Matrix Resurrections Review Thread

[truemane]

Here's the old thread. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?636265-Matrix-4-The-Matrix-Resurrections)

I saw it last night. I'm a good target for this movie. I was 23 when I saw the original and I liked it a lot but didn't love it as much as most people did at the time. And I liked Reloaded a little more than most people did. And I disliked Revolutions about as much as everyone else did.

I like Keanu Reeves. I've always enjoyed his movies and I find it interesting how he's turned into a modern day enlightened sage of sorts. And I like Lana Wachowski. And I liked Sens8, so I was excited that both David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon were involved in the screenplay.

And I love Carrie-Anne Moss. I could honestly just watch her be the smartest person in the room all day long. The old Gene Siskel rule of "is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch" is dangerous to invoke anywhere near Carrie-Anne Moss because she always wins.

At the same time, I'm not in love with the movies or the games or the mythology or any of it, nor do I have any real investment about how any of it should be or ought to be.

So I was a good audience. Excited by the possibilities, but not imprisoned by my expectations of them. Just ready to see what happens next.

And it was.... Meh.

It was so frustrating to me that it had so many of the same weaknesses that plagued the original, weaknesses that really start at the screenplay level. So many interesting or off-beat or good ideas brought up once and then dropped. So many important narrative implications of those things ignored. Such a weird balance of pacing, where it putts along leaning heavily on mystery to create tension and then screaming to a dead dead stop for seven hours while someone helpfully tells us what all this is about in excruciating detail.

So many action-y scenes with no clear stakes and no established geography. As any D&D player will tell you after their sixth random encounter of the day, action with no stakes is just grinding. It's just noise. And it's so odd to me how much trouble the writers have with the very basic task of setting stakes. And every action scene went on too long. In writing, we call them the Two F's (Fighting and Mating): F-scenes are just fine, but they should move the story along somehow, reveal or complicate existing relationships or advance character or plot or theme. Luke Skywalker's fight with Darth Vader in Empire was great because it complicated the trilogy's central conflict. And their fight in Jedi was great because it resolved it. But F-scenes with no narrative weight are just two different kinds of pornography.

No spoilers, but there's an extended chase scene in Resurrections that is quite long and involved (and, truth be told, really well executed) but nothing is ever said about where they're going or what they're going to do when they get there. Nothing is established about what counts as 'safe' and how we'll know it when we see it. So it's a chase with no rules and no finish line. So while it's all very pretty, it's just noise.

And, to my mind worst of all, it repeated the same structural problem that really bugged me in the original: they set-up a story that seems like it's going to be about something (reality, self identity, the existential tragedy that a human's existence precedes their essence) and then instead of paying it off, they do a heist instead.

And... I don't think this counts as a spoiler, but just in case:
The core problem with all of this, to me, is that if the good guys win, and the Matrix falls, and the machines are overthrown, and everyone wakes up, literally billions of people are going to die. There's one functional city, no food, no water, and everyone will think they've gone insane. Talk about failing to establish clear stakes, what's the endgame for this whole mythology? A conversation about this, in-universe, would be a great way to have a discussion about freedom and truth and what price justice and what-have-you, but it's just never adequately addressed.

There was lots of good stuff. A lot of nods and callbacks and metacommentary that worked as thematic elements of the story they were telling. Keanu was great as an older, more tired, less sure, less enthusiastic version of Neo. Carrie-Anne Moss was the smartest person in every room she was in. I liked the new characters (when they bothered to slow down long enough to let them be more than plot devices). Everything Lana does looks great.

My favourite detail was, at the beginning, when they recreate the Trinity rooftop run, the chase runs right to left across the screen. The original went left to right. In move talk, left to right is almost 'going somewhere' and right to left is almost always 'coming back again.'

All in all, I thought it was halfway between "Meh" and "Why bother."

[Psyren]

I was pretty meh on it too.

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

I did like that The One is now The Two thanks to Trinity getting some agency and I really really loved Yahya Abdul Mateen as Morpheus. That's about it, the rest was okay at best and had glaring structural problems at worst. In case you're wondering no, they haven't fixed the humans are batteries thing, like at all. If anything they made it worse.

