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Matrix 4 wants you to choose red or blue pill to watch movie footage

The Matrix Resurrections website puts you in Neo's place -- but this time, you can change your mind.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
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Gael Cooper
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Keanu Reeves returns as Neo in The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the sci-fi series.

 Warner Bros. Pictures

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice. Take the blue pill and return to what he thinks is his normal life, or take the red pill and join the rebellion against the enslaving machines. Now the website for The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the series, asks fans to make a similar choice. 

But Matrix fans get a better deal than Neo. Both options give them peeks at the upcoming film, and whichever one they choose first, they can go back and make another choice to see different footage.

To try it out, go to whatisthematrix.com and click on one of the pills. The red-pill choice results in narration from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, while the blue-pill choice delivers Neil Patrick Harris -- both are actors in the new movie. 

Once you've watched one teaser, click the other pill and watch another one. Not only does each choice deliver slightly different footage, but you can return to the site at a different time and see different scenes. The black cat that famously proved a "glitch in the matrix" shows up again, as do the iconic dripping green computer code, body morphing, frozen-in-midair leaps and more. Is that Reeves as Neo about to step off a towering building? Yikes.

Need more? The film's first trailer comes out Sept. 9 at 6 a.m. PT at the same website.

Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Jada Pinkett Smith return from the earlier films. Abdul-Mateen II and Harris are new to the cast, along with Christina Ricci, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jessica Henwick and Jonathan Groff -- who's seen with his mouth slowly being overgrown with skin in a disturbing scene that harkens back to the original movie. Fishburne told New York Magazine in 2020 that he was not asked to return as Morpheus.

The Matrix Resurrections comes to theaters and HBO Max on Dec. 22.

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