This spring marks the 20th anniversary of The Matrix. It was 20 years ago that the hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) picked the red pill over the blue, and was given an unforgettable glimpse of a world in which robots enslave untold billions of human beings, extracting their life force to fuel their evil empire. The Matrix drew on a well-worn science-fiction trope, as old as Metropolis, in which the hero discovers the hideous truth lurking just beneath the pleasant surface of daily life.
“The Matrix is everywhere,” Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) tells Neo. “You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.” Everyday reality, in the Wachowskis’ startling vision, is an illusion designed to mask the process by which robots quite literally turn human beings into disposable batteries.