Lastly, NPH as the Analyst:
started out really great, but then got... sexist at the end? Isn't he a machine? At least Smith hated all humans equally, which makes a ton more sense :smallconfused:

Just having him yell out sexist epithets so Trinity can kick his face in repeatedly and the audience can yell "yass kween!" felt so forced.

[Ramza00]

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

2015 Lana Wachowski said to a reporter question she had no idea of a Matrix adjacent movie, and WB had not contacted her.
2017 The Hollywood Reporter announced WB was considering a Morpheus prequel with Michael B Jordan to star.
2019 August, WB announced Matrix Revolutions with Lana to direct, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss to return. Lana shared that her two parents and a third person a friend recently passed away and dealing with this grief was the seed for the fourth movie.

Of course there is probably far more things than those 3 dates, but we can not see behind the veil.

—————

The movie was great. It will not be satisfying for many people with their previous structures in their memory, but this lack of satisfaction will cause people to think about things with another perspective. Likewise it will provide a substance for some viewers to create new images and simulcras to build.

This is a good thing in my estimation, for this was one of the goals of the first three movies. “Heroes Journey” stories that do not challenge you often are mere popcorn movies, empty, hollow, disposable, unless it was one of your first introductions to the genre like an 8 year old being shown Star Wars. Heroes Journey stories that examine this structure, that deconstructs it in some way will always have polarized feelings on large groups of people. And this is good and okay 👍



Lastly, NPH as the Analyst:
started out really great, but then got... sexist at the end? Isn't he a machine? At least Smith hated all humans equally, which makes a ton more sense :smallconfused:

Just having him yell out sexist epithets so Trinity can kick his face in repeatedly and the audience can yell "yass kween!" felt so forced.


The Architect is a a Misanthrope, a hater of human kind. Likewise Smith, Merv (the French man) etc.

All of them feel powerless to some degree and thus they use a combination of Misanthropy, Snobbery, Betrayal, Hypocrite, and Cruelty to distance themselves from their feeling of powerlessness. Sure these programs have power, but the systems of control are so large that no individual agent…wait I need a different word for individual agent… no individual factor can create control in the system via individual efforts due to “overload.”

The alternative is things like faith, community, authenticity, sentimentality, etc but these too do not “promise” the result we want, if they did they too would be systems of control and should be seen in a skeptical light. Only by surrendering and have the curiosity of a child, like an artist, or perhaps faith of a community member an alternative is possible. What is the line again “Rama Kandra: No, it is a [] word. What matters is the connection the word implies. I see that you are in love. Can you tell me what you would give to hold on to that connection?”

The Analyst is a misanthrope and sexist in ways similar to people before, yet different, for it is the same melody but different refrain with slightly different variations.

[gomipile]

No spoilers, but there's an extended chase scene in Resurrections that is quite long and involved (and, truth be told, really well executed) but nothing is ever said about where they're going or what they're going to do when they get there. Nothing is established about what counts as 'safe' and how we'll know it when we see it. So it's a chase with no rules and no finish line. So while it's all very pretty, it's just noise.

I have a lot of thoughts on this film, but for now, I think I have the clearest response to this quoted point about the chase scene.

The setup for the chase sequence is that the horde of bots is in the way of getting Neo and Trinity to a mirror. The goal is to be able to get them out of the Matrix past the bots' interference.

One character even says that if Neo could fly, they'd be able to do this easily, but at that point the characters don't think of it as a realistic goal.

As the chase sequence develops, the bots get harder and harder to deal with (I assume this happens as the Analyst gets more and more frustrated.)

That development escalates the tension more and more until a brief respite on the roof when the helicopter threat is partially dealt with using telekinesis on the missile. That moment could be seen as a partial twist. I'd argue that I see a narrative structure here where everything from the helicopter's destruction onward is the twist or subsequence that brings resolution to this part of the plot.

