In May 2020, after Elon Musk tweeted: “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied: “Taken!”, Lilly responded pithily: “F*** both of you”. It isn’t hard to find evidence that she and her sister Lilly, who created The Matrix together, have become unhappy with how its meaning has been twisted and reinterpreted. The decision to place the choice between the two pills front and centre in Resurrections’ marketing feels purposeful: a possible attempt by director Lana Wachowski to reclaim the contemporary narrative that surrounds the scene. The film’s website allowed viewers to choose between a red or blue pill, which in turn determined the teaser trailer they’d be shown. That moment was invoked this week in a viral marketing campaign for The Matrix Resurrections – the fourth film in the franchise – which is set for release this December. “You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.” You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” he says.

After explaining to him that he has lived his whole life in a virtual “prison for mind” known as The Matrix – and offering to show him the truth outside of that cage – Morpheus presents him with a pair of colour-coded pills: “You take the blue pill, the story ends. In The Matrix, the 1999 phenomenon that introduced the world to bullet-time fight sequences and briefly made fiddly little sunglasses without arms the height of fashion, Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo a simple choice. It’s one of the most famous scenes in modern film history.

Matrix red pill