Matrix Revolutions--Holy CRAP

[stj]

The first movie doesn't rise or fall on Keanu Reeves' acting.

It was a relatively fresh story with interesting developments and twists.

The Oracle makes the plot of The Matrix gibberish. Gibberish is never fresh. Am the One, am not the One, am the One are arbitrary twists, not interesting developments. And prolonged scenes of carnage are not exciting.

Buying into Neo as a vicarious identification figure is absolutely key to The Matrix. That can't happen with a horrible performance. But according to dogman, Reeves is horrible, therefore The Matrix must be a failed movie and the sequels spend more time with the good actors. The "philosophy" in The Matrix is pretty much limited to a "gee whiz, ain't it cool to think..." The sequel at least finishes the sentence. Idealism is nonsense but there really is novelty in the sequel.

Your heart has to leap when Keanu Reeves comes back to life or The Matrix flops. Get into the typically horrible Reeves performance so much that you buy this nonsense? Something just does not compute.

 

[JarodRussell]

I do think that one missed opportunity of The Matrix and its sequels was to show that not everyone freed from the Matrix was happy. Suicides would happen on a daily basis, I guess. Imagine you live in the simulation, everything's fine. Your family, your job, you simply live your life and it's a good one. And then some guy wearing sunglasses comes along and tells you that all of that isn't true and that you need to leave the Matrix. And then you wake up and find yourself living in a war against machines, and you will never EVER see the sun shine again. No trees, no birds, no dogs, nothing. No music, no books, no cinema, because all that stuff happens inside the Matrix, and it looked like that returning to the Matrix was only an option for the "military".

Even IF you were curious as hell about what the real world would be like, you'd be terribly shocked and suffer a total breakdown, I guess.

Cyphers betrayal was perfectly understandable. Especially considering that nobody but Morpheus believed in that Neo prophecy stuff.



Come to think of it, the only family we've seen was the Indian computer program family. Which means that the machines were more human than the humans themselves, who were only portrayed loners and losers and outcasts inside the Matrix.

 

[Trekker4747]

Again, how would you know what it looked like on the Nebuchadnezzar?

I can't forget what I saw in the film.

You're not getting the point. If you were in the Matrix, approached with this pill situation, you'd have no idea what the "real world" is. Or, hell, even what Morpheous was talking about!

Morpheous was pretty dishonest with Neo. For all Neo knew he'd take the red pill and then wake up six hours later in a dumpster with a torn sphincter.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

'Revolutions' should have featured Zion and the "Real World" being simply another layer of The Matrix necessary to give the illusion of freedom to the plugged-in people who realized they were living in a virtual world. Having Neo simply able to have powers in the real world as well was a total cop-out. The movie should have ended with The Architect and The Oracle laughing their asses off that they had convinced yet another chump to follow his "destiny" and let the humans think they won the war when in reality they never stopped being plugged-in; they just escaped to shittier virtual lives with the illusion of freedom.

But, buying into the movie's premise that that was the real world, why the hell don't they work on making The Construct available to everyone so that they can lead less dire virtual lives free from slavery while returning to the real world for the necessities like eating gruel and going to cave-raves? The control room and ships can jack-in, but there was no indication that anyone else can. Even if power and computing limitations mean you couldn't have one in every "home," at least you could rotate time on it so everyone could have a shot at a pleasant day every once in a while. If they had invested more in developing that technology instead of battlemechs they could have lived in smaller, more distributed and easily hidden communities instead of one big easy to kill hive - and could have still lived as a single community via The Contruct.

Maybe if he had had some time to relax in virtual Aruba Captain Mifune wouldn't have spent half the movie screaming incoherently at everything. The Kid was so annoying he gave me newfound respect for the reserved-by-comparison Wesley Crusher. And how the hell did Morpheus get fat from eating rationed gruel? I think he's been holding out a secret stash of Twinkies from the rest of Zion.

You're not getting the point. If you were in the Matrix, approached with this pill situation, you'd have no idea what the "real world" is. Or, hell, even what Morpheous was talking about!

Morpheous was pretty dishonest with Neo. For all Neo knew he'd take the red pill and then wake up six hours later in a dumpster with a torn sphincter.

Indeed. Going by what Cypher said about how if he had known what the real world was like he would have chosen to stay in The Matrix, it seems like lying to the person being freed is standard operating procedure; unless Morpheus was the one who freed him too and he's just a dick about it in general whereas others are more honest.

