Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) is a science fiction classic. The setting is a devastated Earth in the far future. The premise is that humanity has been enslaved by artificial intelligences. Human beings spend our lives in what are essentially coffins while mechanical vampires drain our energy. We don’t know it, because we are asleep, dreaming that we are in a radically different world. This is the Matrix. Today we would call it a multiplayer online game.
Like many dystopias, The Matrix is actually too optimistic. The Wachowski brothers thought the human race would have to be forced into the pods. They didn’t imagine we would choose them. But eventually, gaming addicts will build coffins for themselves as in The Matrix, where they can loll about catheterized, diapered, and fed intravenously, so the game never ends. To sustain themselves, they’d gladly share their body heat.
The image of the human race both enslaved and deluded about its condition by a fake world of mere projections goes back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic. It is echoed in Descartes’ Meditations and the Marxist concept of ideology.
Plato, Descartes, and Marx all believed that emancipation is possible, but there’s no way to think yourself out of the Matrix. If you managed to wake yourself up, you’d discover that you are a naked, flabby blob in a pod full of pink goo, hooked into a machine that both nourishes and drains you.
Plato posited a sunlit world outside the cave where one could live and plan to return and liberate one’s fellows. Outside the Matrix, however, the Earth is devastated and shrouded in darkness. You wouldn’t have a chance.
Thus it isn’t clear how the resistance movement of the Matrix started or how it can end. To begin, the resistance needs a deus not from the machine, but outside of it altogether: perhaps a seed of unenslaved humanity living in a place called “Zion” near the Earth’s core.
Getting people to join the resistance is a hard sell. You can persuade people to quit a job or a relationship by arguing that “it isn’t really you.” But imagine telling people that everything about their world, including the people they love, including their very selves, is fake. The real world is a hellscape where they are living corpses, imprisoned in coffins, fed upon by parasites. Which world would you choose?
Thus it is nice that the resistance gives people a choice: the first choice they ever really had. If they take the red pill, they will trade everything and everyone they knew and loved for life in a post-apocalyptic hell. If they take the blue pill, they will go back to sleep in the Matrix. Naturally, only deeply alienated people would take the red pill.
However, the ultimate goal of the resistance is to crash the Matrix for everyone, whether they like it or not. But it is not clear how the human race could survive such an event. There’s Zion, but that promised land probably isn’t big enough for everyone.
The Matrix works as the story of the hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) awakening to reality and joining the resistance. But as far as the larger project of liberating humanity goes, the creators of The Matrix had written themselves into a corner, and they should have quit while they were ahead. The story could not stand up to too much scrutiny about where the resistance came from and where it was going.
The first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, was a clever movie with a bleak message: The resistance itself is an illusion, created by and subordinate to the Matrix. Of course that’s a useful lesson in a world of coopted and manufactured oppositions. The problem is that on the basic premises of the films, there can’t really be a true opposition — which means that no matter what happens, the machines will always be in control.
The second sequel, The Matrix Revolutions, was pretentious, incoherent garbage in which Neo and the heroine Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) both die. It sounds like a bleak ending, but look on the bright side: If the hero and heroine are dead, at least there won’t be another sequel, right?
For, as this new movie has the brass to explain, Warner Brothers needed more money, and money has the magic power to resurrect dead franchises over and over again. Hence The Matrix Resurrections. What could possibly go wrong? Look how well it worked for Star Wars!
The Matrix is objectively more useful to the pro-white Right than the anti-white Left, but you have to look past the casting to see that. In The Matrix, the bad guys are all clean-cut white men. The good guys look like the Left: a coalition of non-whites and white misfits. But just bracket that out for a minute. Imagine the movie with a monoracial cast and you’ll see that the story itself is not anti-white. Only the casting gives that impression.
In today’s world, what is the closest thing to the Matrix? The mass media, including gaming. In today’s world, who are the parasites who control the Matrix? They are overwhelmingly Leftist and disproportionately Jewish. (The Wachowskis are not Jewish, but Anglo and Polish in descent.) In today’s world, the race-conscious Right are the advocates of realism — racial, sexual, and political — whereas the Left are advocates of social constructionism, utopianism, gender fluidity, and delusional happy talk. (Both Wachowski brothers have “changed their sex.” Larry is now known as Lana, and Andy now styles himself Lilly.)

