Headscratchers / The Matrix Revolutions

Infinite-Ammo Code?

• How come it took them until the very last movie (its remake of the Lobby shootout) to discover an Infinite-Ammo hack?? Heck, why doesn't Neo create a whole bunch of Ones by turning whatever code or expanded understanding he has of The Matrix into a training program and downloading it into everybody's heads? Smith proved you can overwrite wetware with software; I was waiting for Neo to do the same.
  • Because expanded understanding is not perfect understanding. He's still learning his powers.

Why Don't Ya Just EMP 'Em?

• Here's what's bugged me about the final attack on Zion. So, in the first movie, the EMP is depicted as the only weapon against the machines. In the final battle, everyone has robot walkers and rocket launchers, etc. This isn't what bugs me, what gets to me is: why the hell didn't they mount an EMP device in Zion? They could have just set it to repeated blasts to repel the assault. I know, "machines run into EMP blasts" makes for a bad story, but just ignoring EMP? I remember the flight of the hovercraft to bring the EMP to the city, but...not mounting it in the city itself doesn't make any sense.
  • EMP in the middle of the defenses is a really bad idea, hence why that commander got so pissed off at Morpheus for bringing his ship there and setting it off. Sure, it kills all the sentinels, but it also knocks out your own defenses, and then the next wave comes to kick your ass. For some reason, EMPs seem to only work once, hence why the ships got slaughtered when Smith/Bane activated one early, and why they couldn't just activate it again. As for building one way up and out of range from the defenses, well they really didn't plan on the sentinels coming down from above. By the time they found out about that, it was too late and they had no time to build specialized EMPs to attatch to the ceiling, not to mention no way of telling precisely where they'll burst through.
    • In 'The Matrix Online' when humanity moves to 'New Zion' they take this into account, EMP mines are stuck throughout the tunnels leading towards zion, the only way in is directly down (Mineral deposits and magma and stuff stop the other ways) and the only way down is by going into a 'dead drop', purposely deactivating your electronics so that you don't get fried, which pisses the machines off something fierce and causes the truce to finally break.
    • In addition, using the EMP would probably ruin all of the machines in Zion that make it livable.
    • "For some reason" is actually a decent reason — in real life, most EMP generators powerful enough to do something like that generate the sudden pulse of energy required by setting off some kind of explosive. Obviously it's not easy to rig such a thing up again after it's already been blown.
    • The reason the EMP "only works once", is because when you set off that one EMP, it destroys/shuts down all the other EMP generators, along with any other tech in its radius. An EMP is a weapon of last resort, since using it shuts down the rest of your ship. Bane activating it early shut down any other ships close to it.
    • EMPs only destroy electronics that have current in them. That's why you shut down your hovership thingy when you are about to blow the EMP. Therefore, any number of EMP Generators could be set up around Zion and the only problems would be charge time between connecting the power and detonating.
  • IIRC, they didn't use an EMP because they didn't have any working EMPs. Until Morpheus and Co. showed up, there were no EMPs to be set off.

Open Cockpits On the Mechas?

