Westlake on Matrix

My Aussie friend Geoff Westlake finally saw Matrix Revolutions and blogged some thoughts, including a quote from the Wachowski brothers in 1999 to Time Mag:

“The Bible seeks to answer a lot of relevant questions for man,” says Larry. “In the film we refer to the story of Nebuchadnezzar; he has a dream he can’t remember but keeps searching for an answer. Then there’s the whole idea of a messiah. It’s not just a Judeo-Christian myth; it also plays into the search for the reincarnation of the Buddha…The search–the quest–informs Greek myths (“We have Orpheus and Morpheus in the film,” says Larry) as well as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “It’s a story about consciousness,” says Larry, “a child’s perception of an adult’s world. The Matrix is about the birth and evolution of consciousness. It starts off crazy, then things start to make sense.” It can also be read as a variant on Gibson’s Neuromancer, the 1986 cyberpunk classic about a computer cowboy on the run. “It’d be near impossible to make a movie out of that,” says Larry. “We knew the way to make it relevant was to turn what we view as the real world into a virtual reality.”

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

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