The twist continues as Trinity has an epiphany about her dream while watching the sunrise, which could be seen as payoff for Sati bringing sunrises to the Matrix in the third movie.

I might be reaching here, but I think at this point Trinity's dream can be read as her subconsciously having developed a plan to escape, in a similar way as Neo's creation of Morpheus/Smith might be able to be seen as his subconscious planning for escape.

When the armed troops storm the roof, we as the audience more or less know that they're going to jump off the roof and fly away. I don't think that's much of a stretch given the earlier scenes about Thomas in the past on the roof edge at some rooftop party.

The twist is completed when it is revealed that Trinity is the first to learn to fly and control her flight.

The overall sequence concludes with them having been safely extracted.

I may be wrong, but to me this whole sequence around the chase seems to follow something like a Kishōtenketsu four-part narrative structure.

[Psyren]

This is a good thing in my estimation, for this was one of the goals of the first three movies. “Heroes Journey” stories that do not challenge you often are mere popcorn movies, empty, hollow, disposable, unless it was one of your first introductions to the genre like an 8 year old being shown Star Wars. Heroes Journey stories that examine this structure, that deconstructs it in some way will always have polarized feelings on large groups of people. And this is good and okay 👍

Being down on the execution of something doesn't mean I didn't know what they were going for, nor does it mean I was unchallenged :smallconfused:
And to be clear, I didn't hate the movie, I just saw the potential for something more - something that spent less time wallowing in/calling back to the original trilogy and more time using it as a jumping-off point to a better franchise overall.

There were definitely other things I liked, chief among them the emergence of factions within the machines, with the Sentients having broken with the Matrix to join humanity, and the use of their magnetic ball technology to enter the heavy air quotes "real world." But even that I couldn't unequivocally enjoy because it threw the machines' silly "energy crisis" into even starker relief, and Io's own artificial sunlight (where the hell is all that energy coming from?) begs the question of why the machines themselves aren't trying to grow strawberries or sweet potatoes etc. Because what's going to happen now with God-Neo and Goddess-Trinity? They can remake the Matrix in their own image, what does that actually mean? Free all the minds and they're condemning countless machines to starvation and death by the show's own premise. But leave them trapped and they're condoning slavery and the harvest. There needs to be a third option, but the movie was in such a hurry to call back the ending of the first one that they glossed over all these questions, and hoped you did too.

And lastly I don't mind using misogyny as shorthand for making a villain despicable. But when the villain in question is an AI it's pretty lazy.

[Ramza00]

I had 3 parts of my post. The middle part was not directed at you PsyRen, :smallsmile: I liked the movie, recognize it is not for everyone, and how that can be a good thing.

[Eldan]

Short review before I read what everyone else thought.

Tl;dr: interesting, but not good.

The good:
Keanu Reeves is a much better and subtler actor these days.
The first half hour or so had some interesting story ideas.
Some excellent worldbuilding that I really want to use as a setting for an entirely different story now. I especially love the Synthients (or whatever they were called). Generally some cool set and creature design.

The bad:
Am I the only one who feels like Moss and Reeves have no chemistry whatsoever and their Romance is incredibly uninteresting?
Also, the action scenes were horrendously dull. I did not care one bit, none of it was interesting or impressive. It felt like worse retreads of some of the action beats of the originals, but without room to breathe or a sense of awe that the best ones had.

I really wanted the movie to focus more on the ideas and less on the action. Because we all knew where the action was going. Or just toss the last two acts entirely. I've seen "possibly schizophrenic creative type has breakdown and thinks his creations come to life" before, but I've liked it the last few times I've seen it and I think this movie could have made it work.


Here's the old thread. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?636265-Matrix-4-The-Matrix-Resurrections)

And... I don't think this counts as a spoiler, but just in case:
The core problem with all of this, to me, is that if the good guys win, and the Matrix falls, and the machines are overthrown, and everyone wakes up, literally billions of people are going to die. There's one functional city, no food, no water, and everyone will think they've gone insane. Talk about failing to establish clear stakes, what's the endgame for this whole mythology? A conversation about this, in-universe, would be a great way to have a discussion about freedom and truth and what price justice and what-have-you, but it's just never adequately addressed.