• What bugs me more than this is the Robot Walkers in general. I mean why bother building mechs without any COCKPIT PROTECTION?!!? That's like building a fish tank without using any glass. Absolutely pointless.
  • Why would they need any cockpit protection? Did any of the machines actually shoot at them? No. They just relied on their sentinel claws to rip up the mech pilots. The only defense against that would be some sort of heavily armored "shell" enclosing the pilot that the sentinels couldn't break through easily. Assuming the legs of the mech could even carry this extra armor, this would dramatically increase the weight of the mech and decrease its mobility. The pilot can no longer aim each mech arm independently because he's crammed into an armored metal coffin cockpit. Oh, and you can't put a window in the cockpit because sentinel claws would break through it easily, so the pilot would have to rely on a video screen connected to an external camera (which, if broken, would leave him completely blind). You've turned a light, agile combat mech into an overly complex, overly heavy block of armor that probably couldn't even support its own weight. Congratulations.
    • Why would they need any cockpit protection? How about because each mech is standing shoulder to shoulder with other mechs each holding two massive guns over their heads ejecting thousands of red hot shell casings that are raining down randomly on anything in the general area. After a minute of firing those guns in such close proximity you would be lucky if one pilot out of a hundred wasn't completely incapacitated by thrid degree burns over most of his body! Obviously it wouldn't do much against a sentinel but even a 28g expanded steel mesh or a piece of plexi glass would at least save mechs from being disabled by shell casings. How effective would a modern combat soldier be if a shell casing was to slip into the colar of his vest or perhaps slip behind the back of a seated soldier and fall between his ass and his chair?
  • I was under the impression that the mechs were descended from the mechs used in Second Renaissance, were we see the machines cutting through the cockpit protection to rip a man out of it. Cockpit protection was NO GOOD.
    • Just because it is possible to overcome armor does not make it useless. After all there are a lot of weapons that can take out a tank but their armor is still very important and useful. Not to mention an enclosed cockpit with "life support" would provide protection from all of the biological and chemical weapons the Machines should be using.
  • I disagree. The mechs were neither light nor agile. They stuck to static firing positions most of the time. Moreover, window glass is far from the only solution for cockpits, so nobody can say what can or cannot be effective. Even metal grating would be better - at least it would give some time for nearby mechs to give some assistance. Instead of mechs, they should have just built embedded .50 cals pointing at the sky. There was a sentinel in any possible direction, after all. (further, just because armor can be compromised doesn't mean it's worthless)
  • None of the tactics or technology used by either side in the fight for Zion make any sense. After the machines tunneled in they could have easily dropped in any number of chemical/biological/nuclear weapons (being miles underground there is no danger of a EMP pulse reaching the machines) instead of swarms of drones. And if they were sending in machines to attack why not arm them with ranged weapons of some kind? The human battle suits having no protection is ridiculous and if bullets etc work perfectly well on the machines why were Zion's ships not armed with those chain guns too? Of course because the machines have apparently built numerous Zions for humans and then destroyed them (which also makes less then no sense) why no just hide some kill switched and back doors into the machines that maintain the place to begin with?
    • 1. They've destroyed Zion before. I'd say they have a pretty good idea of what works. 2. Ranged weapons would take ammo, and they pretty clearly don't need them. 3. The artists admitted that if the suits had enclosed cockpits, you wouldn't be able to see the pilots. And the ships did have chainguns. 4. Because then the humans could find them and figure out something was up. And who said the machines build the various Zions?
    • Oh god. 1. Honestly? Your argument is "they should know how to do it, so the way it is in the movie therefore makes sense"? 2. They "clearly didn't need them"? They had to use swarm tactics just to get past the machine guns. This is not an effective use of resources. 3. Do you know how flimsy that reasoning is? The various Gundam series, Top Gun and other fighter plane movies, and hell, even Star Wars have shown how to make the audience identify with piloted machines without actually removing the cockpit. A paint job for the hero machines could have worked, with closeups on the actors for whenever we need to see the pilots screaming.
    • 1. That they did it before just makes the tactics used that much more unbelievably dumb. There is no way they defeated the combined armed forces of humanity by throwing a swarm of drones at us. So what happened to all the know how and weapons they would have had to develop the first time? 2. There is no way sending 20 drones to die so the 21st can reach your target is more efficient or effective then having one or two stand off and fire bullets/missiles/etc and resupplying them as needed. 3. That just about proves my point. The tactics and technology used were nonsensical because someone thought it would look better that way. 4. Who else besides the machines could possibly be rebuilding Zion after they destroyed it time and time again? The first human refugees from each reboot of the Matrix need a place they can survive to already be prepared for them or they would simply starve in a sunless world incapable of supporting organic life. Not to mention the technology used is clearly above the late 20th century technology that even the best educated people just coming out of the Matrix would know how to create.
    • Zion makes precious little sense in any aspect. Even if you assume Neo hits the reset button - they're "restarting" the human race with 23 people. We know you can implant memories in people but it still makes no sense! Just... EVERYTHING. It's a true Voodoo Shark - the explanation behind Zion becomes an increasing mire of implausible justifications. OK, assume 23 people with memories relevant to context are put in Zion, with their hovercrafts, production facility, life support and manual on how to save people from the Matrix... oh... that's already crazy... and then we're supposed to believe that the apparently energy hungry machines want to attack Zion regularly (given what Morpheus says)... and then that the One will manage to survive - unless the Machines were trying to kill him pretty hard... and magically only develop weapons that evade EMP in the last week of the "war". It just goes ON and ON. Regardless of whether there people predicting the Matrix, so many events in the real world transpire EXACTLY as is needed - it really would have made more sense for the "real world" to simply be another level of the Matrix construct.
