This is around 17 or so minutes into the movie, and made me question if I want to watch it. Am I being too sensitive or too much of a puritan? I don't want to be, so maybe I just need to relax a bit on this.
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The main villains of the movie are The Men in Black - the anonymous, interchangeable government agents that conspiracy theorists thought were after them - including one with the most generic name in America. They were never going to be minorities because that would be a step away from the legend and make them less anonymous and interchangeable.
Around them you've got the "The Man" characters like the police, the SWAT team and Neo's boss. This is less of a slam dunk, but it could just be a consequence of the movie being imagined and set in 1990s America and filmed in 1990s Australia - your boss was probably a white man, the extras were probably white and it's easier to get away with reusing stuntmen if necessary if the audience can't pick the black guy out of every group of mooks.
Cypher's the only one I'd call an unforced example of the white male villain in the movie, but that's just one guy.
I expect the new Matrix movie to be woke shit, but I'd say the original is just a generically anti-authority movie in a time and place when authority figures were going to be white men.
Oh sure, there was a time that I'd have made that assumption as well. I generally just assume that when I see a lot of white people in an overwhelmingly white majority country, that it's probably just chance.
However ... we have since had 2 decades of the Wachowskis making their political opinions very clear, 2 decades of Hollywoke being more and more blatant, 2 more decades where these coincidences just keep getting more and more statistically unlikely.
Not only that, but we have had 2 more movies where the same pattern played out. Nearly every unambiguously sympathetic character in the Matrix was from a wonderfully diverse rainbow cast, and every single antagonist was white.
The Oracle. The Keymaker. The Asian dude in the white outfit. The friendly family in the train station. The Marovingian's wife was allowed to be white at least, but she at least wasn't male. Jada Pinkett's the bestest driver ever. There is that one old white man council member in Zion who isn't an asshole, and the kid that gets rescued by Neo that helps the black dude in the combat exoskeletal armor, so that's arguably 2 in the good column.
As opposed to the agents, Cypher, the guys buying contraband from Neo, The Marovingian, The Marovingian's bodyguards (one of them might have melanin, don't remember, but I'm pretty sure they were generic white dude thugs), the Architect, the viruses, the other dude (Cain? I don't remember) that gets infected by Smith.
Yeah, it might just be coincidence. Or it might be that they just figured, "I don't want to get outrage from the mob if I cast a Diverse person as a villain." Or it might be that the Wachowskis (and their casting agency) are bigoted assholes now, and they were bigoted assholes then.
I've seen enough evidence that I'm comfortable in saying that it was probably option 3.
The Marovingian's henchmen were the only diverse group of antagonists, with about half of them not being white.
Also, The Matrix was a lifetime ago, where things were quite different. I would believe it a lot sooner that this was a coincidence, than I would today.
The first Matrix movie was fine, casting-wise. It was also from a different era. The second and third ones were "diversity" bullshit on speed. Pretty sure the wachowski brothers decided they had "arrived" at that point and could propagandize to their degenerate hearts' content. They were correct.
I still remember sitting in the theater watching Reloaded on opening night. Like most people, I was psyched as hell. By the time the movie had gotten around to depicting Zion, the "last human city" in a technologically advanced future, as an African drum tribe of mostly brown people grinding on each other, I was done.
These days, I view the Matrix sequels as non-canon.
I remember watching this and being immediately taken out of the movie. Morpheus has literally just warned the crowd of that the machines are coming, but then it's like "nah, it'll be fine, let's have a rave." Imagine that towards the end of the original Star Wars movie when the death star was approaching the rebel base, that the rebels decided to have a dance party instead of preparing for the attack. Makes about as much sense.
I expected Zion to be full of nerds and hackers. Instead it was full of hedonists and hippies.