Rent A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)

A Glitch in the Matrix review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Around the time that The Matrix debuted in theaters, there was a new philosophical and existential interest in the angsty youth crowd. Such concepts of our lives being a smaller product of a bigger world were not new but they sure seemed a whole lot cooler when posed within a speculative sci-fi picture of guns and leather. A renewed sense in questioning our existence spewed forth into an unfulfilled youth that wanted to know there was more to life than the mundanity of our current civilization.

A Glitch in the Matrix attempts to dig into these theories in a rather surreal yet engaging manner. Various thinkers appear on screen in an avatar replacement to talk about the intriguing idea of the simulation hypothesis. They speak about how we perceive the world and contemplate the idea that we don’t exist in reality but as a simulation just outside the real world. Contemplations are given about how he looks at the world and tries to imagine just how everything can function. What is our language but not reverberations of mouth movements? What are our mouths if not some organic function placed by some design? If we die where does our consciousness shift?

As the documentary expands on these ideas, we learn a bit of the history of how these ideas are rather old, going so far back as Plato's Republic. It didn’t just lie dormant either. The most famous example of bringing this philosophy to a modern crowd was with writer Phillip K. Dick. His many books of speculative science fiction have often been about questioning our own existence and how much of our identity we hold ownership over. However, Dick also gave a speech where he spoke earnestly that he believes there is a dimension beyond our own comprehension when he started having a near-death experience. He tried to describe it as calmly as he could and acknowledged several times that he suspects he will not be taken seriously.

Whether or not Dick is telling the truth is hard to say and the documentary doesn’t try to refute or back his claims. Rather, this film tries to explore the question rather than the answer. The answer may very well be one that we don’t figure out until we are dead. Before that time, however, we may be able to find hints in our world’s programming that may suggest it is not truly real. Glitches, if you will, in the game. We sometimes like to manufacture these ideas, as with the Mandella Effect, where selective memory made many people believe that Nelson Mandela died in the 1990s.

While the film does take some bizarre routes in exploring these ideas, complete with surreal and trippy animation to communicate these thoughts, there’s a grounding present that makes this film work. One such talking head poses the question that indeed our entire world is a simulation; so now what? What do we do with this information? We could spend so much time trying to prove this theory that the answer may be more important than the next step in this discovery.

This is an important question because the film doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of going down this rabbit hole. One such tragic story is of a young man who found himself obsessed with The Matrix and believing that there is something beyond his own reality. Convinced that this world meant little, the young man proceeded to take a gun inside his home and murder his mother and father. He would be arrested and tell this story himself in the film’s more bleak passage about how such conspiracy theories can be dangerous if the bigger and broader questions are not asked about the possible endgame.

A Glitch in the Matrix, sadly, spends so much time asking the questions of such theories rather than question the questions all that much. There’s a bigger conversation to be had here but it feels as though this surreal documentary is only in the philosophical paddling pools of questioning what our reality could be and if something exists outside of such a program. Around the time when The Matrix was released and became a pop culture icon, I noticed a slew of philosophical books centering around The Matrix. They were mostly forgettable and only felt like surface-level examinations. This film replicated that nostalgic feeling of only approaching such concepts of existentialism with a mere “whoa.”