  • No one in the future(in most fiction not just the Matrix) knows how to use nuclear weapons properly. 1)Swarming tactics should not exist in the future because tactical nukes will always trump a zerg rush. 2)When the humans are originally defeated they don't just say "screw it" and fire off hydrogen bombs into the upper atmosphere creating a lot a electromagnetic pulses that would ruin any unsheilded circuitry on the planet. That would kill all the robots and leave the humans able to rebuild their own machines. 3)No one uses faraday cages to protect their equipment from EMPs. 4)Enhanced radiation warheads(neutron bombs) would produce free neutrons that can pass through feet of solid steel, depleted uranium, and lead. Neutron fluxes destroy both organic cells and solid state circuitry. Neutron bombs should be the weapon of choice against both machines and men. Basically we get a nuclear weapons taboo because lauching missles and cannon shells with nukes in them as your primary means of attack wouldn't be very cinematic.
  • Before a perfectly good point gets lost, I'd like to reiterate it: why would they need mechas at all and why would they need them manually controlled in particular? They had a hundred years to prepair - they could just set the whole perimeter of the bay with AA-guns! No need for complex, cumbersome and fragile hydraulic robots, no need to deliver ammunition by hand, no threat to soldiers - just a small enforced pillbox with a stash of ammo beneath it and a battery of barrels pointing to the ceiling. And gunners could seat in the HQ, sip cocoa and play Incoming with the squids! As for the Rule of Cool, the whole encirclement of the bay simulteniously bristling with Big Fully Functional Guns (think of the Autobot city shifting into war mode in the Transformers animated movie), wouldn't exactly yield to a bunch of pistol-wielding robot-loaders. I even recall them having a turret in Zion, so I don't get why not place dozens of them.
    • This only works if they know years in advance that the machines are going to attack the dock and that they are going to attack it with swarming tactics. Otherwise, their weapons need to be flexible enough to respond to wherever the machines are attacking in whichever manner they are attacking. And the machines would likely just avoid attacking any place where such extensive defenses had been built into place. To quote Patton "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man".
    • Unlike the situations Patton probably refered to, a) the machines most likely had no way of knowing what kind of defences humans had, and b) little to no choice in the attack direction. How are you supposed to attack an underground city if not by burrowing directly down to it? Especially if you're a hard-logical machine. As for flexibility, a battlefield as cramped as the dock didn't allow for much maneuvering anyway, so mechas in fact acted as turrets, only unstable, fragile and with both gunners and loaders exposed. BTW, the absence of bigger guns is another thing that bothers me.
    • Has anyone ever heard of Metal Storm? Their guns can fire up to 1,620,000 rounds per minute. You can, basically, flood the entire dock with bullet fire for a few seconds, and no machine will be left flying. And this is just technology we have now.
    • Their "1.62 million RPM" gun is a 36-barreled prototype that preloads all of the bullets into the barrels and discharges the round electronically (this is, in fact, how a bunch of the more notable Metal Storm weapons work); this is how they can even achieve such a ridiculous rate of fire in the first place - there are no mechanical or moving parts. The short of all this is that, while they have a prototype that can unleash 1.62 million rounds per minute (technically, 45,000 rounds per minute per barrel), the weapon system has total capacity of 180 rounds - or 5 bullets per barrel. Want more bullets in your clip/magazine/barrel? You have to either make the barrel longer, or add more barrels, and reloading is going to be a bitch.
    • Also, "flood the entire dock with bullet fire for a few seconds"? At 1.62 million rounds per minute, that's 27,000 rounds per second. Once again - the 36-barrel prototype has 180 rounds, total.
• Designers have said that closed cockpits would make more sense, but they wanted audience to be to recognize characters. Also, in The Second Renaissance UN controlled mechas have closed cockpits.
• The key to a mobile gun platform is that it is mobile. There were fixed AA guns in the dock, but if they are taken out, that's it. That sector it's covering is lost. Whereas with APUs, you can move them about to areas as needed. As for the cockpit issue, I think the philosophy behind their design was simplicity and economics: resources are limited in Zion and you want to make a weapon that can be produced with as little material as possible. Too much material and its too heavy/slow. Too many electronics and it might be susceptible to all sorts of electronic haywire (They are fighting machines after all).
  • Except that all the room they had was one rather narrow platform, where they could hardly move at all, so it wouldn't have made any difference really. As for the cockpit, surely they weren't THAT short that they couldn't wield a couple steel slabs on them, were they? Hell, just take off some metal doors and use them as makeshift shields, it would've been better than nothing (not to mention, it would've looked hillariously)! And in their conditions heavier would actually be better, since the machines used ramming tactics, and dodging them was not an option in any case.
  • I think we're missing the point here - most of the real-world human tech seems cobbled together without much extra stuff stapled on. It's entirely possible that the humans didn't have the resources to put glass canopies on every APU. Or hell, maybe they left them off so a wounded pilot could be removed easily.
  • Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but didn't the big reveal in this movie kinda imply that all the stuff in Zion is given to the humans by the machines? So, the mechs don't have closed cockpits because they designed them to be easier for their claws to get the yummy human filling.
    • Probably, so? They had a hundred years to upgrade them. As for the lack of resources, give me a break. They have that huge city, hoverships and whatnot but not a few extra slabs of metal?

