the Modal. Notice the neon sign on the restaurant adds, "For those who love to eat shit."

 

At 6:40 on the DVD, Puppy Pub Grooming is seen in the background. There is an actual pet grooming parlour by this name in Ontario, Canada!

 

The police car at 6:36 on the DVD has license plate 60378.

 

The Modal has a replica of the Keymaker's shop not far from the Heart O' The City Hotel. It was not in this location in the original Matrix trilogy. When we enter the location with the characters, we see there is a hallway of backdoors attached to it.

 

From the hallway, the Agent pulls Bugs into a room that is an approximate replica of Neo's Thomas Anderson apartment as in The Matrix.

 

Bugs tells the Agent her name is derived from that of Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny is, of course, a world famous character from Warner Brothers' well-known Looney Tunes cartoons.

 

At 8:54 on the DVD, the monitor in the Thomas Anderson apartment appears to be a Hansol 501P model. In The Matrix, it was a PanaSync Pro P70. What appear to be an Apple Disk II and Sony brand floppy disk drives are also seen here.

 

The Metacortex ID badge Bugs finds for Thomas Anderson in his apartment shows him as a Junior Programmer. The badge shows as issued May 28, 1996. The badge number is 3809940TAA; possibly the TAA represents the initials from his name, Thomas A. Anderson. Metacortex is the company Anderson worked at in The Matrix.

 

At 9:14 on the DVD, what appear to be Kellogg's cereal and Heinz ketchup products are seen in Anderson's kitchen.

 

The Agent who confides in Bugs turns out to be a program based on Morpheus, created by Neo. Before coming to awareness that he was Morpheus, the Agent was a new Smith.

 

In the Keymaker's shop at 12:37 on the DVD, a board on the wall has a bunch of keys hanging on it, with the slogan above, "Our Genuine HUGH Key Blanks." As far as I can find, HUGH is a fictitious company.

 

At 12:53, a movie titled Root of All Evil, starring Lito Rodriguez, is playing at a theater in the Modal. This seems to be a fictitious film. The actor's name is that of a character who is an actor in Lana Wachowski's 2015-2018 TV series Sense8.

 

At 13:49 on the DVD, Neo appears to have a Morpheus action figure on his desk, based on the Matrix video game he created for the interactive gaming company Deus Machina. Seconds later, a Trinity action figure is seen, then a Sentinel. Deus Machina (Latin for "God Machine") is a fictitious company.

 

    At 13:59 on the DVD, Neo is seen to have a posable model on a shelf of a human hand, with the middle finger raised. This is likely a nod to Anderson flipping off Agent Smith during an interrogation early in The Matrix.

    A Batman statue can also be seen behind and to the right of the hand. Later, statues that are too distant to positively identify, but appear to Green Lantern and Flash, are seen. The superhero characters are all owned by DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Brothers, the film studio that owns the Matrix franchise.

 

Anderson's Matrix video game is seen to have won the Game Awards 1999 Game of the Year. The Game Awards is an actual annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the gaming industry, though it was not established until 2014.

 

Neo/Thomas is working on a new video game called Binary.

 

At 14:58 on the DVD, a passerby on the sidewalk outside the Deus Machina building appears to be carrying a package of Bounty paper towels for some reason! In the background a business called Simulatte, a coffee shop, is seen, where Jude and Tom will get coffee (the real life location was the Joe & The Juice coffee shop at 235 Montgomery Street in San Francisco).

 

Jude's dialog with Thomas at the cafe tells us that the there is a trilogy of Matrix video games. Presumably the second and third games are based on and titled after the trilogy of films we know in our world, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

 

At 15:10 on the DVD, Neo/Thomas' reflection on the shiny surface of the coffee shop table is that of an another man. This is the first hint that this image is what everyone else sees when looking at Thomas Anderson, not the Keanu Reeves face we know.

 

When Trinity/Tiffany enters Simulatte, Jude refers to her as a "total effin' MILF." MILF is an acronym for "Mother I'd Like to Fuck."

 

"Tiffany" says her mom named her that because she loved Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn (1929-1993) was a famed American actress who starred in the 1961 hit film Breakfast at Tiffany's.

 

The man who plays Trinity/Tiffany's husband, Chad, is Chad Stahelski, who is the director of Keanu Reeves' popular John Wick series of films. (Stahelski also acted as Reeves' stunt double in The Matrix and was a martial arts stunt coordinator on The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.)

