How the end of MATRIX REVOLUTIONS sets up a fourth film

No franchise really dies in Hollywood, but Neo and Trinity have definitely done it. Matrix revolutions. However, their deaths will not prevent Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss from returning to their iconic roles in the new Matrix 4. This unexpected sequel may seem strange, but we might have seen it coming. The end of Matrix revolutions set up another chapter in history, establishing a way to bring back the same Neo and Trinity that we already knew.

The war between humans and machines ended shortly after Trinity's death in an accident. Neo's been sacrificed to stop the spread of Agent Smith, which the Matrix could no longer control. All that Neo wanted, in return for saving the machine world, was peace between machines and humans. They accepted his conditions and sent him to Matrix, where he let himself be absorbed by Smith's program. He destroyed her from the inside and, at the same time, he and Agent Smith passed away. The last time we saw Neo, his corpse in crucifixion had been washed away by the machines in a respectful manner, resembling a viking burial traversed by a Christian mass.

But the last moments of the film take place inside the matrix itself, as the sun rises over the dark and rainy dystopian world that Smith has created, bringing the matrix back to its late twentieth century aesthetic. Sitting on a bench watching at dawn of a new age, the Oracle, the "mother" of Matrix, was also released from the Smith by Neo sacrifice. The "father" of Matrix, his liberating adversary of the human, the Architect, approached her. He assured him that he would respect the agreement reached with Neo, but also asked, "How long do you think this peace will last?"

"As long as it's possible," she says. The most responsible machine to free humans from servitude could not guarantee that this relaxation would be a lasting solution.

While the Oracle's response indicated that a future war between humans or machines – or perhaps even another war where they would once again fight together against a red (or human) agenda – was probably inevitable, that did not mean not necessarily that the dead Neo would come back and fight for that. This possibility was approached when she was approached by the young Sati program, responsible for the rising sun. Sati told Oracle that she had done "for Neo" and asked, "Will we ever see it again?"

"I suppose so. One day, the Oracle replied.

In the very last scene of the trilogy, the Matrix's wisest entity, the one that protected and nurtured Neo so that he could end this terrible war, predicted that the peace that was going on was so great. he brought to the world was over and that he would come back again. We should perhaps not be surprised that there is a Matrix 4; Perhaps we should be surprised that it took so long to announce it. Of course, just because Matrix revolutions creating the possibility of another film does not mean that we should have expected Keanu Reeves to take over the role, and certainly not to Carrie-Anne Moss. But there are plausible ways established in the movies for both to return and for them to come back as the same people as they were.

In The matrix reloaded, the architect reveals to Neo that he is "the possibility of an anomaly", result of the unbalanced equation of the matrix. It is not the first version, but the sixth. On the TV screens of the room, we see how the five previous versions of Neo reacted to this information. In reality, the human city of Zion and Neo itself are only control measures of the architect. Neo is a genetically modified clone, without memory of its previous versions, designed for a specific job.

Making a "new" Neo when needed does not pose a problem for the machines in the array, and creating an exact replica of Trinity should not be more of a problem. They have access to her genetic code because she too was born in the womb and not naturally in the real world. But as evidenced by the latest version of Neo, although Matrix can create physical and identical copies of people, each iteration has an entirely new consciousness. In order for Keanu Reeves to come back as Neo's dead savior, we knew that they would have to do something else. Like downloading the old brain into a new body.

Although they are biological creatures, the humans of the womb are physically related to it, like computers. They can have programs – on things like flying helicopters or Kung Fu – that are instantly downloaded. With the incredible technical capabilities of the machines, to think that you can also save the consciousness of a human being on a hard disk (yes, like in this shabby film by Johnny Depp Transcendence), then load it into a new body in the same way as everything else

The Neo who saved both humans and the machine has transcended the world of both. It was the individual Matrix would have saved in case they needed him again, especially if they all believed, like the Architect and the Oracle, that he would one day be needed for a new war. And if you want to save him, you must save the person he loves most, which he relied on the most, because without Trinity Neo, the Savior of the world would never have been saved. His love and support drove Neo to become what he did, and she saved his life countless times in every film, including restoring it with his love, saving him from Purgatory and by bringing him to the City of Machines. As his name suggests, his fighting spirit and inspiration was as essential to beating Smith as anything Neo did.

The matrix 4 could open hundreds or even thousands of years into the future, with the de facto resurrection of Neo and Trinity, whose minds were stored in the womb long ago. It would be a film about death and eternal life.

It looks exactly like the kind of story we expected from The matrixand that's the one they installed at the end of the last one.

Selected image: Warner Bros.