Also, Second Renaissance showed that a fully armoured cockpit at best gives the pilot five extra seconds of agony.

• Which makes no sense because it took the Squids in the end of the first movie a few minutes to cut the ship's hull open, and nobody was shooting at them at that.
• To sum up all the arguments made for this being a sensible choice any extra armour would be heavy and costly to produce limiting their ability to move as needed, previous combat involving the APUs proved beyond a doubt that all increased armour would do in the end is make the users death a lot more agonizing, and the machines were specifically never supposed to get in that close in any situation where Zion had a chance of surviving. If the machines could even get close enough that armour would be needed then Zion would already be doomed because of the number of invaders would have to be completely overwhelming the cities defences. At that point having armour plates would only mean the person inside would die a more drawn out death while restrained by sentinels and sliced to bits with cutting lasers.

Lock Hates EMP's?

• Why was Lock so pissed that they fired an EMP late in the film? They were already losing the battle anyway.
  • The EMP was fired off early and devastated their entire defensive line.
    • No, that was the EMP fired late in Reloaded when they still had a bunch of ships, which was indeed fired before the other ships could get out of range and wrecked the defensive line. As for the EMP fired late in this one, I don't know... the only hint we have is this conversation:
  Lock: The council awaits your report. You'll forgive me for not attending, but I need to find a way to salvage this debacle.
  Roland: Did I miss something here, Commander? I thought we just saved the dock.
  Lock: That's the problem with you people. You can't think more than five minutes in front of your avs. That EMP knocked out every piece of hardware, and every APU. If I were the machines, I'd send every sentinel I had over here right now. "Saved the dock" Captain?, you just handed it to them on a silver platter!
  • Probably ol' Deadbolt had smaller reserve weaponry in place (even on film it wasn't only APUs being used in the defence; there were handheld missile launchers as well, for example.) It wouldn't have been prudent militarily to commit everything just to defend the first assault. However, if his reserves needed electronics in any way to function, the EMP would've rendered them useless, not to mention that any meaningful way to communicate and/or coordinate a defence was similarly zapped. Which basically reduced the defence options for Zion down to handguns, rifles, knives, sharp sticks, and conducting said defence by yelling to one another or using smoke signals and mirrors.
    • Ockham's Razor suggests two other answers: 1) bad writing, and 2) Lock just continuing his role as The Scrappy.
  • The answer is quite simple. Commander Lock is a colossal jackass. Bear in mind that earlier on in Revolutions he discusses the arrival of a ship with an EMP with a man who is presumably his 2IC. Lock says that if the EMP was fired they'd lose the dock, and is told in response that the dock has already been lost. He blows his stack because he's an arse, as both Reloaded and Revolutions make entirely clear. And he doesn't count as The Scrappy because you're not supposed to like him.
  • Earlier in the film Locke mentions that he is only committing half the Infantry to the initial defence of the dock, if the remainder were waiting in the access tunnels or similar they were probably close enough that all their equipment was cooked by the EMP detonation - additionally there were still a handful of operational APUs and probably several more repairable ones. The bulk of Zion's surviving defence is annihilated by the EMP that does not significantly attrite the attacking force. It removes any chance that they can defeat the Machine attack.
    • Implying that the reserve force could've done any better than the vanguard who got instantly slaughtered without doing any notable damage? How? What superweapon was he hiding in those access tunnels, how come it never came up before and why wouldn't they use it from the start? Also, he was the one tp order the door opened! What the hell did he expect to happen?
    • "Instantly slaughtered"? Did we watch the same movie? The defense of the dock is a long, drawn out fight. It was a losing fight, yes, but obviously not "instantly slaughtered." The point is, Locke had back-ups and reinforcements available, apparently — which the EMP completely knocked out.

The Sun's Right Up There!

• When Trinity and Neo fly one of the ships, after they get thru the Electo-Magnetic field of death what do we see?....THE SUN!!! What the hell,why bother with humans, couldn't the machines have built like huge solar-panel towers to funnel the needed power? WHAT NEED WAS THERE TO BOTHER WITH HUMANS AT ALL!!?!?!? GAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
  • If you believe what The Wachowskis originally intended and just assume the Zionites only got a partial idea of what the 'power plant' complex is actually doing since it's in enemy territory they can't access this whole thing makes way more sense. In fact taking the original intent, humans are additional processing power since bioprocessing is inherently way more efficient, most of the plot holes related to power and the sun go away. It's almost like they didn't bother changing the script.
  • That's the fundamental plot device on which the entire movie is built, but you're asking the wrong question; it should be, "Why use humans as a power source when nuclear energy is about two million times as productive as that many humans locked in together?" As it is, solar power's knocked out as an option because the Machines can't penetrate the scorching of the sky to access solar power.
  • The scorching of the sky that is at such a low level that running your hovercraft up a hill of sentinals and "jumping" off the peak will put you above it? While I agree the fundemental plot device requires you to believe they need people farms instead of power plants, this scene is so totally unnecessary and shows such a massive flaw that it really should have been cut. It's like being trapped on the ground floor of a building because the elevator is broken and moaning about it while sitting on the stairs.
    • I seem to remember from some supplemental material somewhere that the Dark Storm Effect is made up of nanomachines, or was instigated by nanomachines. The machines are still functional inside the Effect, and attack and deactivate any mechanical presence that goes into the Storm. Might also explain why the hovercraft seemed to conk out after its swan dive, too.
    • The nanomachines that make up the Dark Storm are mentioned in Mahiro Maeda's commentary for the two Second Renaissance episodes of The Animatrix. Maeda worked closely with the Wachowskis on those episodes. They're also mentioned in the script for The Matrix Revolutions, during the scene where the Logos enters the clouds. Quote, "The molecular replicators immediately drain the life from the Sentinels and they fall dead—".
    • So why not tunnel vertically into every mountain that reaches up above the Dark Storm, then convert each one's peak into a massive solar collector?
    • The logical answer is that no mountain reaches up above the Dark Storm. It's a self-replication nanomachine cloud that completely engulfs our planet.
  • I thought that the idea was that the sky was just available (but only recently), but that the machines had been using humans for so long that they didn't realise that after all this time project Dark Storm would have faded. I mean it's pretty ironic that if they just looked a couple of kilometres up, they would be able to find the sun. I really thought that entire sequence was just saying "the machines with all their logic and perfection cannot even conceive of the idea to look up now when it didn't work thousands of years ago." I really thought it was saying something about the human concept for imagination. ... I may have been wrong though.
    • The sky wasn't available, though. The ship and the squiddies still hanging to it were shut off the moment they went throught the cloud barrier, the Dark Storm clearly is still functional.
  • Did anyone notice how they were crashing into the ground until Trinity restarted the ship? I just thought that with all the lightning going on in that cloud, and machine that attempted to get up there would shut off.
    • That is exactly the reason they flew into the clouds in the first place! There were too many Sentinels for Neo to destroy so they flew up into the clouds. How come nobody noticed that all the sentinels that followed immediately got zapped and plummeted back down? The hovercraft itself shut down as well, it's why they friggin' crashed!

