As you cannot help but know...the sequel to The Matrix is now playing in 3600 theaters all over the country.

And a second Matrix sequel comes out in the fall.

I'm a huge Matrix fan.

But what strikes me about The Matrix trilogy - The Matrix phenomenon - is that the whole thing seems like a sequel….a sequel to:

I'm old enough to remember seeing the first Star Wars movie when it opened 26 years ago, before it had become just a vast autopiloted marketing machine.

And so I got to thinking last week about the remarkable parallels between this new cultural phenomenon and the one that washed over the culture a quarter-century ago.

Both are sci-fi epics featuring awesome cinematic effects of a kind we'd never seen before.

And both movies brilliantly re-synthesized the cultural DNA of dubious, pulpy pop sources -- Saturday morning serials for Star Wars, video games and Hong Kong action films for The Matrix, and comic books for both.

And both stories conform to the timeless structure of the hero's journey that the mythographer Joseph Campbell sketched out decades ago …starting with the hero's step over the threshold into the unknown with the help of guardians and mentors.

Back then we had Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi.

Today we have Morpheus and the Oracle.

Both stories feature an initially clueless hero who discovers his own preternatural powers and then battles against a technologically monstrous totalitarian empire.

But there are intriguing differences between Star Wars and The Matrix, too -differences that precisely reflect the difference between the anxious 1977 zeitgeist and the anxious zeitgeist of 2003.

Star Wars had resonance back then because America was engaged in a long struggle against a real-life empire ... just five years after the first movie came out, our then-president famously called the Soviet Union "the evil empire."

Star Wars came out of Cold War thinking…and then actually provided the language we used to think about the Cold War.

Today The Matrix has a different kind of resonance..deriving from the strange and thrilling and disconcerting world we inhabit now. That is from our sudden, shocking dependence on astoundingly intelligent machines. Today we live in a digitally wired, media-drenched world where we are increasingly intimate with computers, dependent on them …a world of 500 TV channels and 40 million web sites where our daily experience of reality more and more consists of sounds and images beamed all but directly into our brains.

In 2003, the world of The Matrix, where computers and robots have enslaved humanity, seems…almost plausible.

But Star Wars is looking quaint these days. Among other things, that's because the bad guys in Star Wars are an arrogant, technologically super-powerful "empire." And today, on the real planet earth, what nation is technologically super-powerful...and the only true "empire"?

Us.

Which may be another reason why the edgy escapism of The Matrix is so appealing right now. Because I think we'd prefer to scare and thrill ourselves contemplating its apocalyptic, day-after-tomorrow machine-versus-man nightmare …rather than watch a movie in which the high-tech bad guys are called "the empire."

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