 

At 18:15 on the DVD, a bust sitting near the window of Smith's office appears to be a rendition of the original Agent Smith when Neo punched him in the face in a slow-motion shot during the Burly Brawl in The Matrix Reloaded.

 

    Neo/Thomas gets a refill on his prescription from Jolly Bridge Pharmacy. This is a fictitious business. The pills are blue, indicating a desire to stay within the artificial reality of the Matrix.

    At 22:39 on the DVD, the label of the prescription pill bottle reads as containing ontolofloxin. This is a fictitious drug, probably named for "ontology", the study of being, existence, and reality.

 

At 22:52 on the DVD, Neo/Thomas' reflection in the mirror is the disparate face again (as previously seen in the table reflection at the coffee shop).

 

The song that plays over the soundtrack starting at 23:28 on the DVD is "White Rabbit" (1967) by Jefferson Airplane.

 

At 23:42 on the DVD, a bottle of Walden Farms caramel-flavored coffee creamer is seen at a brunch layout at a Deus Machina meeting.

 

At 24:21 on the DVD, the Deus Machina employee called Scott is wearing a Joust t-shirt. Joust is an arcade video game released by Williams Electronics in 1982.

 

Bottles of Bakarra water are seen on the table in the scene mentioned above. This is a fictitious brand. Bakarra is Basque for "only one".

 

Many of the young men who are brainstorming for the Matrix 4 game seem to represent the kind of Matrix-film fans who will not like this fourth film, wanting just guns and fights and effects, "big and loud and dumb". This movie has much less of that than those of the original trilogy did.

 

The kung fu film playing on Neo/Thomas' TV while he practices a martial arts virtual reality is reportedly the 1994 film Fist of Legend.

 

The quote that Neo/Thomas reads off the men's room stall door, "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams," is from the 1971 novel Americana by Don DeLillo. The novel touches on the themes of corporate life, the power of film to offer a false reality, and the problems of contemporary American life.

 

At 25:03 on the DVD, the female Deus Machina employee is seen reading a book compiling Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. As far as I can determine, the cover used on this volume was made expressly for the film.

 

At 25:08 on the DVD, a can of beverage called Jub Jub is seen. I've been unable to determine if this is a real world brand, but it may be prop can made for the movie, as "jubjub" is a species of bird in Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems "Jabberwocky" (1871) and "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876).

 

At 25:19 on the DVD, Trinity/Tiffany walks out of a restaurant across from another restaurant, Cafe Zoetrope. Cafe Zoetrope is a real world Italian restaurant in San Francisco, owned by renowned American film director, producer, and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola.

 

    At 25:32 on the DVD, Neo/Thomas is at home eating a steak and what appears to be asparagus. In the next shot, the plate has changed to steak and french fries. However, since this is part of a montage scene of numerous events in his current life, it could be argued that these are two different meals.

    The steak is likely meant as a callback to Cypher talking about eating a virtual steak in the Matrix in The Matrix: "You know...I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years...you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

 

At 25:41 on the DVD, Neo/Thomas is seen exercising on a Precor fitness walker.

 

While Trinity/Tiffany is having coffee with Neo/Thomas at Simulatte, at 27:05 on the DVD, a man in a checkered shirt and blue vest jacket walks by the window from right to left and then a spectacled man in a red sweater walks from left to right. At 27:57, the same two men walk by again from the same directions! A glitch in the Matrix?

 

Trinity/Tiffany tells Neo/Thomas she likes the character of Trinity in his Matrix games and also likes her Ducati, as she rides motorcycles as well. Trinity rode a Ducati 996 in The Matrix Reloaded.

 

At 30:14 on the DVD, we see Trinity/Tiffany's reflection in the coffeehouse table and it's a different woman. Like Neo/Thomas, people in the Matrix see her differently than we do. Tiffany's story of how she sees Trinity in the video game as looking like her, but her husband doesn't see it, shows that Tiffany doesn't know that others see her looking different from what she sees herself in the mirror. Presumably, the same is true of Neo/Thomas.

 

Trinity/Tiffany receives a phone call that her youngest child stuck a Lego up his nose.

 

The FBI clears the Deus Machina building when it becomes the target of a bomb threat. The FBI is the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, which investigates federal crime and provides internal intelligence for the federal government.