Why Don't Ya Just Nuke 'Em?

• Why didn't the Sentinels just drop a bunch of nukes into the city once they finished drilling through?
  • Same reason they didn't do it the first six times. They want to save the city so they can re-populate it later. No sense in throwing away a perfectly good city.
    • Well, then why don't you just use tons of deadly nerve gas? Or napalm. Lots and lots of napalm. They seem determined to use the strategy that will waste the maximum amount of machinery as possible.
    • I'm presuming the reason has something to do with why they keep re-populating and encouraging the rebellion of survival in the first place - (could just be that the first time round they said "hey, this works, we'll just keep on doing things the exact same way...")
    • Also; machines have hive-mind tendencies were individual consciousness is integrated with the whole, so I'm guessing the individual destruction of a few hundred thousand sentinels doesn't really bother them (Values Dissonance people!)
    • That being said, for such a hyper-rational life form the Machine assault is wildly inefficient from any standpoint (the Architect's blathering notwithstanding). There are multiple points where the Machines lose hundreds or thousands of Sentinels for no particular reason, for instance moving around in a strange massed tentacle formation and attacking in a weirdly dilatory way. While showing the humans that they are indifferent to casualties and going for psychological effect can be useful to the Machines, that's only if they weren't intending to immediately murder all of the recipients of the message. The real reason, as we all know, is Rule of Cool.
  • Also, at the end of the movie, all humans still part of the Matrix would be given a choice of staying or leaving. How would they really react? "I got some good news and bad news. Let me start with the bad news: your life's a total sham. The good news is, you can get out of the sham and live the rest of your days in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer, eating goop! So, whaddya say?" I mean, in the first movie, Neo almost had a heart attack after being told the true nature of the Matrix!
    • For me that was about the only intelligent part of the sequels. We're told that people who are connected to The Matrix will only accept the program if they are given a choice, even if they're only subconsciously aware of it. With peace between humans and machines there's no need to lie anymore, so people can be free to accept the relative peace and safety of The Matrix, or the filthy sewer of Reality. Most people, when faced with that decision would willingly choose to live in The Matrix, and the status quo is maintained, but without crazy trenchcoated saboteurs running around.

Trinity's a Bad Negotiator

• While Neo is stuck in limbo at the train station, when Trinity, Morpheus, and Seraph go to deal with the Merovingian at Club Hel. He asks for the Oracles eyes in exchange for Neo which obviously he wasn't going to get, Trinity eventually gets her gun on him and he surrenders Neo. The problem with this is two reasons first off in Enter The Matrix its implied that the Merovingian is a vampire so a shot to the head would do very little, secondly they had another bargaining chip in the fact that Neo could stop the Smith virus something the Merovingian should have feared.
  • When was it implied that the Merovingian is a Vampire? I don't even recall him appearing at all in Enter the Matrix.
  • I don't recall him appearing in Enter the Matrix, either. He has a fuck ton of vampire and werewolf programs in his employ (why, I have no idea), but it never gives an indication that he's a vampire.
    • As the Oracle said, whenever you hear about a ghost or a werewolf or a vampire, that's a program doing what it's not supposed to do. Everyone working for the Merovingian is a program that had been slated for deletion and went on the run instead. The Merovingian is just the guy who took them all in and put them to work.
    • They're closer to his version of the Matrix, thus they're easier for him to control.
    • Just a short clarification, the Merovingian does briefly appear in Enter the Matrix; he is seen in live action in a cutscene, talking to the keymaker through his cell door, and later in the Mansion stage he is shown talking to his two goons in the wine cellar, while the non-player character is being held captive.
  • It's more implied in the movie (per Persephone) that the Merovingian was more like Neo. He was likely this in beta 2 of the Matrix (where the Architect says that a second version was redesigned "...based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature." Beta 1 was an unacceptable utopia. The second was more like a haunted house where things went "boo" and tried to eat you—no choice, only cause and effect. Given the Merovingian's minions and his complete distaste for choice, preferring cause and effect, he was likely similar to Neo in his role to stabilize beta 2. It may also be why he holds so much influence, even enough to attempt to kill the Oracle to attain her power.

