The Matrix Resurrections, Director Lana Wachowski’s 2021 successor to the original Matrix trilogy, offers a dizzying amount of detail in its two and a half hour running time. And when you hook up with the previous trilogy, lore that makes sense are dropped – and swept past – at high speed. If you haven’t immersed the early 2000s in Matrix-related mythology and the vast transmedia experience of animated spin-offs and games, what happened between the events of the 2003s? The Matrix Revolutions and Resurrections could easily be overlooked.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections.]
At the end of Revolutions, Neo brokered a truce between the machines and humans, sacrificed his own life to defeat his archenemy Agent Smith, the Matrix restarted, and the war between the machines and humans was more or less over. As The Architect, the program originally responsible for creating the matrix, announced to his counterpart, the oracle, at the end of the film, anyone who voluntarily wanted to leave the matrix was now allowed to do so. The Matrix Resurrections begins 60 years after the events of The Matrix Revolutions, and the aftermath of Neo’s sacrifice and the resulting peacetime has manifested itself in ways that neither machines nor humanity could have imagined.
As Niobe Neo relates, shortly after she was rescued from the Matrix by Bugs and the crew of the floating ship Mnemosyne, the machines upheld the terms of the ceasefire by ceasing all hostilities against the last human city of Zion and giving the people their freedom to leave the matrix. Although no one in Zion knows exactly what happened to Neo and Trinity after they went to the Machine City, the newfound peace is nonetheless celebrated and attributed to their apparent sacrifice. For his role in discovery and belief in new things, Morpheus is called to head the Supreme Council of Zion as more and more newly liberated people are welcome in the city. However, this fragile period of peace would not last. As the power plants attached to the Matrix began to produce less and less energy, tensions flared up between the factions among the machines, who disagreed on whether to continue to uphold the terms of Neo’s armistice.
Civil war broke out between the machines, with philanthropic programs and robots fleeing the carnage and seeking refuge with the people. While Niobe warned Morpheus that a conflict between the machines would pose an imminent threat to Zion, Morpheus’ belief in Neo’s truce never wavered. This belief would prove to be Zion’s downfall, as the civil war between the machines ended with the advent of a new program, The Analyst, which went to work to restore the pre-existing hierarchy of programs (i.e. the Oracle, the Architects, etc.) within the Too purge Matrix and led an attack on the city, which among other things led to the death of Morpheus.
Sometime before or after the destruction of Zion, Niobe and a group of sympathetic supporters of humans and machines alike broke out and founded another city. This city, IO, was created only through the peaceful coexistence and collaboration between man and machine and achieved technological feats and agricultural advances that were considered impossible due to the centuries-old environmental damage caused by the man-machine war. In an effort to preserve the valuable gains made in IO, Niobe did not prioritize the liberation of those trapped by the Matrix and instead chose the little peace they made from the analyst’s machinations to hide and protect.
What happened to Neo and Trinity is a little more complicated. After Neo’s defeat by Agent Smith, his and Trinity’s bodies were recovered and taken to Machine City for investigation. The analyst who was one of the programs present during Neo’s sacrifice set out over the years meticulously reconstructing their bodies in order to understand the secret at the heart of the One’s “source code”. Although the nature and origin of Neo’s powers were still deprived of him, The Analyst discovered something else after the two were resuscitated. Whenever they were in close proximity, Neo and Trinity generated spectacular amounts of energy. To contain and use this energy in the service of the Matrix, the analyst built a separate power station separate from the plants that contained the rest of humanity and locked Neo and Trinity in opposite capsules.
After erasing their memories, the analyst disguised their avatars from anyone else connected to the Matrix to hide their identities in addition to the fact that they were still alive. To calm Neo and Trinity down and be oblivious to their true identities and powers, the analyst took their combined memories of the Matrix and wrote them into the reality of this new Matrix as a video game series called (you guessed it) The Matrix, the was created by Thomas A. Anderson (aka Neo).
Although he was thoroughly convinced of this new reality, part of Neo’s subconscious still recognized the nature of the simulation in which he was trapped and longed to escape. Because of this, he created the modal, a self-contained simulation within the matrix that poses as the plane of a video game, although it contains a sentient program modeled after his former mentor and comrade, Morpheus. This modal was discovered by Bugs and the crew of Mnemosyne, which happened at the beginning of The Matrix Resurrections and the subsequent rescue of Neo from the Matrix.
The beauty of the film by Lana Wachowski and her fellow campaigners: Most of it is put aside, with exposure rarely slowing down the plot. But it’s all there in small pieces and just enough gaps to let your imagination run wild.