That was one thing I really liked about this movie and they could have leaned more heavily into it. The people of Io are working on terraforming. On making the planet liveable again. Instead of giving them nearly the same situation as the people of Zion, they should have given them the motivation of trying to change the situation slowly. If Niobe's plan had been to first terraform the planet, reintroduce plants, clear up the sky, while working with at least some machines, and only then taking everyone out of the Matrix, she could still have been a secondary antagonist in the movie without even changing much, and it would have worked much better. The hovercraft captains and Neo are hotshots who want to take the Matrix down now without much of a plan, while the elders of the city are trying to reign them in and work on a timescale of centuries.

[Eldan]

machines' silly "energy crisis" into even starker relief, and Io's own artificial sunlight (where the hell is all that energy coming from?) begs the question of why the machines themselves aren't trying to grow strawberries or sweet potatoes etc. Because what's going to happen now with God-Neo and Goddess-Trinity? They can remake the Matrix in their own image, what does that actually mean? Free all the minds and they're condemning countless machines to starvation and death by the show's own premise. But leave them trapped and they're condoning slavery and the harvest. There needs to be a third option, but the movie was in such a hurry to call back the ending of the first one that they glossed over all these questions, and hoped you did too.


Urgh, yeah. I'm a biologist. Sunlight lamps are an integral part of my job. Blanketing an entire city in them? Where are the gigantic nuclear reactors, exactly, and why can't the machines use those?

[Psyren]

The action, while pretty to look at in the moment, really felt weightless and toothless.

There was no tension, even when Agents showed up, because they all caught the Stormtrooper virus all of a sudden and can't hit even a target running in a straight line down a corridor. Not to mention the good guys now having machines on their side - so even if you are a character who can't hold their own against an Agent, you just sic your pet robot on the enemy robot and book it in the other direction...

...Not that you have to go very far anymore either. The phone booth change makes sense out of universe, making the movie more accessible for a younger audience who might not even know what a phone booth is - But in-universe, it defanged the movie even further, because now literally any mirror or doorway can be a means of escape. Never mind that literally every operator has e Keymaker powers now? So they can just fire up their infinite portals not just to exit the Matrix nearly at-will, but to jump thousands of "miles" in an instant, and they can even place them on moving vehicles. Remember when deja vu was a real threat because it meant the machines were screwing with your exit points to seal you in? Not anymore.

And finally we have the Analyst's new trick, "Swarm Mode" whereby he weaponizes hundreds (if not thousands) of sleeping humans at a time to funnel or pin down the heroes, even to the point of having them sacrifice themselves. This is touted as a a massive improvement over regular agents. Uh, what? Putting aside that Swarm Mode doesn't appear to improve the combat abilities of the turned humans in any way, aren't the machines in some kind of energy crisis? Even accepting the baffling doubled-down logic of human batteries, now you're willing to throw away your batteries en masse at the heroes to stop them? How is that better than just letting them free a few minds here and there? From that final sequence, the Analyst likely lost far more "crops" in a few moments than they've had to the Mnemosyne in weeks if not months.

All this just begs the question of why they even needed a "One" to begin with anymore. We get no sense that they have any particular difficulty with dipping in and out of the Matrix to free minds, nor is there any kind of ticking clock with Io being in some kind of existential danger the way Zion is. Neo is kinda just there.
It's retreading the beats of the original, but without any of the conditions or limitations that gave them meaning.

[Legato Endless]

And lastly I don't mind using misogyny as shorthand for making a villain despicable. But when the villain in question is an AI it's pretty lazy.

I think conceptually this is fine, but the execution is lacking. The Analyst is a sentient social media algorithm, that's exactly the type of AI that's a huge bigot. Thematically he's also a stand-in for Tech Bros CEOs and demagogues, both which are also highly inclined to be sexist. His whole shtick of being better than the architect because he's much more in tune with humanity works fine on paper. The awkward way the movie suddenly yells his bigotry at the end in the most ham-fisted way possible though, yeah, not great.