Turning into Sati?

• The way I understood it, the Matrix is a network of human brains, while the Machine World is a network of computers. Sati, a sentient program, was conceived in the Machine World. She then exiled herself into the Matrix.
  So… Was some poor Indian girl suddenly possessed by the spirit of Sati? Or was some dude’s residual self-image changed to that of a child, just like he would have become agent Thompson? Could she possibly run in the Matrix without hijacking a blue pill, because she is considerate and completely unlike those mean agents? Thinking about it, none of the Exiled displayed the ability to jump hosts, except when real life wrote the plot for the Oracle.
• I imagine there's a difference between "jumping" hosts and a program having its own body.
• My guess is that programs like The Oracle and The Merovingian can't possess humans, only Agents can do that. As The Oracle said, the Machines apparently allow certain programs to move into The Matrix as a form of exile if they face deletion due to obsolescence. It wouldn't be too hard for The Matrix to simply construct a digital avatar for them. If a program's avatar is "killed", the system will construct a similar replacement.
  • The Oracle does apparently have a human host, and was forced to jump to another one between the second and third movie, but it'd make sense for her to be a special exception like the agents. She's meant to be a unique program who can understand humans, who can work with them and figure out where the Architect's going wrong with the Matrix. She probably co-exists permanantly and peacefully with a single host's mind, and relies on them to help her relate to other humans. As for the exiled programs like Sati and the Merovingian, yeah, they seem to be pure avatars with no human hosts at all.
    • That was not a human host. In the words of the Merovingian, that was a shell. In the computer sense. The Oracle's "body" was just a GUI: the part of the program that defines what it looks like. That was what was deleted: when the Oracle switched from looking like Gloria Foster to looking like Mary Alice, that was like switching from Gnome to KDE, nothing more.

What made Neo so special to the Machine God?

As far as I understand, the MG used it's connection to Neo to delete Smith after he assimilated Neo. But how was that connection any different from its connections to all other Matricians? And even if it required a dedicated line for the "troyan horse", couldn't it establish it to any of the non-assimilated ones and then let Smith assimilate them? You can't tell me it actually didn't know about the mess in the Matrix untill Neo came and told it, can you?

• Neo is The One. Simple as that.
  • O-o-o-okey, any answers that will not make me want to type "thank you, Captain Obvious" or something immature like that?
  • It's explained in the movies that The One is an anomaly—something that the Machines can't control or directly replicate, and that includes special properties that other normal people in the Matrix simply do not have. Ergo, whatever those properties are were probably necessary to fix whatever the hell Smith had done. You asked how the connection was different? There's your answer, that everyone else isn't The One, and doesn't have those properties.
  • Smith mentions that some part of Neo imprinted onto him, which freed Smith from the matrix, by bringing them back together, the MG was then able to delete the now non-invincible Smith.
    • Fair enough. This leaves the question: if Neo was so essential to the Machines, why did they try to kill him on approach to their city and back in the ending of "Reloaded"? Sure, in the former case they might not have knowh it was him and thought it was just a random ship on a suicide mission, but couldn't they hail him? Or was it some kind of insane test? Sounds like a damn big risk, since that fall could've killed Neo just as easily as it killed Trinity.
    • Neo is essential up until the Architect giving him the choice, after he refused to go to the Source and reboot the Matrix he really wasn't anymore part of the Machines' plans. As for his part in the solution against Smith, the Deus Ex Machina probably never even considered using Neo, notice that the first reaction was loudly refusing his help. They may be logical machines, but arrogance and proudness are things that come with sentience, and have a way to cloud logic.
    • So what, Neo refuses, and Architect just goes along with it? He no longer cares about that system crash about to fuck up their whole setup? He's not aware that humans can be convinced to change their mind, say, by threatening to destroy everything they hold dear? And what arrogance? They either can manage the situation without Neo or they cannot. Personally I feel like the whole problem is woefully blown out of proportions because the Matrix is by no mean essential to the survival of the machines and nothing stopped them from just turning it off, but whatever. If that "imprint" theory above is correct, The Deus Ex had to know Neo was his only option.
    • There's another factor leading to them trying to kill Neo on the way in - the Machine God seemed to be in serious denial about the problem going on in the Matrix. Neo even points out that Smith has grown beyond its control, and it protests that it doesn't need him. It's only after that point that it lets Neo go in after Smith. Presumably it figured Neo had a shot of taking out Smith, and if Neo loses, well, that just let the MG get a direct delete command on Smith. Win-win.
• Even aside from Neo's One qualities probably having something to do with it, there were no other non-assimilated people in the Matrix. Which could mean that Smith controlled the systems of the body fields at that point too, making it impossible for the Machines to get at him through one of the bodies there. Also, it looks like Neo's original intention was to destroy Smith in combat, and the solution he came up with was improvised.
  • The fields have nothing to do with the Matrix. Fetuses growing on them are not yet connected, so there was no way for Smith to "take over them".
• All of the other humans were in pods out in the power fields. Neo got a direct link to the MG, then the Matrix, instead of the other way around. That's why when Smith overwrote him, the MG could simply delete him.
  • Seriously? They couldn't establish a direct link to any of the Matricians?
• Over time as the Matrix runs people build up who subconsiously choose to reject the system, they become criminals, drug dealers, and some escape to become Zionites. If too many of them build up in the system it glitches and eventually crashes taking everyone inside with it killing everyone. Eventually before the crash someone like Neo emerges who has the potential to completely ignore the rules of the system letting him do whatever he wants. This is either an intentional design choice by the machines, either some kind of program running on a human brain designed to serve this purpose or just something they found inevitably happens with previous iterations and designed the new Matrix to work around, or a useful emergent feature. They use someone like Neo to purge the Matrix of malcontents who reject the system every so often, reboot the Matrix, then force him to build a new Zion. The Zionites help slowly release the malcontents over time letting them hold off a full reboot for longer periods of time meaning less disruption to the lives of the machine consciousness population.

