It’s no wonder that in the original, Morpheus refers to the most druggy children’s book of all, Alice in Wonderland: “Take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” The trailer for Resurrections had for a soundtrack White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane’s superlative 1967 paean to this idea.īut since the franchise began in 1999, the red-pill metaphor in particular has run riot. Pills to make you high, pills to put you to sleep. There are pills for birth control, for blood pressure, for depression, for a headache.

We really do, in fact, live in a pill culture. The new Matrix has kept the franchise’s “pill” theme alive: the website for the new film offers you the choice, once again, of red and blue. Whether we’re wondering whether we’re all brains in a vat, or bemoaning the misleading nature of the phenomenal world, or watching the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave rather than staring madly into the truth of the Sun, mankind has long suspected that what we see isn’t how it really is. Its fleeting properties disguise and mask the true nature of the absolute. Maya is an ancient idea in Hinduism and Buddhism with similar connotations to that of the Matrix (which in Middle English meant “womb”), namely that this world is an illusion. In the original 1999 film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is offered by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) the choice between taking a blue pill and a red pill: the former will allow him to remain in ignorance in a dream-like simulation, while the latter will show him reality – how things really are. In the meantime, aspects of the original trilogy have spilled out all over our culture, and nothing more so than the idea of the “red pill”. The Matrix Resurrections follows The Matrix Revolutions, which came out in 2003 (almost two decades ago).

Red blue pill matrix