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Show MyWeberMedia.com | September 9, 2019 | 5 movies are about faith. Arguably, they can be taken as a triumph of the power of the human spirit over technology. In order to become "The One" in the first installment, Neo has to suspend his disbelief and accept that the simulated world he sees is not the one he actually lives in. Biblical references run rampant in the films as well. Neo comes back from the dead, Morpheus' ship is called the Nebuchadnezzar and Carrie-Anne Moss's name in the series is Trinity. As if that weren't on the nose enough, the only safe human city in the world is named Zion. Then, the action in the movies is delivered through fight scenes reminiscent of "Enter the Dragon," only Neo's enemies usually begin the fights by shooting at him. All three of these seemingly disparate elements — evil robots, belief and kung-fu fights — still somehow combine into, in most critics' opinion, a great movie. As one New Yorker reviewer put it in a 2013 review, "The movie is nonsense, but it does achieve a brazenly chic high style — black-on-black, airborne, spasmodic." The franchise may be nonsense. I wish I could have been at the pitch meeting for the movie — yeah, um, it's about people living in a false reality and they all fight Hugo Weaving using martial arts wearing sunglasses indoors. However, something about the movie has stuck in the cultural consciousness enough that, even without seeing the film, people recognize the phrase The Matrix as describing a computer simulation; moreover, people actually believe the world is a super-advanced computer program. Ultimately, we'll just have to see if Lana and the cast can deliver another film as thought-provoking, visually interesting and culturally impactful as "The Matrix" in a world where the most successful movies at the box office are, more often than not, the latest installment in a superhero franchise. Maybe the production team can just invent new film-making techniques like they did the first time in order to produce as-yet-unseen special effects. But for me, it'll be enough to see Keanu Reeves punch bad guys in slow motion. Sorry John Wick, your action sequences aren't egregious enough — that, and "The Matrix" didn't kill a dog. Comment on this column at signpost.mywebermedia.com MONIKA CLARKE | The Signpost |