That Thing Won't Fly

How the hell can a hover ship soar straight up and above the clouds?

• Momentum. As illustrated by the fact that it doesn't "soar" for long.

The Trainman is better than the Matrix?

• Is there even a smidge of justification why the Trainman could curbstomp Neo? Ok, so he "buit that place and sets the rule". So what? The Matrix built, well, the Matrix, and it sets the rules there, like bestowing the Agents with supernatural abilities, and Neo still trashed them or at least kept up with them. And Trainman obviously couldn't have a fraction of the Matrix's resourses, could he? So what the hell is he?
  • The cheat codes for Tomb Raider 1 don't work in Tomb Raider 2. Neo had power over the Matrix at that point, not over every computer network, and not over the Trainman's specific demesne.
  • The Matrix makes its own rules but it's agents are hidebound by those same rules in a way the Trainman is not. The Trainman has no need to maintain any Masquerade or concern himself with losing human batteries, so he can build a system where he is effectively invincible.
    • Cheat codes are still a part of software - they just unlock certain features or abilities that are not concidered a legitemate part of gameplay - it's like bringing a gun to a fencing match. You shouldn't, but you can. OTOH, as I understood, Neo gained his powers by aknowledging that the world around him was digital and as such its laws had no sway over him - in short, he realised "it was NOT the air he was breating" and started doing things that you cannot do inside. He defied the rules of the virtual reality, which is why I don't see how one kind of VR would stand better against him than another.
    • That's how Morpheus and Neo thought the powers worked, but don't forget that it was eventually revealed that The One is part of the Matrix, he was meant to be that way. What made Neo special wasn't his powers, but what he chose to do with them.
  • Wasn't it said, or at least implied, that the train station wasn't actually part of the Matrix? It was a loading program between two states. Neo is an anomaly of the Matrix, amd whatever power that gave him, the Trainman was just as powerful in his own little pocket dimension.
  • As explained by the Oracle, when a program has finished serving its purpose, it is sent for deletion. The train-man program is the one that handles this process of ferrying programs to the Machine World for deletion. The subway station is like limbo between the life in the Matrix and death in the machine world. This place was built by the train-man and is outside the realm of the Matrix. Neo's mind understands how to bend the rules of the Matrix and is completely ignorant of how the subway is built (example - when he runs from one end of the tunnel he appears from the other). Though Neo's mind might have the potential to break the code of the subway place, he's not aware, and he simply underestimates the train-man, and gets his stomach bashed in. There is an interesting topic on how the train-man is actually programmatic garbage collection here here. And the now rogue garbage collection is helping with smuggling programs into the Matrix.

"What have you done with Sati?"

• This question that the Oracle asks Smith near the end of the film always bothered me. Leaving aside the obvious answer to her question (Smith absorbed her like everyone else), she's the Oracle: why did she need to ask in the first place? Shouldn't she know? She's been able to predict Smith's actions before (i.e. her hasty exit before Neo's fight with the Smiths in Reloaded), so why not now?
  • She knows that something happened to Sati, but not the specifics. The Oracle is aware of everything in the Matrix, but the new Smith is an unknown factor and his powers are not part of the system. She is also indignant about Smith's actions, as he just more or less killed a little innocent girl the Oracle took to protect.
  • The Oracle knows the future until she reaches a choice by someone that she doesn't understand. In order for her future vision to work she needs to grasp the factors involved. Being an Empathetic program she understands humanity fairly well and her machine contemporaries completely. Smith is something new and dangerous which she doesn't understand making him unpredictable to her.

