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The Matrix Resurrections, the primary new installment within the dystopian sci-fi motion franchise in over 12 years, has despatched the web buzzing like an indignant swarm of killer Sentinels. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss return for the sequel as Neo and Trinity, respectively, together with unique trilogy supporting gamers Jada Pinkett Smith and Lambert Wilson and newcomers like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Neil Patrick Harris. However of all the brand new and previous faces seen within the first have a look at the upcoming movie, one iconic character is conspicuously absent: Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus.
We’ve recognized for the reason that preliminary solid bulletins courting again so far as 2019 that Fishburne, liable for taking part in Neo’s stoic, mirror-shades-and-katana-touting mentor, wasn’t returning for the fourth Matrix outing alongside Reeves and Moss. “I’m not within the subsequent Matrix film,” Fishburne instructed Collider in a current interview. “[Y]ou’d need to ask Lana Wachowski why, as a result of I don’t have a solution for that.” Which raises the query: What occurred to Morpheus earlier than the occasions of The Matrix Resurrections?
The reply appears to lie in probably the most unlikely of locations: The Matrix On-line, the now-defunct MMO spinoff of the Matrix trilogy that was launched again in 2005.
Picture: Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Leisure
When The Matrix Revolutions debuted in 2003, interviews urged that the Wachowskis had no intention of releasing one other installment within the collection. As an alternative, the plan was to move the reins of the collection’ storyline to the viewers itself by the use of The Matrix On-line. Within the MMO, gamers assumed the position of a newly woke up “redpill” who chooses from certainly one of a number of factions fashioned between the people and machines within the wake of the occasions of the third movie. The sport had gamers work together with a number of essential characters from the movie trilogy, together with the Oracle (Mary Alice), Seraph (Collin Chou), and, consequently, Morpheus.
“Our movies have been by no means meant for a passive viewers,” stated the Wachowskis in a 2005 interview with IGN. “We needed our viewers to need to work, to need to assume, to have to truly take part in an effort to get pleasure from them. [T]he proven fact that the Matrix movies are three of probably the most profitable grownup movies in historical past […] means that there are different individuals like us. These are the individuals, the individuals who considered it, who labored at it, who we in the end made the trilogy for and it now makes excellent sense to us that they need to inherit the storyline.”
Within the occasions of The Matrix On-line, which came about after the top of The Matrix Revolutions, Morpheus returned to the Matrix to seek the advice of the Oracle as to why, regardless of the obvious truce between the machines and people, the machine had not but returned Neo’s stays to Zion. Morpheus, together with quite a few gamers who selected to affix his faction, set about attempting to reconstruct Neo’s Residual Self Picture — his digitally generated avatar throughout the Matrix — as a approach of hopefully resurrecting him. Annoyed by his failure to take action, Morpheus started demanding the Machines to return Neo’s physique. With no different choices, Morpheus then started detonating “code bombs” throughout the Matrix, compromising the integrity of the simulation as an entire as a approach of forcing the machines to conform together with his calls for.
After setting off one of many code bombs, Morpheus was ambushed by the Murderer, a program created by Machines, and killed. Some gamers on the time theorized that Morpheus may need faked his dying and gone into hiding, however this principle remained unresolved on the time of The Matrix On-line’s cancelation in 2009.
[Ed. note: The following contains minor spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections.]
The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t refute the occasions of The Matrix On-line, however it’s not fully clear if all of it nonetheless strains up 16 years later. So did Lana Wachowski pull a Yoko Taro/Nier transfer and weave a now-dead MMO into the broader mythology of the The Matrix Resurrections? As Niobe tells Neo within the new movie, after the occasions of Revolutions, Morpheus was elected the excessive chair of the council. However when rumors began up that there was a “new energy” taking on the machine world, he ignored them. “He was sure what you had carried out couldn’t be undone. All of those individuals by no means stopped believing in miracles, believing in you.”
In approach, we do see Fishburne’s Morpheus in Resurrections: As a statue, constructed within the honor of a person whose legacy is extra difficult than any hero. And as for everybody being crushed to dying when The Matrix On-line went offline in 2009, properly, chalk that as much as a reboot.
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