Short review before I read what everyone else thought.

Tl;dr: interesting, but not good.

Yeah, this is where I'm at. The film has a lot of ideas, but it doesn't spend enough time on any of them to really drill down to something substantial. And the overall story doesn't meld them together in any satisfying way. I almost suspect the action scenes are deliberately bad, but even that doesn't quite justify the film's very flat cinematography. I'd be interested in a matrix film without any action scenes. This is a franchise where we've increasingly gotten stock fights that don't advance the plots or characters.

There are bits of comedy that work, but that’s really it. There’s a ton of fanservicey callbacks that take up too much time. The drama scenes don't work, and the action is quite banal and unfocused. The Mission Control Guy's costuming looks like a very bad cosplay from a fan film.

The Act 1 meetings as a caricature of forced franchise development and creative cycles are sort of funny. Not compelling or scary as they should be, but kind of cringingly accurate about slavish sequel demands. The other incorporations of modern technology are more obnoxious. Bots. So many Bots.

Then there’s some modern not especially penetrating look at the current social controls of autocratic societies. FACTS AND FEELINGS!

In act 3, the movie sort of turns into The Happening. I...did not expect that.

Some of the dialogue feels very first year film student, such as when mankind's leader uses the matrix as a word for word metaphor for the prison of someone’s prejudices. Lots of unnecessary exposition. Smith is like an agent. But not. Woah.

There are seeds of interesting questions like the morality of freeing people into a much rougher existence that go fairly unexplored.

This lacks real ambition, and it really won’t surprise you on any dramatic level. At all. For a matrix movie, that’s pretty damning. While I had mixed receptions on the sequels, they did at times give me more to chew on. Not really sure about the talk of this being a deconstruction. That's what the Matrix Reloaded was.

Revolutions is more the paean of Lana Wachowski grappling with her problems with society and this sequel that was foisted upon her and us. There's some trans metaphor, some social critique, some rumination on the dark patterns of current society.

But it probably won't emotionally move a lot of people, and if you're looking for like, actual focus on the sci-fi society of man-machine interactions or answering that questinon about energy everyone in this fanbase obsesses over, you're definiately not getting in.

5/10. Smarter than Eternals, not as good as Dune as sci-fi movies this year go.

Jada Pinkett Smith's old person makeup looks so bad I was temporarily convinced I was watching an episode of Star Trek: TNG.


Once again, Neo being The One means, he gets like, a gimmick power. Force push. Pew. Pew pew.


Neo doesn’t believe in himself. So he believes in someone who believes in him.

[Peelee]

I was pretty meh on it too.

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

[Psyren]

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

It's played a bit tongue-in-cheek but yeah. Fourth wall is essentially obliterated. I'm not saying this was a bad decision necessarily, but I do think the "joke" went on a bit too long and ate up runtime that could have gone towards fleshing out some of the new movie's more interesting ideas.

In-universe, Neo has been recaptured and resurrected (title-drop), and instead of his Matrix persona being a directionless cubicle drone like in the first movie, he's a world-famous game developer personality (think a Peter Molyneux or Hideo Kojima type) with a corner office. The events of the first three films have been encapsulated, seemingly by Neo himself, into a popular "Matrix" series of video games. This gives the machines a means of control over him since any memories he has of the events of the original trilogy, he can (with a few prods from his therapist/handler, the Analyst) chalk up to just being ideas he had when making those games, and thus not question the new reality he finds himself in.

Subconsciously he knows he's trapped though, and so in the game within the movie he planted a seed that would eventually lead to his emancipation - creating a bit of corrupting code called a Modal that would eventually turn one of the Matrix's agents, and cause it to incorporate elements of both Morpheus and Smith into its personality. This is the new Morpheus, played by Yayha Abdul-Mateen, and he's easily my favorite character in this outing.

