^^ Interesting, with me it's the opposite and I've stopped counting how many times I revisited RELOADED just for a couple of scenes and ended up watching the whole film. But I agree that the shooting of "innocent" people equally turned me off the first time. In the context of the story, however, these people are already "dead", forever slaves of the machines and instantly "obsessed" by lethal agents of the system unless taken out first. The presentation of violence is ambigous, no doubt. Like I said, it shouldn't be taken too literal but rather in a metaphorical sense with some grains of salt. Bob
To me, all this metaphorical depth that's supposed to be in these films is just a big bag of extremely hot air.
One time I fell asleep at that scene. It was just drawn out. For the third movie the Neo and Agent Smith fight at the end was weightless. It was just two CGI characters going at each other's throats. It's sort of the same thing with "Man of Steel". There's only so many times you can watch a character go through a building.
<<For me it's the ultimate metaphor but you can't take things literally. Machines requiring human energy but simultaneously having all the equipment to harvest geothermal energy instead (which is how humanity survives, BTW)? >> As spelled out in The Second Renaissance, the Machines are using humans as a power source not because it's efficient, but because they fundamentally require a symbiotic relationship with Man. And since Man betrayed them and tried to kill them, they redefined that relationship by using them as power slaves.
Weren't humans originally to be used by the machines as a neural net until executive meddling turned them into batteries?
Essentially, they wanted the Matrix to be the largest supercomputer ever made, slaving billions of Human minds into it to create the Deus Ex Machina from Revolutions, without a physical form. But it got shelved, then crammed into the end of the third film, kind of keeping the bodiless idea with the baby-squiddies making it up. Even those little guys were originally meant to be the larval form of the Sentinals, but they dropped that too and retconned their ability to reproduce into them fabricating intelligent bombs from discarded material on the move. Quite a few people gutted the storyline as they went along, even the first film could have been a lot better.
What's all this talk about Neo, Morpheus and Trinity? You should all be watching the original and best Matrix adventure from 1985... [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPhISgw3I2w[/yt]
This is one element that's never made much sense to me. I have trouble believing that if the machines created a simulation as complex as the Matrix, they'd be unable to force all humans to accept it as whatever reality they deem suitable. I don't think human flaws would be enough to disrupt that control on the level that's inferred in the films, but I do see where a 20th century version of the Matrix is more suitable for their manipulation with the One. It's why Cypher was willing to sell out his comrades in the resistance in exchange for a theoretically better life, even if that life was a fantasy. His mind wouldn't have known the difference.
Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no. "The Matrix" was great. It's sequels where crap tacos. Ignore them. Pretend they don't exist. Everyone else does.
Here's something I could never figure out. It's a minor thing, but still... At many times in the films it's said that characters have to migrate to a specific point within the Matrix to locate a 'hard line' out of it. But how can this be true? The reality of the Matrix is wholly virtual - physical locations (in it) have no meaning. This is also why I don't understand how Neo taking a certain kind of pill would allow people in the real world to lock onto him... @Unicron, I think it was a case of the humans in the Matrixes 1 and 2 'subconsciously' not accepting the Matrix. It probably manifested itself as a rash of suicides or unexplained deaths. The people might not have even known why they couldn't accept the simulation - they just lost the will to live.
The hard-line is a dramatic necessity. If they could just hit the exit button at any time then they're never in any danger and there's no drama and no story.
Hmm...that could explain why the Wachowskis in one of their rare interviews following THE CLOUD ATLAS mentioned "fusion" energy regarding the "inefficiency issue" (i.e. the fusion between man and machine?). However, the Architect told Neo that the machines would adapt to the new situation in case Neo didn't comply to make the choice he was expected to make. It seemed to me that the symbiotic relationship didn't have such a high priority any more. Bob
I tend to think of the trilogy in the sense that Neo is always in the Matrix, he just thinks he is out, a la THIS , and then I see the second and third movies as being chock full of metaphor, like the Bible. Makes for a much better viewing experience.
<<However, the Architect told Neo that the machines would adapt to the new situation in case Neo didn't comply to make the choice he was expected to make. It seemed to me that the symbiotic relationship didn't have such a high priority any more.>> That line confirms that the Machines don't physically need Man to survive, but emotionally. He might have been bluffing, so confident in his perfection that Neo could never surprise him, or if Man truly rejected Machine again then they would be prepared to kill every person in Zion, after all they still have billions in the goo tubes.
It's possible their fusion generators would have kept running for many more years after the Power Plant was shut down or the superconductors damaged, but it would mean a slow painful death as more and more Machines were sacrificed to power the more important ones. The constant electrical imput of the pods seems to be what runs their generators or whatever this "form of fusion" is, likely Lithium fusion as with the oceans gone I can't see them readily using deuterium. I know one Animatrix episode hints that thats what their doing, a constant flight of deuterium extractor machines, but its contradicted by everything else. And all of the ones flying around carrying a Human in a pod underneath (they never explained how those work...) would die off immediately. It was a bluff, they can't survive alone now, and the Oracle finally called them on it.
I read the "insane" fan theory but honestly, I'm unable to see the difference or why it should make a better viewing experience. The only essential criticism presented here (please correct me where I'm wrong) is that Neo is able to stop the squid in the real world and that he became able to see in the real world though he was blind-folded. For all we know Neo was or became a mutant with psycho- and telekinetic powers in the real world. Already in RELOADED we noticed that he was able to see into the future while in the real world. Of course, such abilities would have have been incomprehensible for the machines just as it was incomprehensible for the Borg in "Q Who" that it wasn't Starfleet technology but the "Q Drive" that had brought the Enterprise-D that far. He was an "anomaly" but far beyond what the Oracle and the Architect expected, thus able to accomplish feats considered to be impossible or felt by many to be exclusive to the virtual reality of the Matrix. Bob
Essentially, Man created the machines and in the last scene of REVOLUTIONS the Architect suggests that the machines do have ethic principles superior to Man's. So they would "feel" bad about killing their creators? (which of course they or their squid tools do constantly but that doesn't necessarily mean the machines think it's a good thing and would like this to end, too). I don't think the Architect was bluffing ("What do you think I am, human?!") and Neo's choice was putting everything at risk. But again, Neo was special (in the real world, too, and beyond machine comprehension) and IIRC the Architect was quite certain that Neo would not be able to save Trinity. Bob