 

When the SWAT officer bursts in on Neo/Thomas and Morpheus in the restroom, Morpheus suddenly has two guns in his hands, an IWI Masada pistol and a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun. It's particularly hard to imagine him hiding the machine gun on his person up until now.

 

The Analyst's black cat drinks from a bowl labeled "Déjá-vu" at 36:01 on the DVD. This is a nod to the black cat that Neo sees in The Matrix that walks by him twice from the same direction in immediate succession, prompting Neo to think he's experiencing déjá vu, the sensation of having experienced a current event previously (which was actually a glitch in the Matrix).

 

At 36:35 on the DVD, in Neo's "memory" of his suicide attempt, there are giant blue/red pills on the table, as well as a statue of a white rabbit. The silvery angel statue (a real world Game of the Year award) may be what triggers a latent memory that he can fly.

 

When Bugs stops Neo/Thomas from attempting to fly off the skyscraper, not only does she have a tattoo of the white rabbit, she is also wearing a t-shirt with an image of a carrot on it.

 

Bugs takes Neo/Thomas through a portal on top of the skyscraper in San Francisco to a train in Tokyo, Japan.

 

At 48:23 on the DVD, Berg wields a SIG-Sauer MPX Copperhead K submachine gun against the invading SWAT team.

 

At 48:35 on the DVD, a SWAT officer fires a Milkor MGL (multiple grenade launcher).

 

At 48:35 on the DVD, a passenger on the Tokyo train is wearing a cloth face mask (for prevention of germ spread, as in during the COVID-19 pandemic) that has Matrix code printed on it!

 

At 48:35 on the DVD, we can see that Lexy has a tattoo of red and blue pills on the back of her neck where her Matrix port is located in the waking world.

 

The stone bridge seen at both ends of Morpheus' dojo platform in the pond is actually the Rakotzbrücke in Kromlau Azalea and Rhododendron Park in Germany.

 

Bugs asks the doctor who's resuscitating Neo, "What's up, Doc?" This was Bugs Bunny's tag line.

 

Bugs tells Neo that the Oracle was purged when the current version of the Matrix was uploaded.

 

Bugs is the captain of the hovercraft Mnemosyne. The Mnemosyne's plaque, seen at 1:03:04 on the DVD, refers to it as a Mark III, No. 19 and reveals that the craft was built in 2274. "Mnemosyne" is the goddess of memory in Ancient Greek mythology.

 

Ellster reveals to Neo that she is the granddaughter of Roland. Roland was the captain of the hovercraft Mjolnir during the timeframe of the Matrix trilogy and The Matrix Online.

 

The free humans in the real world live in a hidden city called IO, along with machines who are their allies, called synthients. I/O is an abbreviation for Input/Output in computer terminology. Notice also that IO looks like 01 in reverse (the name of the machine city on Earth's surface in The Matrix Revolutions).

 

Neo drinks some kind of liquor with Niobe and he remarks that it's a long way from Dozer's paint stripper. Dozer was a crewmember on the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix. He died in the events of that film.

 

A statue of Morpheus stands in a memorial cave in IO. Niobe explains to Neo that Morpheus was elected unanimously to the post of High Chair of the Council of Zion. When the Machine Civil War started for control of scarce power sources, the Analyst was able to overthrow the Architect, then the Analyst attacked Zion, killing Morpheus and forcing the humans to flee. The humans of Zion allied with some of the synthients to build IO.

 

The Morpheus program sees where Niobe's government is keeping Neo under house incarceration, lest he cause trouble, and refers to it as the "Rapunzel tower." This refers to the German fairy tale called Rapunzel about a beautiful young girl who is kept in a tower by a sorceress, with no means of escape.

 

The motorcycle Trinity/Tiffany rides is a Ducati Scrambler 1100 Pro.

 

For the interception of Trinity/Tiffany, Seq drops Bugs and Neo and their team into the Matrix in a fancy hotel room. At 1:20:25 on the DVD, the reflection of the Eiffel Tower can be seen in a mirror, indicating the hotel is in the Paris, France of the Matrix.

 

During the fight among Neo's team and Smith's and the Merovingian's, the Merovingian says some lines in French I'm not able to make out.

 

    The Analyst explains that he is a program created to study and understand human psychology in order to control humans better. When Neo died during the events of The Matrix Revolutions, the Analyst convinced the machine powers to let him try to rebuild Neo, finding he also needed to bring Trinity back in order to keep Neo in his psychological control.

