The Matrix

I thought it was quite fascinating that The Matrix Reloaded was the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time until Deadpool took the crown.

To be fair, it was the equivelant PG-13 in a lot of markets.

Edited by DeadlyAssassin on Jan 19th 2022 at 9:14:26 PM

> The thing is, I have never met a single person that likes the Matrix sequels.

I'm sorry I can't hear you over RAVING IN ZION!

-rave music plays,in Zion-

Also,using a time like Zion was really on the nose

The Matrix was never remotely subtle about anything except maybe the trans allegory. It's more a testament to how cinematically illiterate a lot of people are that it has been misinterpreted this badly by alt-right nuts.

I for one wish we could get another Animatrix.

I don't know how funny it is, but it is certainly ironic that the most heartfelt metaphor that the Wachowskis were going for is also the one that the fewest people picked up on. I had no idea until much later, but then again I wasn't exactly super aware of LGBTQ+ issues in 1999.

I might even tolerate the cave rave in Reloaded if the movie had a slightly lower exposition-to-action ratio overall. As for Revolutions, as I said before the train station segment is by far its weakest because it doesn't seem to serve the overall plot except to establish Sati as a character, and Sati is almost irrelevant to the plot.

It's clear that the film wants to make a "programs can experience love too" message, but it's not clear how that motivates Neo in any meaningful way. He's already going to fight Smith. There's a story beat of the Oracle herself having to make a choice that she doesn't understand, and it's implied that this is tied in with Smith assimilating Sati, but it feels like that's part of a side story that we never see the entirety of... until Resurrections, I guess.

Also, the less we'd seen of "The Kid", the happier I'd have been, but oh well.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 19th 2022 at 3:38:01 PM

Just curious, what exactly is it that you dislike about the Kid? The acting?

More the heavy-handedness of it. So this one dope with no useful skills is really worshipful of Neo, miraculously saves the day at Zion, and survives to the end by having Plot Armor thick enough to build a city on. Oh, and he accidentally saves Neo from being attacked by Bane/Smith that one time. He's the Jar-Jar Binks of the sequels.

His story in The Animatrix is actually pretty cool and sets up this idea of people freeing themselves without anyone giving them a red pill, but (a) it goes nowhere in the films, (b) I can't help but wonder how many angst-ridden teenagers tried that in real life.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 19th 2022 at 3:46:44 PM

I think Sati in Revolutions ties in a decent way by showing that the Matrix itself can be turned from a tool of oppression and that it deserves to stick around so that programs can grow into people of their own. But given as Neo has no real way of destroying the Matrix, as the prior movie made it clear, there isn’t really as much of an ethical dilemma as there would be if he could.

Given the heavy transphobia of the 2000s, I’m not surprised the Wachowskis kept that metaphor subtle because of the risks if it were more apparent.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Jan 19th 2022 at 12:53:00 PM

I dig the "programs can feel love too" idea, but this is exactly the problem: it has nothing to do with Neo's story. As you point out, it's not like he was ever going to genocide the Machines and liberate humans from their oppression for all time, destroying Sati in the process.

Sati is a character in a story that only tangentially impacts Neo's. Again, this is fine. Nothing inherently wrong with painting a picture of a bigger world. But it takes up what, twenty minutes of runtime? No. Bad writer!

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 19th 2022 at 4:23:09 AM

I have no problems whatsoever with The Kid.

The train sequence is the one you either need to cut entirely or expand significantly, and the movie has no room for the latter. The video game Matrix the Path of Neo expands on it (by retroactively adding something like it to movie one) and gives it a pretty cool vibe of it being more explicitly the afterlife express of programs where the common laws of physics do not apply and you have to make some puzzles. Something like that would have been neat, but it just has no room in the film.

This is another area where the roughly 40 minutes of Morpheus and Niobe making their way back to Zion could have been better served, really. Morpheus and Niobe having to awaken programs with the Merovingian's help would have made for a cooler subplot, the Exiles either making a (gun-based) escape/resistance from Smith's wrath.

Having been reading up on the fallout between Marcus Chong and the Wachowskis/Warner Brothers, is there any validity to Chong's claims about the Wachowskis, Reeves and the studio cheating him out of money?

Im just here bcuz i like the matrix n this thread kinda died

I saw the most recent movie and I thought it was pretty solid. Using bots as programs pretending to be humans until activated was a really clever way to update the Matrix to modern times internet and cybersafety, and I liked how the new human city living at peace with machines shows how important was Neo's sacrifice and leads to a pretty interesting world to explore.