Anyway - called in by his boss, Neo is instructed to get to work on the 4th game (read: movie) because Warner Brothers says so, and that whether he's feeling a creative spark is irrelevant since they will work on the new installment whether he is involved or not. This would be the on-the-nose bit. Neo agrees, which leads into a very meta-meta-meta sequence of the big room planning sessions with the game designers attempting to break down all the elements of what made the original Matrix (the movie in our world, the game in theirs) work. It's fun, kind of, but ultimately doesn't do much beyond remind the audience (or maybe just me) of how much better all those elements fit together in the original film, if not the sequels. And as I mentioned earlier, the joke goes on way too long.

My biggest problem with this setup is the utter lack of stakes:

Yeah Neo's existence is a bit sad/unfulfilled, but he's been held captive in this new reality by the machines for 60 years (which felt like 20 to him, on the inside.) The movie doesn't do a good job of establishing any sense of urgency for why we need to get him out right this second. There's no desperate war of attrition being lost, no sense that the new human city Io is declining or failing (quite the opposite actually), no prophecy guiding the main characters, no sense of real menace from the Big Bad, it's just getting the action figures out of the toy chest for one more game before putting them away again. Just a reminder to people that "Hey, the Matrix still exists, keep buying merch!"

[Peelee]

It's played a bit tongue-in-cheek but yeah. Fourth wall is essentially obliterated. I'm not saying this was a bad decision necessarily, but I do think the "joke" went on a bit too long and ate up runtime that could have gone towards fleshing out some of the new movie's more interesting ideas.

In-universe, Neo has been recaptured and resurrected (title-drop), and instead of his Matrix persona being a directionless cubicle drone like in the first movie, he's a world-famous game developer personality (think a Peter Molyneux or Hideo Kojima type) with a corner office. The events of the first three films have been encapsulated, seemingly by Neo himself, into a popular "Matrix" series of video games. This gives the machines a means of control over him since any memories he has of the events of the original trilogy, he can (with a few prods from his therapist/handler, the Analyst) chalk up to just being ideas he had when making those games, and thus not question the new reality he finds himself in.

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

[Traab]

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

Yeah that part gives me some total recall vibes as we have excuses for why our main character feels the way he does and a charade being kept up but he cant be sure which is the illusion and which is real.

[Psyren]

I don't even know why we needed there to be such a big real-world timeskip in the first place:
Was it just so they can justify a new human city (Io) having arisen? Because they already have the perfect explanation for that, i.e. all the separatist AI that have joined up with humanity could easily share their advanced tech and work around the clock to build such a marvel in a "mere" 20 or 30 years.

Was it so they could show off the horrible age makeup they slathered all over Jada Pinkett-Smith? Because let me tell you, if you thought the de-aging technology used in movies these days was bad... Also, how old is she supposed to be then, 80? 90?

Was it so they can have the new Scooby gang cast? They didn't need 60 years for that! Hell, I think having them be children that grew up in Zion, and either slightly mistrustful of the machines or pioneers for how willing they are to work with them, is actually more poignant / meaningful than being a couple of generations removed.

Was it so they could explain why Morpheus and most of the rest of the original cast are dead? Like, just say they died in a final skirmish or something. We're already going with how the machines somehow welched on their end of the deal, having Morpheus be a casualty of that would actually (gasp) add some personal stakes for Neo beyond just wanting to get laid. (And by the way, the fact that AI are capable of outright lying in this universe is one of the "interesting ideas" I would have liked to see them explore further.)

[Dienekes]

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

Agreed actually. I thought that concept was interesting with just enough of a wink at the camera that it could really show the writer/director's dislike of the current system they're in. I honestly think it's kinda brilliant.

But after setting up that concept, I can't say I thought the movie was great. It also did this thing where it showed flashback glimpses of characters from the original. And I just kept thinking, "Man, Smith was just way more interesting than all these people. Even after he was overused by the third movie."

[BloodSquirrel]

It was so frustrating to me that it had so many of the same weaknesses that plagued the original, weaknesses that really start at the screenplay level. So many interesting or off-beat or good ideas brought up once and then dropped. So many important narrative implications of those things ignored. Such a weird balance of pacing, where it putts along leaning heavily on mystery to create tension and then screaming to a dead dead stop for seven hours while someone helpfully tells us what all this is about in excruciating detail.