Endgame

• What was the point of... everything that happened in these movies? What was achieved in the end? Humans are no closer to "freedom" than they were before. Even if the Matricians would prefer to leave by their own volition, the machines can obviously only release so many, before it starts hurting their own power demands, and then it's literally back to square one. Also, the machines control all the natural resources on the planet (such as there are) and have no reason to share them or facilitate humans' expansion in any significant way. So, the Architect's "as long as they can hold it" sounds pretty hollow - humans cannot uphold the peace at all, because there's no parity in forces and no common interests, meaning the peace can only hold as long as the humans don't become a nuiscance. Which is... again, pretty much the same thing it was in the beginning.
  • The point wasn't so much freedom in the sense of getting all of humanity out of the Matrix. While Morpheus certainly thinks this is the goal, it's not feasible. The point was giving people choice. This was the happiest ending that such a bleak dystopian setting could offer. Indeed, the vast majority of humanity will in all likelihood stay in the Matrix. But they'll be aware of it and have a choice, and those who wish to leave are allowed to instead of being hunted down and slaughtered. As for common interests, both sides want to exist. Frankly, it makes a lot more sense when you reject the notion that humans are powering the Matrix (because it's nonsense) and think about it in terms of the Machines actually wanting to preserve humans.
  • Yes, they will be given the choice. And every day they would be acutely aware that the machines might just as easily take it away. Can you imagine if the Return of the Jedi ended with the Death Star still in place, only with some more "temperate" Imperial in Palpatine's place, but there would be the same celebrations because he would pinky-promise not to blow up any more planets? That would've been a watered down version of this absurdity, because at least the Resistance presented a somewhat formidable force, unlike Zion. Yeah, sure, the Machines would save on maintaining the masquerade and warrant themselves against another Smith incident, but neither seemed to concern them that much. Hell, they probably saw the entire charade as a form of entertainment. Kinda like the "Matrix" movies.
  • Humanity and the Machines have been driven back together by common interests, survival, and ultimately through interaction between programs from the machine world and people like Neo they now stand to potentially let go of the old war. It will be a long process but they've both been shown that they aren't as different as they thought they were, have at least a temporary truce in place to let them talk again, and while the machines have been shown to be scientifically powerful they still are lacking in many areas which humans could compliment. Together if they can avoid going back to killing one another they stand to build a better future that isn't as dark as the world they have to share now.
    • The survival of the machines was never threatened, whereas the survival of humans depeneds entirely on the grace of the machines. This is nowhere even close to what one might call a common interest. There was no war either - machines allowed Zion to exist, maintained the charade for some reason, and crashed it the moment they wanted to. As for the multiple areas the machines were ostensibly lacking in, care to provide some examples? What are they going to talk about with the humans, and if they were interested in talking, what was stopping them before? As for "avoid going back to killing one another" - again, it was always completely one-sided. Humans scurried away, machines hunted them down. What can humans possibly do to avoid that, other than keep the low profile, and what can they possibly do if the machines decide to go back on their word? "isn't as dark as the world they have to share now" - they don't share it. Machines control the world. Why would they be willing to change that? Was there any indication whatsoever that they were unhappy with the world?
    • Incorrect. The outright destruction of the Matrix by Smith was a serious threat to the machine population. Whether they're being used as processors or power sources the death of all those humans would ultimately have forced the machines to cull their own population reducing them to a shadow of what they are now. It might not even be a sustainable level for them as the Architect straight out says it's an inferior state to what they are now that they were reluctantly willing to accept if things didn't work out. The Oracle, Sati, and plenty of other programs especially Smith make it clear they don't like the current system of authoritarian rule and long to see it change. As it stands the masquerade has been broken and humanity at large is now aware that the Matrix exists, so if the machines decided tomorrow to take away the choice then the human population inside would reject the simulation enmass and thus cause it to crash just like the Architect described to Neo, taking them and machine civilization as it exists now with it. They have no choice if they wish to maintain their current civilization besides working with the humans and sharing the world.
  • Turns out by the sequel that, while stability was impossible due to the necessity of humans to Machine life, there was some common ground to be found. It's just not every Machine wanted to work with humans to bridge the gap when their resources started to dwindle as people left the Matrix, resulting in an Enemy Civil War between the Machines wanting peace and the Machines preferring to control humanity as they did before.

Machines oppressing programs

• Why do the Machines treat programs like second-class citizens at best and disposable pawns at worst? You'd think they'd be more compassionate toward their cousin race given their history with humanity.
  • Just like humanity tends to be so compassionate toward their cousin races?

How heavy is ammo?

Ever pick up an ammo box of 50 cal? It's heavy. Pretty sure there is no way that a human could move a cart of ammo around as shown in the Dock scenes.

• The carts have wheels. Cars weigh 1 - 2 tons and you can push them.

Smith's confused freak out in the hole

Why is Smith spooked by recognizing him being in the hole with Neo? He can see the future, he states several times he's seen the outcome of the fight, why does it bother him when it happens?

• Smith becomes more human as the films progress. Repeating the Oracle's line might not have been entirely him in control. His demeanor changes when he says it. When he comes back, he becomes worried because he feels he's being tricked. Smith is feeling fear, possibly for the first time. Neo even asks him what he's afraid of. The Oracle once said "No one can see passed a decision they don't understand." Smith didn't understand that Neo would accept defeat, he only foresaw his victory, and he couldn't see passed Neo's decision to keep fighting. He doesn't under why.

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