em The Matrix Resurrections /em Takes Back the Red Pill

As the millennium was about to turn, The Matrix arrived in theaters like a speeding bullet--or maybe a very slow-moving one, filmed with the then-novel extreme-slo-mo special effect that would become known as "bullet time." Digital technology played a much smaller role in most people's lives in 1999. The internet was still a novelty, used by most people mainly for sending and receiving email. Smartphones were nonexistent, music was still mainly listened to on CD, and Netflix was a two-year-old company primarily in the business of mailing movies on DVD to people's houses. The idea that all of humanity was trapped in a simulation, our physical bodies parked in life-sustaining pods while our daily lives unfolded in a virtual space run by distant evil overlords, still sounded like a cool science-fiction metaphor, not a description of banal everyday reality.