I’m always so serious in my posts. Today, I will try to be a little less serious. I will talk about the upcoming film The Matrix Resurrections.
As many of my friends know, I am a bit of a Matrix fanatic. Not that I think the story is real or even entirely realistic. However, I do think it is an amazingly rich story that can be enjoyed on countless levels, and poses numerous deep and philosophical questions. Put simply, the story makes one think. For me, this frequently makes a story (whether it is a film or a book) very enjoyable.
I will not rehash what has taken place in the story up to the point in time of this latest film, in part because it would take too long. Also, because I would not want to spoil it for those of you who may not be familiar with the story. Seriously, if you are reading this and you either have not seen the previous films, or if you simply have no idea about this story, I urge you to stop reading right now and go watch them. The first film for sure, but I encourage you to make your way through all three films, and The Animatrix as well. The entire story is quite interesting, and there is much to talk about throughout.
This is your spoiler warning. Do not continue reading if you do not want me to spoil the story for you. I will try to be somewhat vague regarding some things, but ultimately I suspect I will have to go rather deep simply to make my points. So, once again, this is your spoiler warning.
This past week, the trailer for the upcoming film was released. For many of us fans, we have been eagerly awaiting this trailer, as well as the film. Speaking for myself, I was not disappointed.
The first thing to establish is that this is a trailer. As a trailer, its purpose is to get audiences excited and eager to watch the upcoming film. It is an advertising vehicle intended to get “butts into seats” at the theaters. As such, I immediately expect the trailer to be misleading and deceptive. In fact, knowing the trouble Marvel studies has gone to with their own film trailers, misrepresenting information and outright manipulating scenes in order to mislead audiences, I expect this trailer may have done similar things. On the other hand, considering the complexity of the story, the producers may not have had to do very much anyway.
I’m not going through the trailer frame by frame or anything like that. Just proposing some things regarding what may be going on and what sorts of things I noticed and looked for in the trailer. Significant things that I believe will be important in the upcoming film. At the front of this line of important things is the fact that Neo appears to be our star and protagonist.
For anyone who knows the story, this one detail should already raise questions. After all, at the conclusion of the third film, Neo died. It is true that it may be possible to suggest Neo wasn’t entirely dead. In his mutual annihilation with Agent Smith, like all the other residents of the Matrix, Thomas Anderson may simply have been purged of the virus and re-awoken with the rest. This is certainly not made clear in the third film, but it remains a possibility.
I suspect there are a number of possible interpretations for what happened at the end of the third film. Firstly, it has been established numerous times that the “body cannot live without the mind,” as Morpheus makes explicitly clear in the first film. At the conclusion of the fight between Neo and Agent Smith, Neo’s mind should be gone, leaving his body without a mind. His body, now a lifeless husk, being gracefully taken away by the machines, possibly in reverence. But we also know that the machines are particularly adept with the simple flesh and blood bodies of humans as well, as is establish in the The Second Renaissance Part II. It would not be very difficult for the machines to take Neo’s body and repair or maintain it for future uses, if they were so motivated.
With his body’s survival established, this leaves us with his mind once again. Neo’s mind should have been destroyed, along with Agent Smith’s mind. For me, this is a critically important plot point, and the reason I believe the story works so well. Neo cannot survive the elimination of Agent Smith. They are “equal and opposite,” as the Oracle suggests, and as such neither can exist without the other. Or, to put this another way, one cannot be destroyed without destroying the other. Neo must die at the end of the story. So his existence in the fourth film becomes a very interesting puzzle.
One simple way they might explain Neo’s mind would be to copy it from backup. This, of course, suggests that the Matrix is being regularly backed up. This could also explain how the Matrix is restored as well, suggesting perhaps the Matrix was restored from a previous backup. However, as I say all this, it seems less and less reasonable. If backups were being done, then human minds would be regularly backed up, and at times, restored, suggesting human minds were being restored from time to time. This would be highly problematic, especially considering the sorts of information that would regularly be overwritten.
Very generally, backups are typically performed at instantaneous intervals, however, Agent Smith’s infection of the people inside the Matrix takes place slowly over time. To restore a backup of the Matrix, one would need to be done from before Agent Smith becomes virulent, which takes place at the end of the first film.
As case example of overwriting minds, let us briefly discuss the character Bane. In the second film, Bane’s mind is overwritten with Agent Smith’s mind. Upon leaving the Matrix, Agent Smith is effectively possessing Bane’s body. This is a significant plot point in the second and third films. Is Bane’s mind literally and completely overwritten with Agent Smith’s mind? This is not made entirely clear, and involves suppositions regarding mind/body dualism. In fact, this entire discussion assumes that minds and bodies can exist independent of one another, something that Morpheus will remind us cannot happen.
It is here that we enter some very murky waters. There are many, many examples of science fiction that exist today where the assumption of mind/body dualism is assumed. That minds can exist independently from bodies. In the Matrix story itself, at the end of the second film and the beginning of the third, it is suggested that Neo’s mind and body do, in fact, separate completely. It requires the character Link and others to utilize “some pretty ancient hacks” in order to successfully reintegrate Neo’s mind with his body. In fact, Link doesn’t even recognize Neo inside the Matrix, telling Morpheus that he “couldn’t tell what it was” that was with Morpheus. Of note here is the use of the pronoun “it” as opposed to “who,” suggesting Neo’s mind didn’t even look like a human mind at all.
There are a lot of ways one might interpret this entire situation. Morpheus suggests that minds and bodies cannot exist independent of each other, and yet Neo’s mind clearly was separated from his body for a significant amount of time. Furthermore, Neo’s mind (while separated from its body) clearly is unlike a typical human mind as well. All of this suggests that minds and bodies can actually be separated, however, there may be consequences of such a separation. This likely relates to the special nature of Neo, and why he is able to do the things he does, as noted by Councillor Hamann.
It is unlikely I will be able to resolve this puzzle, but it does strongly suggest the possibility that the machines could do something similar in this latest film. The machines could continue maintaining Neo’s body after the fight with Agent Smith (similar to how the human’s maintained Neo’s body at the end of the second film). The machines could, conceivably find a source for Neo’s mind and then join the two back together. All that remains to explain is where Neo’s mind might be found.
It is also here that we might conceivably have our tension or conflict within the fourth film. Neo and Agent Smith are inextricably tied to one another, at least after the events of the first film. There cannot be one without the other. If the machines found and/or preserved Neo’s mind in some fashion, then Agent Smith’s mind should not be far behind. To be fair, if Neo’s mind is in a condition from before he and Agent Smith merged, then perhaps Neo can exist without Agent Smith. However, in such a circumstance, Neo’s mind would not contain the extra code from Agent Smith: the code from the source. Would Neo continue to have the extraordinary abilities he had without the source code?
It will be interesting to see how the producers of this latest installment explain the mere existence of Neo. It seems very strange to me that he exists at all. And I haven’t even discussed the existence of Trinity…