On the one hand you'd probably lose a lot of fresh recruits if you told them how horrible life on the outside really was, but on the flip-side you'd probably lessen the number of suicides and revenge killings by those who were fooled.

 

[JarodRussell]

'Revolutions' should have featured Zion and the "Real World" being simply another layer of The Matrix necessary to give the illusion of freedom to the plugged-in people who realized they were living in a virtual world. Having Neo simply able to have powers in the real world as well was a total cop-out. The movie should have ended with The Architect and The Oracle laughing their asses off that they had convinced yet another chump to follow his "destiny" and let the humans think they won the war when in reality they never stopped being plugged-in; they just escaped to shittier virtual lives with the illusion of freedom.

But, buying into the movie's premise that that was the real world, why the hell don't they work on making The Construct available to everyone so that they can lead less dire virtual lives free from slavery while returning to the real world for the necessities like eating gruel and going to cave-raves? The control room and ships can jack-in, but there was no indication that anyone else can. Even if power and computing limitations mean you couldn't have one in every "home," at least you could rotate time on it so everyone could have a shot at a pleasant day every once in a while. If they had invested more in developing that technology instead of battlemechs they could have lived in smaller, more distributed and easily hidden communities instead of one big easy to kill hive - and could have still lived as a single community via The Contruct.

Maybe if he had had some time to relax in virtual Aruba Captain Mifune wouldn't have spent half the movie screaming incoherently at everything. The Kid was so annoying he gave me newfound respect for the reserved-by-comparison Wesley Crusher. And how the hell did Morpheus get fat from eating rationed gruel? I think he's been holding out a secret stash of Twinkies from the rest of Zion.

Yeah, that would have been interesting. But I would have preferred that Neo figures it out and steps outside into the REAL real world. Maybe as a final scene, open ended, kinda like when Truman left the Truman Show studio.

Haha, and the last one is a good point. They should have really made the characters looks different in the real world. Morpheus and Neo were way too buff. They weren't doing anything, they were just sitting in a chair. Their training sessions inside the Matrix weren't real.

 

[Trekker4747]

Yeah, I was expecting Xion to be another layer of The Matrix too, it certainly seemed that way. But him having "powers" in the real world?

Bullshit.

 

[doubleohfive]

Yeah, I was expecting Xion to be another layer of The Matrix too, it certainly seemed that way. But him having "powers" in the real world?

Bullshit.

Really? Are you not just as awesome in the real world as you are here, Screech?

 

[JarodRussell]

Yeah, I was expecting Xion to be another layer of The Matrix too, it certainly seemed that way. But him having "powers" in the real world?

Bullshit.

The whole thing with Neo having powers in the real world and Agent Smith stepping outside the Matrix into the real world was... yeah, bullshit.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Yeah, that would have been interesting. But I would have preferred that Neo figures it out and steps outside into the REAL real world.

I tried to think of a happy ending, but none really came to mind that would allow for millions of people to be involuntarily living in a virtual world. Even if in the Real Real World they aren't enslaved by the Machines, things have to be pretty horrific for them to have chosen that option. The world is probably just as bad as the "Real World" in The Matrix, although whatever disaster might have driven them to choose to live a virtual life might be over with by now and the biosphere recovered. Alternatively, they could all be prisoners in a virtual prison forced to live a life of constant struggle to pay for their crimes, and the millions of extra people are just digital constructs themselves.

One possibility for a happier ending would be that people put themselves into stasis on a generational ship with their minds kept active through living in the virtual world. The AI controlling the ship runs on their collective consciousness and every mind lost means a corresponding loss in brain power for the AI. So, in order to keep the people jacked-in and contributing to running the ship's systems, the AI created The Matrix and the Real World as layers to keep the people from disconnecting before they reached their destination. The final iteration would be Neo freeing everyone as scheduled by the AI when it had fulfilled its mission and gotten them all to their destination alive and well. The Agents and all that were simply a means to an end, and even the dead people from within The Matrix got to live on in a virtual afterlife until they were awoken at mission's end. But that's a lot more hokey than my evil ending.

Maybe the whole thing is a post-apocalyptic creation of the Rossum Corporation using Dollhouse technology and Boyd Langdon/Commander Locke has been secretly backing up and transferring his consciousness into new clone bodies for centuries.

