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.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (42)
sorted by:
Go back and re-watch The Matrix. Pay attention to who the bad guys are vs who the good guys are. Zero non-white people are put in villainous roles. It's even more blatant in the sequels that they would have made if they wanted to make a couple more shitty movies with some impressive action sequences.
There's no way it's not deliberate.
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.