You can buy Michael Polignano’s Taking Our Own Side here.
In today’s world, who are the slaves of the Matrix? The answer is tricky, because almost everyone is deceived and exploited to one extent or another. But whites, especially straight white men, are at the bottom of the progressive stack. Whites are targeted with relentless hate propaganda, including the casting of The Matrix itself. Thus it was natural for race-conscious whites to see The Matrix as an allegory for our situation and to appropriate the “red pill” as a symbol of our awakening. To my knowledge, the first use of the red pill in this manner was in Michael Polignano’s speech “My Awakening Too” from May 2004.
One of the ambitions of The Matrix Resurrections was to somehow “take back the red pill” from the Right. The movie accomplishes nothing of the kind, so I suspect that this was just another cynical attempt to promote a movie by getting race-conscious whites to hate it online. (See my article on the No Time to Die trailers.)
The Matrix Resurrections is directed by “Lana” Wachowski, but after a few minutes, I thought this was the work of Jar Jar Abrams, since it follows the pattern of his cursed Star Wars movies. Because the Mouse needed money, Abrams was tasked with resurrecting Star Wars. Since the purpose was money, and since he held the fans in utter contempt, there was no question of creating an original story within the larger Star Wars mythos (what the money people call a “franchise”). So Jar Jar decided to simply coast on nostalgia. He dusted off the original cast members (who were long past their discard dates) and put them in scene-by-scene, sometime shot-by-shot rip-offs of the original trilogy, this time as farce. Since he had no idea what made the original trilogy popular, he took the 70-IQ cargo cultist route of imitation, thinking that would be safer. He also junked the plots up with so many inanities and gags and leaps of logic that he delivered running times of 138 and 142 minutes, which simply highlighted the vapidity of the stories. Not only did he insult the intelligence, taste, and values of the fans, he bored them silly.
“Lana” follows the Abrams playbook to the letter. The Matrix Resurrections is garbage: pretentious, incoherent, boring, and deeply insulting to its audience. But “Lana” goes Abrams one better: He breaks the fourth wall; he goes “meta”; he thinks that brazenly flaunting the greed and cynicism of the whole enterprise will somehow redeem it. But it doesn’t. Self-conscious, ironic garbage is still garbage.
I like to think that the Wachowskis were sincere when they made The Matrix. It probably never occurred to them that they were far closer to the machines than the plucky resistance fighters. Judging from The Matrix Resurrections, however, “Lana” no longer has any illusions. He’s quite comfortable with his role as deceiver and parasite. If you are a fan of The Matrix and still think that objective reality matters—if you’d like to be liberated from illusion—if you are not comfortable with being a pod-dwelling, bamboozled milch-cow for soulless parasites at Warner Brothers, I have a red pill for you
The Unz Review, December 30, 2021
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13 comments
Good warning here!
Jar Jar Abrams! I grudgingly watched it knowing it was going to be a steaming pile. Morgoth pretty much predicted the entire movie before it was released.
I’ll see it anyway, just because I’ve been at variance with Trev on a number of recent movies like the new Dune, which I thought was pretty good. It is impossible for the same mind to write Star Trek and Star Wars well, as they try to get Jar Jar to do. The two media, while there is an overlap, are fundamentally different and opposed. Star Wars represents the triumph of the spirit over the material, the romantic and fantastic, while Star Trek reflects the ascendancy of the materialistic; order, experiment, and continued progress of modernity. Star Wars relies on egoistic romantic motifs, such as the destiny child, the Prelude, wilhelm Meister. Star Wars is Dune, while Star Trek is Jules Verne. No individual can be in both camps at once, and to do so insures a counterfeit product.
Did any of you guys see Jupiter Rising by the wachowskis? It’s not as good as matrix, but I thought it was somewhat amusing. It’s sort of a tribute to jodorowsky and mobius and the old heavy metal animation. I thought it had some good dialogue and visuals. What does the red storm of Jupiter represent?