    The Analyst's time spent trying to resurrect Neo may be why the Machines never gave Neo's body back to the humans, despite Morpheus' demands for it in The Matrix Online.

 

The shot at 2:03:05 on the DVD was shot in front of the Grant Plaza Hotel in San Francisco.

 

At 2:03:49 on the DVD, a bot driving during the Neo/Trinity chase is wearing a pin badge reading "I (Heart) Kater". I'm not sure what this refers to. Only seconds earlier, the badge is not there!

 

At 2:04:45 on the DVD, Bank of the Orient is seen. Seconds later, a 7-Eleven store and Shanghai Commercial Bank are seen.

 

The helicopters that attack Neo and Trinity are Eurocopter AS350 AStars.

 

At 2:06:17 on the DVD, a lighted sign advertising "Papa Song's Coming Soon" is seen along the roadway. This was a fast food restaurant in Cloud Atlas, a 2012 science-fiction film directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer.

 

At 2:13:25 on the DVD, the Transamerica Pyramid is seen in the background. To the right of it is the somewhat similar-looking Salesforce Tower.

 

As the end credits begin, a cover of the song "Wake Up" (originally by Rage Against the Machine) by Brass Against plays. The original version of the song was played over the end credits of The Matrix.

 

Unanswered Questions

 

If the events of this film take place about 60 years after those of The Matrix Revolutions, why does Sati still look so young? Since she is a program and not a human and also someone with some degree of power that normal programs do not have, it may be that she is able to keep herself "young" and also hidden from the Analyst.

 

    Is The Matrix Online still considered part of the canon of The Matrix franchise after the release of this film? After the final film of the initial Matrix trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, creators the Wachowskis announced the story would officially continue in the form of The Matrix Online, a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that was in operation from March 25, 2005 to July 31, 2009, allowing the fans to help control how the story proceeded. After a little more than four years of operation, MxO's subscription model was no longer bringing in enough money to justify the support needed (as frequently occurs with MMORPGs after several years) and the host servers were shut down at midnight on July 31, 2009, leaving the game's ongoing storylines unresolved. The story of this film does not directly tie into any of the plot threads of The Matrix Online; whether it contradicts any of it is debatable.

   Since the events of this film take place 60 years after The Matrix Revolutions (and the events of The Matrix Online took place shortly after those of that film), there is plenty of room for the game's events to have occurred. Probably the biggest potential contradiction between the game and this film is in Niobe's description of what happened to Morpheus after Neo's death in The Matrix Revolutions. She says he was elected High Chair of the Council of Zion and, despite the start of the Machine Civil War, he did not believe that the peace between machines and humans that had been negotiated by Neo would be broken. But the Analyst's forces in the end did attack Zion, with Morpheus becoming a fatality.

   This does not mesh particularly well with the story of Morpheus in The Matrix Online. In the MMORPG, no mention is made of Morpheus' new position on the Council. There, he continues to access the Matrix, first hoping to gather Neo's RSI (Residual Self-Image) in order to resurrect him inside the Matrix, then, failing that, demanding that the machines return Neo's body (which the machines fail to do). In an attempt to coerce the machines, Morpheus and his agents begin using code bombs to sabotage parts of the Matrix, but he was later seemingly killed by a program called the Assassin inside the Matrix.

   Niobe makes no mention of these Matrix Online events. Still, it might be possible to twist the threads around so that both versions of the post-trilogy timeline are true. 

 

Memorable Dialog

 

maybe this isn't the story we think it is.mp3

maybe you know him by his real name.mp3

most people think that Neo is dead.mp3

this is not the real world.mp3

I am Morpheus.mp3

a sequel to the trilogy.mp3

nervous breakdown or computer generated reality.mp3

the Matrix is about...mp3

bullet time.mp3

it's been over 60 years.mp3

that's what the Matrix does.mp3

you made it possible and it changed everything.mp3

our resident Neo-ologist.mp3

the meaning of our side.mp3

I don't believe in the One.mp3

what if I can't be what I once was?.mp3

Smith as in the Smith.mp3

I still know kung fu.mp3

Anderson and Smith.mp3

mojo rising.mp3

I will sequel franchise spinoff.mp3

using a power that defined you to control you.mp3

quietly yearning for what you don't have while dreading losing what you do.mp3

some boring-ass trial.mp3

you gave up on people.mp3

my name is Trinity.mp3

we're on our way to remake your world.mp3

another chance.mp3 

 

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