New matrix movie4/9/2023 Seen in retrospect, the Matrix sequels are among the first mainstream movies to showcase such a radical vision of queer culture, even if they have no characters explicitly coded as gay. We don’t learn a lot about the rebels’ system of government or daily way of life, but two things the inhabitants of Zion seem to believe in fiercely are freedom and pleasure. The city-state of Zion, where the rebels make their home, appears to have founded its culture on the sacred act of grinding up against good-looking fellow citizens in giant raves. Alongside the technological dystopia the first Matrix imagines, the second two try to envision something more unusual in contemporary science fiction: utopia. Where the first film was a compact, fast-moving action thriller, the sequels reveled in exploring the inner workings of the universe the first movie had built: a place divided between underground-dwelling rebels in grungy unraveling knitwear and their super-sleek, hyper-skilled counterparts in the all-digital world. The second two Matrix movies, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both released in 2003 after a back-to-back, Lord of the Rings-style megashoot), went somewhere very different, but equally if not more original. I remember coming out of The Matrix with two friends and talking over each other in excitement on the multiplex escalator, our synapses afire over a big-budget Hollywood action movie that looked and felt so different, so 21 st century. The idea that all of humanity was trapped in a simulation, our physical bodies parked in life-sustaining pods while our daily lives unfolded in a virtual space run by distant evil overlords, still sounded like a cool science-fiction metaphor, not a description of banal everyday reality. Smartphones were nonexistent, music was still mainly listened to on CD, and Netflix was a two-year-old company primarily in the business of mailing movies on DVD to people’s houses. The internet was still a novelty, used by most people mainly for sending and receiving email. As the millennium was about to turn, The Matrix arrived in theaters like a speeding bullet-or maybe a very slow-moving one, filmed with the then-novel extreme-slo-mo special effect that would become known as “bullet time.” Digital technology played a much smaller role in most people’s lives in 1999.
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