Saw it when it was released in theater. Barely recall it, except the ceremonial floating scene with Mila Kunis, who started out the movie as the world’s best looking janitress.
I think it’s the opposite; Villeneuve is the modern verne, Star wars were pure garbage. Modern SF is about what? alien invasions, colonisation of space? How about filming “what we owe to our parasites”? BTW Jupiter Rising was marvel levels of cringe.
Matrix is a gnostic allegory, which the proper catholics fought circa 500-1500 .
long live the king. don’t bother with the resurrection. technically the first matrix is an absolute masterpiece.
so what was it about, to complete the picture
reality is not real, but if you look really hard you can see it. if you’re somehow disconnected dispossesed disemboweled, warner brothers have an another world for ya just don’t blink
or you’ll miss the grinning cat
Thanks for the clear message in this review. Seems to be one more Hollywood production I don’t need to go to the cinema for.
I didn’t have much hope this could be a good as a Denis Villeneuve or Christopher Nolan sci fi film, but wished for at least a mildly entertaining dystopian flick. It committed the worst sin of being a big budget bore – I couldn’t even finish it. The smug and empty pretentiousness laded even further. I admire the original Matrix concept, whose allegory remains ripe for discussion in the modern era. But even the original film was marred by too many annoying slo mo gunfights that were tedious even when it came out.
Prospect (2018) is a half decent sci fi made on a fraction of the bloated Matrix budget.
Prospect is more than half decent, IMHO. I particularly enjoyed the retro look. The interior of Cee and her father’s landing pod looked like that of a 1970s’ British caravan, and their protective suits like old-time deep-sea diving dress. I half expected the electronics to be powered by vacuum tubes.
Great performances from Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher, and using sixties’ Cambodian, Japanese and Latvian pop hits for the soundtrack worked brilliantly.
This was an excellent film review, much better than anything else I’ve read. I’m sort of relieved that the new film sucks, as Omicron has me too worried to venture back to the theaters for a while, but if it had been awesome, I would have been disappointed not to see it (or I would have had to sit there with my uncomfortable N95 mask on the whole showing).
I agree the Star Wars reboots (that I have seen, going back to the late 90s resurrection) have been just awful. OTOH, I liked the recent Dune quite a bit (despite the excessively African casting, which must have been done pre-Floyd, too), and look forward to its second instalment.
The bottom line is that it will be a very long time until pop culture, which could be a great awakening and recruiting tool for white preservationists if we controlled its production (as we will, of course, in the future, halcyon Ethnostate), is any kind of ally of ours. View it (in moderation) for mindless entertainment and relaxation only. We can advance our cause in the cultural realm much more easily via fiction and perhaps visual arts than film, and this due to the prohibitive costs and artificial barriers not only of production, but distribution.
Comics are a poor mans movie screen, or so they say.
Couple weeks ago I popped my copy of the original (1999) The Matrix into the DVD player. It was the first time I viewed the movie in years. Some observations:
You can really see how far post-modern society has come (or gone…) over the last two decades. The Matrix was the great big cyberpunk fantasy of escape from the IRL cubicle farm, that you really are an outlaw hacker with cool comrades all in mirrorshades, taking on the The Man. And in the 1990s this was pretty much the scene, the era of the Internet Wild West, dial up modems, Operation Sun Devil, Mondo 2000, R.U. Sirius and Burning Man. It was all so edgy…then.
Today? The hackers are working for the IT monopolies or doing contract work for Regime intelligence agencies.
Still, there are cyber rebels in 2022 and they are on the Dissident Right, navigating the digital underground from whence they launch meme raids, stake out temporary autonomous deep web zones, and wake more people to the reality of race and nation. Consider how “take the red pill” has become the entry point for rebels against the Regime.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons Matrix Resurrections was authorized, to delete the premise of the original trilogy, that post-modern life is a simulacra masking the reality of Regime control. It says something that the Regime is willing to crash a great franchise in order to restore its mass consensual hallucination. But it’s not gonna work. The Dissident Right has survived the de-platformings, the de-financializations, the disinformation jobs…and is replicating stronger than ever.
Now where are those mirrorshades?
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