The Matrix

Come to think about it, the action scenes in the second film involved a lot more innocent people getting caught in the crossfire. In the first film, they only stacked those who had allied with the Agents, so while their actions were harsh, it was still understandable.

In Reloaded? Anything goes. Get out of the way!

I think I remember hearing or reading somewhere that the police in the lobby scene were all supposed to be programs. It may have been on the commentary. But of course the film doesn't make it explicit, even though it could have.

"There's actual human beings in that building!"

"Actually, the security personnel are programs. Similar to Agents, only with human capabilities. But Agents can still take them over, so we need to get rid of them quickly."

Reloaded is one of those movies that only makes sense while you're watching it. Once you re-watch it, it opens up way too many Plot Holes.

I never really understood the complaint about the cops. Yes, they're innocent people and that's a shame but A) Agents can take over anyone, we can't take any chances. B) Leaving Morpheus there would mean he'd eventually give Smith the codes and thus doom Zion. They had to do it.

I never like that tendecy of hero to be in a ambigous or grey setting only for them to do nothing at all, is establish that almost all people could be an agent any time so they cant bring the luxury of mercy.

That is the truth. Plus, even if they just tried to tell the officers what the situation truly is, do you think they'd believe them? Not to mention that would also alert the Agents to their presence.

I'd say the cop thing was probably due to the strategy involved - as in, none. There's really no reason why Neo couldn't have quietly placed a bomb on the front gate to serve as a distraction, and then pick Morpheus up in a helicopter as he eventually did anyway. Other than that, killing potential Agents seems prudent... invoking a metric ton of unfortunate implications and similarities to real life cult attitudes, but prudent.

I find that all the Nebuchadnezzar crew intentionally acted without emotion when in the Matrix, just like how you wouldn't waste much time with emoticons in a video game. Morpheus is The Stoic philosopher of the group when in leather, but a large ham in the real world. I wouldn't say the execution was all that great, but it was still an intended theme of the story.

Because there is Smith in the room and a distraction will just alert the agent who would try to move Morpheus out of the location right there, and the situation in the movie give them right to the protagonist, as I discuss at lot with you in the "rooting for the empire" thread, trying to put another plan will be a cop up really bad.

And I dont know about that, Morpheus since th be large ham only in a podium(which is the place where anyone should be one except in motivational speech) otherwise he is farly normal like any other chararter.

They could have unplugged him. It's what they were about to do before Neo decided to take charge.

One complaint about the sequels I don't understand are the accusations of Villain Decay for the Agents. Them being fodder to Neo is fine but people also say that Morpheus and Trinity "did well" in their fights against them.

Morpheus only appeared to "do well" because he had a weapon and even then he did no damage. It wasn't quite as brutal as his fight with Smith but people forget that moments before that fight Morpheus had headbutted through concrete.

Theres even quite a bit of fridge brilliance in how Agents lose their seemingly implacable status, in that it was just that - seemingly implacable. As soon as Neo exploded Smith from within and sent his colleagues packing, redpills would have a reason to believe even an Agent could be defeated... in a world were belief determines reality.

Apart from that, even Neo was only as invincible in the sequels as any other martial arts protagonist. Notably, every enemy he fights is somehow new and unfamiliar - upgraded Agents, gravity-defying vampires, Smith-tachi, not to mention the Trainman. Neo may have been overpowered, but there was still plenty of novelty in the fights.

I was looking up what the Wachowskis had to say about the direction they took the series, and this is what they said:

"What we were trying to achieve with the story overall was a shift, the same kind of shift that happens for Neo, that Neo goes from being in this sort of cocooned and programmed world, to having to participate in the construction of meaning to his life. And we were like, 'Well, can the audience go through the three movies and experience something similar to what the main character experiences?'

So the first movie is sort of typical in its approach. The second movie is deconstructionist, and it assaults all of the things that you thought to be true in the first movie, and so people get very upset, and they're like 'Stop attacking me!' in the same way that people get upset with deconstructionist philosophy. I mean, Derrida and Foucault, these people upset us. And then the third movie is the most ambiguous, because it asks you to actually participate in the construction of meaning."

Your thoughts? Are they just trying to rationalize why the sequels weren't as well received?

The Wachowski's were pretty upfront that at least with the sequels they were more about The Prisoner-style audience infuriating confusion and chaos.

Them being fodder to Neo is fine but people also say that Morpheus and Trinity "did well" in their fights against them.

To be more exact, Morpheus did well. Trinity got destroyed in her Agent Fight.

To me it seems Morpheus only does well against an Agent in Reloaded because they are atop a moving car, which means the wind resistance of that scenario cripples the agent's maneuverability, putting them on more even ground.

It's a common idea that objectively weaker humans could overcome the Implacable Man machines via creativity and ingenuity, as machines are limited by Creative Sterility. In the first film when Morpheus fights Agent Smith he starts the situation in a position of weakness, and tight spaces with no room to move ensured he had no chance. Fighting against the Agent on the rooftop was also on a flat plane with no cover. Neo was able to fight Smith in part because the train station offered some variety for Neo to take advantage of, plus a train.

In the sequels the highway fight involves constant momentum, getting knocked off and having to get back on. Morpheus' Finishing Move was a flying crane kick from in front of the semi. Trinity's fight in the office building was a very desperate one, the best you can say is she survived longer than expected.

