#MATRIX RED PILL OR BLUE FREE#

The red and blue pills might also tell us something about The Matrix Resurrections' maze-like plot.

Revisiting the red and blue pills in this huge way allows Lana to use The Matrix Resurrections as a commentary on the franchise's real-world influence over the past 20 years. Whether recycling shots from the original or dropping lines that apply in reality as much as in-universe, Lana Wachowski's return to the Matrix lands curiously close to real life. Though the trailer is intensely frustrating in its mysteriousness, The Matrix Resurrections is clearly extremely meta. The metaphor is a neat one: in the Nineties, prescription estrogen given to transitioning trans women did indeed come in the form of a red pill.In a case of art imitating life, the prevalence of The Matrix's red and blue pills through 2 decades of pop culture likely inspired the red and blue theme of The Matrix Resurrections. Then there’s the red pill itself, which can be seen as analogous to hormone therapy. Hugo Weaving’s terrifying baddie Agent Smith only ever refers to Neo by his original, socially approved name “ Mister Anderson”, a practice known as “deadnaming” when done to trans people.

#MATRIX RED PILL OR BLUE FREE#

Neo only becomes his true self when he breaks free from The Matrix, but not everyone is happy about it. In other words, he is suffering from dysphoria. He is troubled by the nagging sensation that something is off about the world, something he can’t quite put his finger on. By night, he is a hacker with a name he’s chosen for himself. By day, he’s an office drone known as Thomas Anderson. The trans symbolism of The Matrix is easy enough to identify. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and why we still want them together 25 years after Speed.The Matrix Resurrections: Easter eggs and secrets from the first trailer.If you’ve taken their version of the red pill, you probably haven’t had the Covid vaccine, either. From that ignoble interpretation, the idea of “taking the red pill” became a running motif for Trump supporters, QAnon followers and anyone else who believed they were declaring their rejection of a perceived liberal consensus. One of the group’s core rules forbids anyone declaring in a post that they are, in fact, a woman. That means it’s subject to tighter controls, is invisible in the site’s search function and that anyone trying to visit the group is first warned that it is “dedicated to shocking or highly offensive content”. They called themselves “red pillers”, and congregated online in deeply misogynistic groups like the subreddit r/TheRedPill, which proved so unruly – even by Reddit standards – that it’s been placed in the site’s “quarantine” since 2018.

Men’s rights activists vociferously adopted it, believing that they’d seen “the truth” that society is unfairly structured to benefit women. In May 2020, after Elon Musk tweeted: “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied: “Taken!”, Lilly responded pithily: “F*** both of you”. It isn’t hard to find evidence that she and her sister Lilly, who created The Matrix together, have become unhappy with how its meaning has been twisted and reinterpreted.

The decision to place the choice between the two pills front and centre in Resurrections’ marketing feels purposeful: a possible attempt by director Lana Wachowski to reclaim the contemporary narrative that surrounds the scene. The film’s website allowed viewers to choose between a red or blue pill, which in turn determined the teaser trailer they’d be shown. That moment was invoked this week in a viral marketing campaign for The Matrix Resurrections – the fourth film in the franchise – which is set for release this December. “You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.” You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” he says. After explaining to him that he has lived his whole life in a virtual “prison for mind” known as The Matrix – and offering to show him the truth outside of that cage – Morpheus presents him with a pair of colour-coded pills: “You take the blue pill, the story ends. In The Matrix, the 1999 phenomenon that introduced the world to bullet-time fight sequences and briefly made fiddly little sunglasses without arms the height of fashion, Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo a simple choice. It’s one of the most famous scenes in modern film history.

Matrix red pill or blue