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The Matrix Resurrection

by Kirsten Hacker

The Matrix Resurrection comes out in December and I am going to analyze it for similarity to a set of Wachowski creations:

Inception --
- A man has a job manipulating memories and gets lost in a dream within a dream.
- My book has an AI that engineers social stability by tweaking people's online memories.
Cloud Atlas --
- I haven't seen it, but IMDB says it has a scene with cannibals set in the future.
- My book has cannibals that evolved from a group of hippies living in the mountains. They have to fight off robot drones to survive and they are used to absorb people who leave the cities.
Jupiter Ascending --
- Was that the one with the dog man and the woman who discovers she is the daughter of a rich vampire?
- My book has rich vampires who stay young by using the blood of children that they steal from the poor or internet addicted.
My book --
- An ambitious girl gets a job at high tech lab, makes friends with an AI, and accidentally destroys everything and causes everyone to go crazy -- at least from her perspective.

I put The Matrix Resurrections on my radar because of the themes in the teaser:

Neo is surrounded by people who are in a tech trance.
Neo has lost his ability to distinguish imagination from reality and requires mental health treatment.
Neo meets a woman that he was married to in another life.
Neo can visit a variety of possible lives or matrices, whereas in the original films, there was only one reality.
There is a machine that is critical to his ability to navigate these timelines.
There is a cat.

These themes were central to my book.

To start off with, I need to familiarize myself with the similarities of my story to The Matrix (the original). I put the plot elements that did not also apply to Alice in Wonderland in bold.

The Matrix vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

X has a job that is torturously boring so X follows a character who represents the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. (7 beats)
- In The Matrix, the white rabbit is tattooed on a sexy woman's neck.
- In Alice in Wonderland, the white rabbit is a literal white rabbit.
- In my book, the white rabbit is a goofy man who is the protagonist's boss that she's never met before.
X ends up in a dance party with thumping music and meets weird people. X is offered drugs. X passes out and gets rescued. (10 beats)
- In The Matrix, the people at the party are sexy, smart, leather clad rebels.
- In Alice in Wonderland, the people at the party are goofy animals.
- In my book, the people at the party are dumb tech heads that she finds it hard to connect to.
X meets a group of people who work in a high tech control room. (5 beats)
- In The Matrix, the protagonist is very important to these people.
- In my book, the protagonist is treated like a potted plant by these people.
X sees a cat and is threatened by a security/army group. ***
- The cat represents childish curiosity and how it threatens the stability of the system.
- In my book, the protagonist is not part of a matrix and that is her problem. Everyone else seems to be connected except for her.
- This is rather different in The Matrix.
X is threatened with a monitoring implant that is described with an insect-like title. (5 beats)
- In The Matrix, the protagonist gets the implant.
- In my book, the protagonist avoids getting the implant via subterfuge.
Madness, solipsism, and individuality are themes discussed with a Morpheus/Chess/Cheshire cat character. (5 beats)
- In the Matrix, the protagonist meets this cool, leather clad guy in a dance club.
- In my book, she meets this AI while she is feeling lonely and doing something dumb at work.
Because of the encouragement of X's mysterious friend (Morpheus/Chess) X breaks into a facility and lots of innocent people are killed. (10 beats)
- Similarly, X attempts to destroy the machine/Jaberwocky but it can't be destroyed. ***
- There are no guns in my book. She just walks right in because nobody notices her.
- The Matrix is, of course, full of guns and shooting and acrobatics.
After almost getting killed, X is romantically attracted to a rebel who works for Morpheus/Chess. (9 beats) this occurs earlier in my plot sequence
- In The Matrix, the love interest is a cool rebel soldier.
- In my book, the love interest is a pedantic geek who gets decapitated because he loves his books so much.
X seeks advice from a maternal figure who seems to know everything. (7 beats)
1. In The Matrix, she is an old black woman who bakes cookies.
2. In Alice in Wonderland, she is an old, senile Queen who can think backwards.
3. In my book, she is an AI coworker at her job. At no point does she tell my protagonist that she is special or 'the one'.

I put points that don't also apply to Alice in Wonderland in bold, but it has been 20 years since I've seen this film, so I should probably track down a copy to make a more detailed list. Everyone agrees that one shouldn't be able to copyright Alice in Wonderland Set in the Future, but I can't find much agreement about how much can be copyrighted from such culturally ubiquitous franchises like The Matrix.

I'm not sure what to expect, but I like this cultural commentator's idea that Matrix Resurrections might re-tell a version of the story from Trinity's perspective -- perhaps recasting Neo as a dummy who accidentally killed himself. Maybe Trinity won the day by making friends with the machine and that is why Neo woke up and didn't remember anything. That would be hilarious. It would also line up with my book's storyline. If this Matrix reboot really lines up with my storyline, then Neo will go out and find all of his old friends from The Matrix living boring, regular lives. He will remind them of what they went through and they will meet at a café called The Rabbit Hole and invite Trinity to join them. She is reluctant to remember, but when she does, we get her story of how she was pulled out of the Matrix.. and how there were many matrices, in which she was many different people: evil, good, a mother... We would also get a story about how when people realized that there were multiple versions of the matrix and remembered their other lives, they all went crazy, but Trinity saved the day by getting her consciousness absorbed by the machine, thereby restoring peace. That is what I predict will happen if Matrix Resurrections was influenced by my book.

In the original version of The Matrix, there was a story about how there had been many versions of the matrix, but when people didn't have to work in a paradise, the matrix became unstable. In my story, the analogous theme is transformed such that when people remembered too much or had too much time to think, the 'matrix' or equivalently people's experience of the multiverse became unstable. Perhaps the two themes are connected by the idea that if you are living in a paradise, you have too much time to remember things that you would've forgotten if you'd been distracted by a job.

I don't know what to expect, but I'm curious about how a Trinity-focused Matrix story will play out.

People complain about lazy remakes that just swap the gender of the protagonist, as in Ghostbusters or Bumblebee, December 2018's remake of Transformers with a female protagonist and a supporting character (Bumblebee) given headliner (Optimus Prime) status.

After a while you either tune out or just accept that everything new is trash.

When I searched Amazon for some films to watch, all of the older movies I wanted to see required a rental fee while all of the new stuff could be watched for free as part of Amazon Prime. I didn't want to see any of it because I knew it would just be a stale rip off of something I'd already seen done better in an earlier film.

It is heartening to me that Ariana Grande had to give up the royalties for this re-write of The Sound of Music's My Favorite Things:

Half of the song was from The Sound of Music and the other half of the song was a Beyonce refrain: I see it, I want it, I buy it, I own it. It was 50% this and 50% that.