R | 2h 16m | Sci-Fi, Action | March 31, 1999
You’ve undoubtedly heard of red pills versus blue pills, “bullet time,” and the names Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, and Agent Smith by now. Few movies have had such an immediate, profound, and lasting cultural impact on American society as “The Matrix,” which won 4 Oscars. It’s being re-released this year in celebration of its 25th anniversary.
It’s the tale of the technological fall of humanity, where the rise of AI led the way to a reign of omnipotent, sentient machines that usurped human dominance, much like super-computer Hal in 1968’s prescient “2001, A Space Odyssey,” super-android Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in 1982’s “Blade Runner,” Skynet in the “Terminator” series, and what the scientist-philosopher-mystic Rudolf Steiner predicted 100 years ago. More on Steiner later.
‘The Matrix’
The human-machine battle had been hugely destructive. Humans intentionally blacked out the sky in order to deprive the machines of solar energy. That’s why, when the machines finally prevailed, they created megalithic power plants, or farms, that used cloned humans and culled their body heat to use as batteries. They utilize the neural interactive simulation—the massive Matrix computer program—written by an all-powerful program known as the “Architect” to keep it all running smoothly.
Since human bodies can only thrive via an active mind and will regress without one, the machines keep the minds of their encapsulated humans plugged into the Matrix program to maintain optimal body health. None of these embryonic human clones are aware of what is actually going on.
Only non-Matrix humans know, and they exist in the last safe haven, a subterranean city called Zion, far below the earth’s surface. The Zion human rebel force and the machines are at still at war with each other. Humans can’t fight the machines directly, so they fight them through the Matrix by basically becoming computer viruses that exist in the Matrix. One by one, they can slowly save humans this way.
Basic Story
Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) lives two lives. A run-of-the-mill computer programmer by day, he’s a computer hacker named Neo by night. Neo has always had questions about life, but the truth he’s about to be exposed to is far beyond his imagination. After being contacted by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), a legendary hacker considered a terrorist by the government, Neo finds himself hunted by law enforcement.
Neo joins team Morpheus, becomes a rebel against the machines, undergoing training (programming, actually) to develop into a warrior. Then he battles dangerous agents in the Matrix.
Agent Smith (a pre-Elrond Hugo Weaving) and his little band of Secret Service-type agents are programs created by the machines to hunt down humans like Neo, who are aware of the Matrix. The agents are an anti-malware software.
Neo, via the assistance of Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) and the tutelage of Morpheus, learns to understand the matrix so well that he becomes unstoppable in his ability to save humans. Morpheus calls him “The One.” Obvious biblical parallels abound.
Ring Any Bells?
This is all very similar, of course, to ancient mythologies that maintain that old, corrupted universes are blown up by the gods and created anew. The Matrix (like Creation) was written to be perfect. Humans, however, are imperfect. Each completion of a successful matrix ultimately falls apart because humans, having free will, make illogical choices and question everything.
There’s been a lot of talk over the last few decades about energy: fossil, green, windmills, solar. Lots of preoccupation with cloning too. Somebody cloned a sheep 28 years ago. It’s possible that in some underground, black-site military lab, cloned human super-soldiers already exist. Hollywood made the super-soldier movie “Universal Soldier,” starring Jean Claude Van Damme, 22 years ago.
In addition to all the talk about energy, cloning, super-soldiers, and terminators, there are robots and robocops. Just yesterday on Facebook there was a video of a SWAT mini-tank robocop taking down a suspect. The fool tried to foil what is basically a phase-one terminator by throwing a blanket from his window, over the robots’ camera.
The S.W.A.T. Wall-E then sprayed tear-gas in the perp’s apartment. The bad guy bolted out the door and tried to make a run for it, but officer Wall-E tackled him and used it’s tank-treads to roll up on his legs, and sat on him until human police came to take him into custody. I bet that tank-operating officer had a blast; it’s gotta be a fun videogame-like way to make an arrest. That’s all well and good.
Upshot
“The Matrix” puts philosophical and epistemological concepts such as the brain being the main interpreter of reality, up for debate. The movie (and franchise) prompts audiences to question the nature of reality and of artificial intelligence.Advancing AI, cloning, and robotics are what we silly humans have been up to for decades, claiming we merely intend to improve the quality of our lives. In reality it’s all being driven by technological competition, which most likely leads straight to the doorstep of the military industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about. We continue to happily fiddle and tinker with all of the above. And instead of attempting to halt the inevitable logical catastrophe, we make movies about it to show how bad it’s going be and watch them as entertainment.
If you’re not familiar with “The Matrix,” I highly recommend watching it, not as entertainment (although it’s supremely entertaining) but as the wake-up call the entire human race is in dire need of.
Rudolf Steiner’s Prophecy on AI
Educator and seer Rudolf Steiner spoke to the notion that there isn’t one evil, but two opposing forces of evil; basically Lucifer and Satan. Or the red devil versus the black devil. Or sex versus death. Christ, he posited, stands between these two extremes. The black form, the satanic, or the Ahrimanic, as he called it, is the sclerotic, mechanistic one. He cautioned that it would be this dark energy that would incarnate as the anti-Christ. Steiner is someone to pay attention to. Consider the fact that more than 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner wrote the following:“In the future, we will eliminate the soul with medicine. Under the pretext of a ‘healthy point of view’, there will be a vaccine by which the human body will be treated as soon as possible directly at birth, so that the human being cannot develop the thought of the existence of soul and Spirit.
“To materialistic doctors, will be entrusted the task of removing the soul of humanity. As today, people are vaccinated against this disease or that disease, so in the future, children will be vaccinated with a substance that can be produced precisely in such a way that people, thanks to this vaccination, will be immune to being subjected to the ”madness” of spiritual life. He would be extremely smart, but he would not develop a conscience, and that is the true goal of some materialistic circles.
“With such a vaccine, you can easily make the etheric body loose in the physical body. Once the etheric body is detached, the relationship between the universe and the etheric body would become extremely unstable, and man would become an automaton, for the physical body of man must be polished on this Earth by spiritual will. So, the vaccine becomes a kind of Ahrimanic force; man can no longer get rid of a given materialistic feeling. He becomes materialistic of constitution and can no longer rise to the spiritual.”
Interesting concepts to think about. Also interesting is that the Wachowskis, who wrote and directed “The Matrix,” are former Waldorf students. Waldorf education was founded by Rudolf Steiner.