I do have a question that the new Architect's way of generating extra energy made me think of: the machines had to use humanity as sources of energy because the sky was covered by smog during the war and blocked the sun, right? But how do the machines exactly use human energy if the sun being blocked means there isn't much photossynthesis anymore? We humans use energy by consuming organic matter and oxygen gas and liberating carbon dyoxide and water on its place, which photosynthetic beings like plants then use to generate more organic matter and oxygen once again by using sunlight as a source, which in the universe of the movie became sparse. The machines could recycle the nutrients in the body by reutilizing them like it is said in the first three movies, if I'm not mistaken, but turning all of the CO₂ and water into organic matter and O₂ once again would spend the very energy that machines need to survive, which just creates a sort of perpetual machine paradox in which the energy humans produce comes from nowhere. Wouldn't be more efficient for the machines to use something like nuclear or geothermic energy instead, or is there a reason for that in the expanded material? This makes me wonder, where did humans in Zion (and now Io) get their food from? There was a protein paste, but where did they take carbohydrates from?

Edited by good-morning on May 15th 2022 at 12:51:44 PM

Yes, the part about machines needing humans to produce energy didn't hold water in the first film, and it still doesn't. But otherwise there would be no humans and therefore no story.

I suppose that the public was less aware of such problems back then. And of course most stories that feature heroes with cool powers don't make sense if you think of the physics involved.

People have been aware of the human battery issue being illogical since the first movie came out.

In fact, it is widely believed that the original script called for human brains to be connected to some kind of massive distributed computing network, which at least doesn't violate thermodynamics, but the producers made them change it because audiences wouldn't understand.

I’m surprised the machines haven’t found a way to bring sunlight back, really. Is there really a manmade gaz that can completely black out the sky for centuries?

No. Any particulates would eventually precipitate out, although it could take quite a while depending on how bad it is. Morpheus' line, "It was us who scorched the sky," does an awful lot of heavy lifting for what is literally a sci-fi Hand Wave. The depiction of the cover in Revolutions doesn't help either, since it's way too low: it looks like a low-hanging cloud layer, and that would precipitate in days or weeks.

Edited by Fighteer on May 15th 2022 at 10:19:33 AM

Yeah, a Nuclear Winter f.e. would last up to approx. 4 years.

The type of cover that Morpheus described, that could "blot out the sun" for a substantial length of time, is more realistically associated with volcanism or asteroid impact: something that would throw gigatons of fine particulates (ash and dust) high up into the stratosphere, blanketing the Earth. At that altitude, atmosphere is cycled through the layers very, very slowly, and light material can remain up there for years.

As I said, the mechanism by which we achieved this is hand-waved by Morpheus, and quite rightly so. The kind of nuclear exchange that could create such an effect would be catastrophic — apocalyptic, even. If we had that kind of capability, we should have tried to nuke the machines, not irradiate our biosphere. Heck, it seems like we'd already resigned ourselves to killing most of the human population.

There really is no scientific explanation for it, so it's best to just let it go for the sake of the story.

Movie 3 shows that the "blotting out the sun" process seems to be different from a regular nuclear winter. When Neo's ship reaches the clouds they black out his ship's systems (and that of every surrounding machine) with a EMP, so it's probably something beyond simple nuclear clouds.

The Architect implies they are aware using humans for power is a flawed system, and they have been considering alternate sources with "a level of survival we are prepared to accept."

We know from studying volcanic eruptions that there is an enormous amount of static electricity in those ash clouds. The recent eruption of a volcano in the Tongan island chain was studied from space and there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes recorded. Flying through such a cloud could certainly subject a vehicle to static discharges and lightning strikes that could disable its electrical systems.

It would have other effects as well. There were several infamous aviation incidents caused by volcanic ash, the most well-known of which was British Airways flight 9, covered here by Mentour Pilot. In that case the ash contaminated the engines of a Boeing 747, causing all four to fail, and also sandblasted its exterior, damaging instruments and preventing the pilots from seeing through the windows.

The scene is perfectly fine in that regard, although it doesn't answer the question of how the material is staying where it is. Watching it, we can observe a lot of buffeting, indicating that there are strong winds at that altitude. This implies some kind of major climatic change to Earth's atmosphere that maintains wind circulation at the same altitude as the dust contamination. How there isn't constant rain and why the surface isn't affected by those winds are more of those unaddressed questions.

Right, but it was flawed from the beginning, because of thermodynamics. It would take more energy to operate those power plants than the machines could extract from them. Morpheus mentions "a kind of fusion" in his speech; this is sort of like saying, "I get all my energy by standing outside in the sun... and eating some food."

These are all examples of Bellisario's Maxim. They are fundamental to the premise of the story so there's no point in worrying about their scientific validity.

Edited by Fighteer on May 15th 2022 at 1:31:30 PM

Regarding the clouds: According to the wiki, the Darkstorm is composed of (presumably self-replicating) nanomachines.

Edited by CheapMarzipan on May 15th 2022 at 12:40:31 PM