How ‘The Matrix’ Broke Will Smith: A Complete Timeline

Dekker Dreyer December 27, 2021

Will Smith versus The Matrix

This isn’t a story about Matrix: Resurrections... not exactly. We need to start two decades ago. We need to go back to the beginning, when the original Matrix was going into production. So take the red pill and come with me down the rabbit hole as we explore how the convoluted pseudo-philosophy of the Matrix series broke Will Smith.

The Matrix is, at its heart, an action movie. The film that probably looms largest in its influence over the franchise is the 1995 anime feature Ghost in the Shell. In Ghost in the Shell the question of what constitutes personhood is placed front and center in a fantasy world where humans can upload their minds to a variety of devices and sophisticated artificial intelligences can likewise inhabit physical spaces through mechanical bodies. The question of mind / body is very clearly articulated. This idea of a distinct separation between your consciousness and your corporeal body has been a central question across most world religions for millennia; it’s foundational to the human experience. The Matrix took this a step further by suggesting that if your consciousness was kept from your physical body how would you know what is “real”. This thought experiment was a 20th century version of Plato’s Cave, a philosophical construct that asks the question “If you live your entire life looking in one direction at shadows on a cave wall would you ever consider that there are physical objects behind you making the shadows?”

That’s the Matrix in a nutshell. Everything you need to understand the main themes of the Matrix rests in those two inspirations. But that wasn’t smart or cool enough for the filmmakers, so they really stretched themselves to try and add extra layers of academic validity to their series. This took the form of numerous documentary projects and thinkpieces associating a wide variety of postmodern concepts to the Matrix, but one philosopher’s work emerged as the focal point of this effort.

The creative team made several allusions to a connection between their films and the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation, largely denied those connections saying any overtures toward his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings”. It’s important to note that anyone who has read and understood his work would come to the same conclusion. The fourth film tries very hard to correct this by incorporating themes which more directly address Baudrillard, for better or worse. All that said, Baudrillard has become conjoined to the Matrix through this meta narrative, which, funny enough, is actually a situation that tracks much more closely to his writings than anything in the films. Baudrillard’s theories mainly concentrate on our relationship to information, mass marketing, and self-identity; that means that the tension between the Waschowskis insisting there’s a connection, the media perpetuating that narrative, and Baudrillard denying the narrative is a real world demonstration of his ideas. The irony is too thick.

We’re going to take this a step further and dive head-first into the deepest end of Baudrillard territory by expanding this meta narrative to include someone who really needed to read those last two paragraphs much earlier in his life; the one and only Fresh Prince.

In the late 90s Will Smith was having a moment. He’d been through the 80s as a famous rapper and exploded into the 90s as both a television star and theatrical draw. His critically acclaimed turn in Six Degrees of Separation was followed by box office-dominating roles in Independence Day, Men in Black, and Bad Boys —Will Smith was a media powerhouse. With all of his clout, it’s no surprise that he was offered the part of Neo in the Matrix franchise. What is surprising is that he turned it down because he couldn’t make sense of the pitch or the script.

“So I probably would have messed The Matrix up. I would have ruined it, so I did y’all a favor.” Will Smith

Normally this is where these stories end. Star passes on major film, different actor is cast, history is made. You’ve heard it a million times. There are alternate universes where Burt Reynolds is Han Solo and Anthony Michael Hall is Ferris Bueller.This, however, is different. I’m suggesting that the trauma of Will Smith misunderstanding The Matrix broke him and we’ve been watching a twenty year existential crisis unfold.

In the immediate aftermath of The Matrix’s success Will Smith needed comfort and grounding. He retreated to a series of sequels with Bad Boys 2 and Men in Black 2. This was to reassure himself of the validity of his own constructed identity. He needed to see himself as a movie star and shrewd businessman who knows how to pick a hit and sequels were the best path forward for him in that endeavor. This was comfort food… he was healing himself. His wife Jada, however, was cast in the next installments of the Matrix series as rebel captain Niobe; she had read for the role of Trinity in the first film, but lost out to Carrie-Anne Moss. It’s a dangerous game having your wife become central to the very thing that keeps you awake at night. “It’s okay… The Matrix must’ve been a fluke, there’s no way they could keep this going,” he must’ve thought. No Big Willie, it was not a fluke. In 2003 both Matrix sequels came out and cemented the franchise as a fixture of pop culture, his own wife, now part of that which torments him.

The success of the trilogy as a whole sent Smith on a mission. “It must’ve been robots and AI mumbo jumbo… that’s what the people want,” he thought. If he could just capture that simple formula he’d be able to somehow conquer his obsession and experience the schadenfreude of making a smarter action adventure film than The Matrix. I, Robot released the following year earning $100m less than the third Matrix movie and was largely dismissed by critics. The Matrix had become iconic and both audiences and pundits heralded it as incredibly sophisticated; I,Robot on the other hand was derided as a dumbing down of Asimov’s original book series. This thirst for intellectual validation would drive Smith to hyper focus on his children, trying to expose them to increasing levels of obscure pseudo-science, hoping against hope that they’d be better armed than he was when confronted with a script like The Matrix. This Ahab-like obsession culminated in the bizarre Dune-meets-Black Panther father-son box office bomb After Earth. The muddled philosophical framework of After Earth confused people in the complete opposite way as The Matrix did. It made audiences hyper-critical of “why” the Smiths would make such a ridiculous movie which insisted that its own existence was some kind of profound statement about the human condition. Then came the “prana energy” interview.

In 2014 After Earth star Jaden Smith, and his recording artist sister Willow, spoke to the New York Times about quantum mysticism.

Willow, in the piece, would say, “I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist.” and Jaden followed with, “It’s proven that how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe. It’s relative to beings and other places. But on the level of being here on earth, if you are aware in a moment, one second can last a year. And if you are unaware, your whole childhood, your whole life can pass by in six seconds. But it’s also such a thing that you can get lost in.”

In several broad ways they’re not wrong… but they’re just a few degrees off center, like they were left alone with a stack of academic journals and no guidance for how to contextualize them. If this doesn’t feel like a tortured Will Smith making his tween-aged children read books they aren’t ready to understand in a desperate bid to make them into what he isn’t, then nothing does. The comedy of this is The Matrix was never that deep to begin with. Jaden’s movie and music career would cool soon after the article was published; The Matrix claimed another generation of Smiths as its victims.

This brings us to the Red Table Talk and Jada’s “entanglements.”

Jada, having been in The Matrix franchise, was clearly the heavy in their household. She had looked into the eye of the dragon and where Will flinched, she stood firm. She did what Will lacked the resolve to do. For years Will and Jada have had a difficult to contextualize relationship with Will admitting that his Christian upbringing made it incredibly hard for him to accept the kind of “open” marriage Jada wanted. I submit for your approval that Will Smith was willing to go along with Jada’s desire for additional sexual partners, despite his personal reservations, because Jada had understood The Matrix and he hadn’t. After all, if he was so wrong about The Matrix and Jada “got it” what else does Jada understand about the nature of man’s place in the universe that Smith fundamentally misunderstands? Hence, Jada’s entanglements and Will’s compliance in addressing them publicly with no judgement. Smith’s ego… his sense of who he is… has been so profoundly undermined by The Matrix that he has no clear way to articulate the validity of his own emotional desires. Will Smith, just like the mockingly named “Agent Smith” in both the original and third films, has been overwritten by the code of the Matrix and his identity has been dissolved into meaningless green characters floating in a dark void.