Tag / movies

by B. Bratu

From Revolutions to Resurrections: A Prediction on the Matrix 4

After seeing the latest Matrix 4 trailer that begins with “We’re all caught in these strange repeating loops”, I was struck by the fear that the latest entry in this movie series would follow the current trend of “time paradox” science-fiction movies: I’m thinking of the Interstellars, Arrivals and Dunes of recent times. All of these suffer from a brilliant premise that peters out into a “it couldn’t have happened any other way” scenario.

Could the Matrix 4 also fall into this cliché and, more importantly, would that go against what the movies have until now achieved? To answer this question, I will first look at Interstellar, Arrival and Dune as symptoms of contemporary science-fiction cinema; I will also complement this with a small commentary on Westworld and I will finally summarize the findings of my previous analysis of the trilogy. In doing so, I hope to give myself and others interested in the Matrix 4 a Marxian-inspired guideline for when the movie comes out next week.

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by B. Bratu

Matrix analysis (4): Mister Anderson

Agents-Smith

Picture credits and copyright: Warner Bros.

Welcome to the fourth and final part of our Marxian reading of the Matrix. Along the way, I hope I’ve managed to express what I perceive as strong affinities between central elements and themes of the trilogy and conceptual creations of Karl Marx. In “Battery”, we found out that the “simulation” of the movies is shown to be our exact world, and that the notions that we are simply batteries for productive purposes is not only also argued by Marx, but also supported by some statistical evidence. After that, in “Machine Praxis”, through the infrastructure-superstructure conceptual couple, we argued that the words and actions of the ‘rebel’ humans reflected the ideology of the machines, who themselves engaged in the world not as a reality they have historically inherited and are producing by their actions, but as an achieved and impenetrable universe. Finally, in “Contradictions”, we came to suspect that the main adversary of the machines were not the human ‘rebels’, but rather the ‘exiled’ programs refusing to be destroyed; we suggested this to be the result of the machines’ design of the Matrix, comparing it to Marx’s maxim where “the bourgeoisie produces, above all, its own grave-diggers”.

Before continuing, take a look at this, to put you in the context of the post.

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