The Matrix Reloaded

This is really not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Yes, it feels dated and has corny CGI, but I feel like that’s part of the charm. I think it shows how daring this period of CGI experimentation was in the early aughts. The film itself is not mind-blowing, it's sort of cheesy, and obviously made to have mass-market appeal, but certainly not terrible.
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The rave scene was incredible. It reminded me of a dance party I attended at an industrial techno club in New York City that had a strict no-phones-or-photography policy on the dance floor and no mirrors in the bathroom. It was phenomenal to say the least. Anyone who has attended something similar may recognize in the film’s rave scene this feeling of having your sense of self completely dissolve, of briefly exiting the mirror stage, of forgetting what you look like, unworried about being watched or seen or perceived or objectified, and completely entranced by the sea of bodies around you synchronized to the music's thud.

I think that experience is becoming increasingly rare since many venues do not have a no-phone-or-photography policy, and, in its absence, it might feel as though the potential threat of being recorded on a dance floor incentivizes appeasing the Big Other of Instagram Stories, of performing your aliveness, rather than experiencing the feeling of letting one’s ego unravel. This scene made me think about how the possibility of experiencing some sort of "freedom" at a rave may be foreclosed in a time when the slippage between cyberspace and the real world is constant and perpetual.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why the scene was included in the film—to show what sort of future alternatives might’ve been imagined in the past, yet don’t seem possible in the present, perhaps because living in the world might feel like social spaces are covered by a huge technological blanket. It might be something close to what Mark Fisher describes in his account of the "post-rave" present of London.