You know, I've never understood why so many people nowadays consider Dark City to be superior to The Matrix in every way. While it is a good film, I feel that it lacks the joy and philosophy that the latter has, and just isn't as memorable or exciting. That, and its characters are really bland, even more so than people accuse the characters in The Matrix of being, and overall, I feel that it is a bit over praised. Yet people often use it as an example of why The Matrix is apparently overrated and not deserving of a all the praise.

Is it due to Hype Backlash? The Nostalgia Critic? Simply it being released a year before and people wishing it had the same impact?

edited 12th Sep '15 10:09:01 PM by LDragon2

Aforementioned Nostalgia Critic review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQHCEUvc4Q0

edited 12th Sep '15 11:45:08 PM by Guy01

Nostalgia Critic is, first and foremost, an attempt to entertain via video review. Doug Walker's personal videos tend to show a much better balance in terms of critique and analysis. But still, people take those reviews a little too seriously. In his review for Patch Adams he has a long tirade about how the film changed the real life death of Adam's friend in an accident and makes it a death of a fictional love interest via a disturbed patient. Now a good number of Patch Adams-related entries on the wiki have something about that fact shoehorned into the trope, regardless if it is relevant to the trope.

Thing is, when The Matrix first came out what really piqued everyone's interest was not just the highly technical, tightly choreographed action scenes, but the concept of the Matrix itself, questioning reality and whether or not we are controlled by "the system." It's something not often depicted in a mainstream action movie. But the idea of machines rising against us was already mentioned as being a well worn topic in general sci fi and especially cyberpunk, The Terminator most famously. I never heard of Dark City before Critics review, but ranting that one "deserves" accolades more is a pointless debate. One is iconic, the other is cult classic.

edited 13th Sep '15 2:03:34 AM by KJMackley

I'd say the Terminator similarities were part of the reason for the sequels to be considered disappointing; the other part being the somewhat more verbose existentialist discussions. Still, they also had their advantages over the first film, in how the standard cyberpunk anti-establishment attitudes were evolved into a much grayer conflict of borderline Blue-and-Orange Morality. And there's how even programs were treated as pretty fleshed out entities, all but people in their own right, which is a very rare occasion in Hollywood films. The idea that the whole war was for survival, with no default heroes and villains, and that the main conflict was in what constituted peace - this was as far from the Terminator as possible.

Neo VS Smith With Healthbars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtI3AwEgUgU

The clincher is the end where Smith gets a whole new health bar and Neo is like Screw This, I'm Outta Here

That was great, thanks for the link.

the think about Matrix is that the machine just won and mankind is fighiting a very hopeless battle against them, pushing the cyberpunk aspect until his logical end, also Smith as the final conflict was nice, consider he is pretty much a virus who murder machine and human alike.

Also, here is nostalgia critic opinion of animatrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ZmPJIlEjA

edited 16th Sep '15 7:31:56 PM by unknowing

I realize this thread hasn't been active in a long while but I'm in the process of rewatching the films with my fiancee, who hasn't seen them before, and wanted to see if anyone wanted to talk about it.

Anyway, I was reading the thread, and I came across this discussion from a long while back about whether Smith has free agency, sparked by the CM Thread's decision to cut him. I was in the CM Thread when the decision was made to cut, and while I totally agree with Tobias summation of Smith as heinous by both human and machine standards, the cut wasn't based on that.

The cut was based on the question of whether Smith could chose to stop being an SOB. He's built from the ground up to be an emotionally dead enforcer of the Matrix's will, which doesn't exactly offer him much of a starting point for a sense of morality once he goes free. Worse still, he was already malfunctioning, a problem which Neo took to the next level when he blew him up at the end of the first film. And that's without getting into the fact that the system appears at times to be re-purposing Smith into a counterpoint to Neo ("The Many" if you will), in a response to Neo becoming more powerful than any The One beforehand. As was noted in the thread here:

If this is the case it explains Smith's rant to Neo about how while they are ostensibly free they are, in fact, not free—they are still slaves to the system, still living out roles set out by it. If that is the case, then by the end it's safe to say that Smith has successfully broken out of this role (the system isn't going to deliberately endanger itself) but it makes the question of whether Smith could, at any point, stop being a bastard pretty questionable.

Anyway, I bring it up not so much to restart a debate on his moral agency, but because I find the question of whether Smith is a complete fluke, or the result of the system trying to balance and overcompensating to be an interesting one. I'd always assumed the latter, as did most of the others I'd talked to, but reading the earlier discussion in this thread it seems like most posters here assumed the former.

So, I was going through the YMMV page for Realoaded, and came across this entry:

• Fridge Logic: The movie pretty much falls apart with the reveal that Neo getting into the Architect's chamber was exactly what the Machines wanted to happen. Smith is exempt since he's an exile and clearly doesn't care anymore, but everyone else, their repeatedly trying to kill the heroes just seems counter-productive.

It blew by goddamn mind. I've been trying to do the mental gymnastics to figure out why the Agents keep trying to kill the heroes. Do they just not know about the Architect's plan to bring the One back into the Source? If so, then why?

Don't get me wrong, I love the franchise, even the sequels, but this has been bugging me for quite a while.

Its their job, they are all part of the overall equation. Its a carefully created masquerade under the masquerade that no one but the Architect, the previous Neos and the Oracle are in on.