This new movie, by contrast, holds out no such hope, telling us from its opening scene that choice is an illusion. A few fights later, the new Morpheus (now played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is presented with a choice and says “that’s no choice at all,” a line he’ll repeat throughout the movie that inverts Morpheus’s past beliefs. In this Matrix, people have been shown reality: The whole story of the original Matrix movies is presented as a video game in the world of this film, which means everybody has access to the truth. But most people reject that truth and stay in fantasyland, just as many viewers will surely find this film’s critical references to its predecessors tedious. People within its fictional constraints — like admirers of the Wachowskis’s earlier fictions who reject their later developments — choose to believe the lie because they’re emotionally invested in it, not because they haven’t been exposed to the truth.
