#Take the red pill free

It’s a good thing his life wasn’t all that glamorous back in the Matrix or he might have gone looking for Morpheus’ spare stash of blue pills. He’s pretty much conscripted by Morpheus into the most dangerous job possible using a combination of guilt and intimidation.

#Take the red pill free

I’m not saying it’s better to be controlled by an algorithm, but only that we shouldn’t so readily fool ourselves into thinking that we can escape it into some utopia.Īnd what of the lies we tell ourselves about what it means to be truly free? Neo manages to escape the great manipulation that the Matrix uses to placate its slimy human power sources, but as the “chosen one,” he’s not free to live his own authentic life. Unfortunately, life outside the Matrix isn’t glamorous or even fun, and humans have all the same problems they did before – blind faith, denial, anger, love, lust, bitterness, and greed. The Matrix wants us to imagine the terrifying possibility of living in a false world where we’re being controlled by machines and juxtaposes this with a world where people are free, real, authentic. In general, the film is designed to make us think about free will, fate, the depths of oppression, the irony of creation that later dominates its inventor, and the power (and pain) of knowledge. There are plenty of pop philosophy books that have the deeper meanings covered in case you want to talk about Plato’s Cave Allegory, Descartes, etc. Neo, of course, takes the red pill and (20-year-old spoiler alert) becomes the hero. Neither choice is all that great, especially when the real world involves living on a bedraggled ship, eating gruel, and being chased by “agents” who are out to obliterate the resistance before it can free more minds from the Matrix. He gives Neo the choice to take a red pill and become part of the resistance or take the blue pill and forget he ever knew there was a real world out there so he can rejoin the rest of humanity in serving as an organic power source for the machines. He’s recruited to join the “real world” by Morpheus, the leader of the human resistance against their AI overlords. Thomas Anderson is a computer programmer by day and hacker called Neo by night.

This raises the question: did we take the blue pill?