 

[Trekker4747]

Yeah, I was expecting Xion to be another layer of The Matrix too, it certainly seemed that way. But him having "powers" in the real world?

Bullshit.

Really? Are you not just as awesome in the real world as you are here, Screech?

You'd probably find me just as, if not more so, awesome in the real world. (My dry humor is hard to come across online) Others maybe not so much. But really, I think my "awesome" here is... nothing.

One possibility for a happier ending would be that people put themselves into stasis on a generational ship with their minds kept active through living in the virtual world. The AI controlling the ship runs on their collective consciousness and every mind lost means a corresponding loss in brain power for the AI. So, in order to keep the people jacked-in and contributing to running the ship's systems, the AI created The Matrix and the Real World as layers to keep the people from disconnecting before they reached their destination. The final iteration would be Neo freeing everyone as scheduled by the AI when it had fulfilled its mission and gotten them all to their destination alive and well. The Agents and all that were simply a means to an end, and even the dead people from within The Matrix got to live on in a virtual afterlife until they were awoken at mission's end. But that's a lot more hokey than my evil ending.

You're clearly a better story teller than the Wachowskis.

 

[JarodRussell]

Problem with such a thing is that the resolution of such a mystery is ALWAYS disappointing, no matter how you do it.

Though I was thinking about something similar like you just wrote. Essentially something in which the humans aren't actually enslaved by machines.

 

[Trekker4747]

Because, let's be honest, using humans as batteries is vastly wasteful and pretty damn retarded.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

'Revolutions' should have featured Zion and the "Real World" being simply another layer of The Matrix necessary to give the illusion of freedom to the plugged-in people who realized they were living in a virtual world. Having Neo simply able to have powers in the real world as well was a total cop-out. The movie should have ended with The Architect and The Oracle laughing their asses off that they had convinced yet another chump to follow his "destiny" and let the humans think they won the war when in reality they never stopped being plugged-in; they just escaped to shittier virtual lives with the illusion of freedom.

This was actually my first thought when Neo was able to disable Squiddies in the "real world." I assumed this was an indication that the "real world" was also a simulation and thus he could manipulate it just as well as the Matrix. But, no, they went and had him be a genuine superhuman.

But, buying into the movie's premise that that was the real world, why the hell don't they work on making The Construct available to everyone so that they can lead less dire virtual lives free from slavery while returning to the real world for the necessities like eating gruel and going to cave-raves? The control room and ships can jack-in, but there was no indication that anyone else can. Even if power and computing limitations mean you couldn't have one in every "home," at least you could rotate time on it so everyone could have a shot at a pleasant day every once in a while. If they had invested more in developing that technology instead of battlemechs they could have lived in smaller, more distributed and easily hidden communities instead of one big easy to kill hive - and could have still lived as a single community via The Contruct.

Yeah, the Matrix itself isn't really that bad as long as you're just trying to live your life. The resistance had no compunction about killing innocent people in the Matrix, and that made them more of a menace than the machines! The machines had every interest in keeping humanity alive and even expanding it. It's not like they were obligated to give humans any kind of life at all--they could've kept everyone in drug-induced comas with little to no brain activity. No Matrix necessary, no resistance because no one is cognizant enough to question anything.

You're not getting the point. If you were in the Matrix, approached with this pill situation, you'd have no idea what the "real world" is. Or, hell, even what Morpheous was talking about!

Morpheous was pretty dishonest with Neo. For all Neo knew he'd take the red pill and then wake up six hours later in a dumpster with a torn sphincter.

Indeed. Going by what Cypher said about how if he had known what the real world was like he would have chosen to stay in The Matrix, it seems like lying to the person being freed is standard operating procedure; unless Morpheus was the one who freed him too and he's just a dick about it in general whereas others are more honest.

On the one hand you'd probably lose a lot of fresh recruits if you told them how horrible life on the outside really was, but on the flip-side you'd probably lessen the number of suicides and revenge killings by those who were fooled.

Yeah, Morpheus was a big fat liar and he's just lucky he turned out to be right about Neo. It wasn't really discussed but what if Neo wasn't the first "One" Morpheus had awakened? What if there was a trail of men who died thinking they were the One because Morpheus filled their heads with that crap? He should have a lot to answer for and I really don't blame the other characters for thinking he's a kook.

