The 18-year wait is nearly over, and the fourth Matrix movie, The Matrix Resurrections, is almost here.

This hour, we look back at the original film and its continued influence across the culture with bullet time and red pills and the “woah” meme and so much more.

We take the question of whether we’re living in a simulation much more seriously than we did when The Matrix came out. We’re much more attuned to the allegory for the trans experience that The Matrix might well have been.

And The Matrix Resurrections is just the latest iteration of the ongoing #Keanussance, from Duke Caboom to Bill & Ted Face the Music to John Wick: Chapter 4 next year.

GUESTS:

• River Donaghey - An associate editor at Vice, where he published the piece “Give Keanu Reeves Some Space, Everybody”
• David Sims - A staff writer at The Atlantic and the cohost of Blank Check with Griffin and David
• Emily VanDerWerff - The critic at large for Vox, where she published “How The Matrix universalized a trans experience — and helped me accept my own”
• Rizwan Virk - Executive director of Play Labs at M.I.T. and the author of The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are in a Video Game

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Colin McEnroe, Cat Pastor, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired June 19, 2019.