I'm weighing in pretty late on this, but I've only just now gotten the chance to see the film. One certainly *could* do a marxist read of it, I guess, but I don't know that reading would be particularly interesting. It's maybe a bit facile. I'm down with the Baudrillardian read. Same old same old gender thing going on, though. I was real hopeful at the beginning, when Trinity (oh those names!!) comes on looking tough and haggard and pale, kicking butt. But it became a boys game real fast, and by the end Trinity is saying her essential role in life is standing by her man and loving him. Only through her love for her man will she be able to fully become herself. And it seems to me (although I am admittedly a newbie to the genre) that the AIs are always male, or at least male-presenting. It's that rationality=male thing again, isn't it? Well, in The Matrix the AIs shift from body to body, and every time it happens the AI chooses a male body to inhabit, and it morphs into another male-presenting body (the AIs all dress in a sort of skinny butch blues bros. sort of way). And the AIs are all white as well.
frances