As for a real ending, if we go with the idea that the "real world" is also a virtual construct, then my idea of a perfect ending would be that everyone has figured this out, and Neo is about to pull the plug on the whole thing--and everyone will finally wake up in the real real world. Neo presses the big red button or whatever, and cut to black. Whatever we can imagine the real world to be will be more interesting than anything they could show, so best to leave it on that ambiguous note. The humans won inside the Matrix and inside the fake "real world." What's next? Who knows? I can live with a little mystery.

 

[JarodRussell]

OR

Neo didn't return from the Machine City because he was in fact released into the real real world.




But btw... who freed Morpheus and all others before Neo? Not sure if they ever mentioned that.

 

[Trekker4747]

Someone else could've freed him (whomever the last "The One" was) or he "self realized" (something talked about in the Animatrix where it's said some people realize all on their own, wake up in the real world and are "flushed" out of the system.

Interestingly, the annoying kid that pesters Neo in Xion/Zion in the second movie is said to have "self-actualized" to get himself out of The Matrix (this happens in one of the Animatrix toons) which, I think, sort of suggests he's more of "The One" than Neo. (Who had to be pulled out manually by Morpehous, et. al.)

 

[JarodRussell]

Someone else could've freed him (whomever the last "The One" was) or he "self realized" (something talked about in the Animatrix where it's said some people realize all on their own, wake up in the real world and are "flushed" out of the system.

Interestingly, the annoying kid that pesters Neo in Xion/Zion in the second movie is said to have "self-actualized" to get himself out of The Matrix (this happens in one of the Animatrix toons) which, I think, sort of suggests he's more of "The One" than Neo. (Who had to be pulled out manually by Morpehous, et. al.)

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Shouldn't "The One" be someone who woke up all by himself and not someone who needs to be woken up?

 

[Locutus of Bored]

But btw... who freed Morpheus and all others before Neo? Not sure if they ever mentioned that.

They were living a life of bliss until Admiral Doherty came and ripped them from their world with the approval of the Council... oh, wait, wrong movie.

Anthony Zerbe's character and the rest of the council members seem like possible earlier ship captains who removed people from The Matrix. It would make sense for them to maintain leadership roles.

IIRC, Morpheus did mention something about the people who unplugged him in the first movie. Nothing specific though. Something about "the ones who freed the first of us." He could have been referring to their ancestors though.

Because, let's be honest, using humans as batteries is vastly wasteful and pretty damn retarded.

Yep. Nuclear power (they've no doubt got fusion by then) would be a hell of a lot more efficient than human bio-electric fields. Why that didn't occur to them while they were writing the film is beyond me.

The Machines did say that they had alternatives if they needed to eradicate humanity, but seemed to imply that those methods were less than desirable and would require drastically reducing their numbers and power usage.

The only way using humans as batteries works for me is if you look at it as revenge by the Machines for all their years of enslavement at the hands of man. They could have just killed them all and found a different, more efficient power source, but that would be letting humankind off too easy. They wanted to punish them, to make them serve the Machines as they had served man. If that had been mentioned at some point I would have been happy.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah, the "humans as energy source" thing is pretty laughable but you have to buy it for the movies to work. It was mentioned that it was "combined with a form of cold fusion" or something. But if you had that, you wouldn't need the humans at all.

The only explanation that makes any sense is that the humans are somehow required to run the fusion reactors, perhaps as a giant parallel computer with each human serving as a processor, working in unison to regulate and control the reactors.

Otherwise, yeah, the vengeance/punishment angle is the only thing that makes sense. Machines usually aren't portrayed in sci-fi to have any emotions at all, so it's kind of ironic that the ones in the Matrix movies are so very emotional: vindictive, narcissistic, cruel, and superior.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Neo having powers in the real world thing was a joke and something that they chose not to explore, it seemed like it was forced into the ending just to have a cool cliffhanger and to incite debate and speculation about Neo which it clearly did. Neo took on Paul Atredies attributes in Revolutions (along with the obvious Jesus allusions) I couldn't help but think about the end of the first night of "Children of Dune" where Paul is blinded and the scene where Trinity is killed after being impaled when they crash reminded me of Chani's death scene after giving birth to the twins. It just could have been so much more impactful than it was.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

[edit] @ Robert

Oh, right. I forgot that Morpheus said "combined with a form of fusion, they had all the power they'd need."

Yeah, the processing power idea makes a hell of a lot more sense than using people as batteries. Maybe that is what the Machines are using them for and their arrogance prevents them from admitting it to the humans.