To me, that was the strength of the first movie. None of the series ideas are particularly deep- they never really get beyond the most surface level discussion of free-will versus determinism- but the first movie moves through them in a way that feels organic and natural, letting each one stay just long enough not to wear out its welcome before moving on to the eventual action climax. The movie ends on something of a vague note, which works because it leaves a lot of things up that would be very difficult to actually work through up to implication.

Of course, that's also why the sequels didn't work and none of the ancillary media was ever able to elevate substance over style. The ideas behind The Matrix just don't stand up to an intense examination, at least not as executed by the original creators. The first Matrix movie was a perfect example of how more is not better, and how some things just work best as a single, self-contained story that gives you something to think about. When the sequels tried to do that thinking for you, the result was a lot banal mouth-flapping.

I haven't seen Ressurections yet, and I'm iffy on whether I want to bother or not. I'm generally not a fan of reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, or things of that ilk, but I kind of wonder whether a continuation of The Matrix franchise would be better served by just starting over and exercising some of the biggest problems (such as The One as described in the first movie being too powerful to keep around in action movie sequels) and building its thematic aspirations more deeply into the setting and conflict.

Right now, this is one of those "The conversation and meta-narrative of this franchise being brought back is more interesting than the movie itself" situations where I'd be more compelled to watch it if I saw that a reviewer I liked had made one of those 2-4 hour reviews than if everyone just says "meh" and moves on.

[Eldan]

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

It does, and I actually thought it was one of hte more interesting things in the movie.

Story summary of the first act, for those who haven't seen it, slightly spoilery:

Thomas Anderson was a wildly successful video game designer 20 years ago and created a semi-biographical video game trilogy called The Matrix that follows the first three movies. Now, 20 years later, his studio was bought out by Warner Brothers, and he either has to produce a sequel or be kicked out of his own company. He's creatively bankrupt, though, and hasn't produced anything in 20 years, so they saddle him with an increasingly obnoxious team of "creatives" until he has a psychotic breakdown and starts seeing his creations as real.

[Psyren]

It does, and I actually thought it was one of hte more interesting things in the movie.

Story summary of the first act, for those who haven't seen it, slightly spoilery:

Thomas Anderson was a wildly successful video game designer 20 years ago and created a semi-biographical video game trilogy called The Matrix that follows the first three movies. Now, 20 years later, his studio was bought out by Warner Brothers, and he either has to produce a sequel or be kicked out of his own company. He's creatively bankrupt, though, and hasn't produced anything in 20 years, so they saddle him with an increasingly obnoxious team of "creatives" until he has a psychotic breakdown and starts seeing his creations as real.

Note that it's only been 20 years inside the Matrix. In reality he's been held captive for 60 - some of which time was spent on reconstructing his and Trinity's broken bodies.

Also I found the moustache-twirling villainy of the machines here to be pretty hilarious. If they had just left him alone, or better yet either allowed him to shack up with Trinity inside the virtual world or never let him see her in the first place, they could have probably kept both Ones on lockdown for eternity. But they couldn't help but be Stupid Evil instead :smalltongue:

[Tyndmyr]

It is less of a Matrix movie, and more of a rumination on the legacy of the Matrix movies.

This is...kind of unfortunate. The first Matrix was glorious. Holds up fantastically today. The sequels, while not hitting the heights of the first, were still fun enough and watchable. Good bits, could stand to rewatch them even if I am going to forward through one or two boring bits.

This one is mostly a lot of waiting around for the characters to catch up to the viewers. There's a *lot* of metacommentary that feels almost like it's directly addressing the viewer, because forget about the 4th wall, I guess. It's not on the talent...the actors do a great job with what they have, and it's a strong cast. Can't really fault them for any of this.

There is way too much reliance on nostalgia, with a *lot* of shot for shot recreation. I kind of get that, given the premise, but I can just watch the original matrix if I want to see it. Nostalgia is fine, but it needs to serve a purpose in the film's current narrative. The most recent Ghostbusters and Spiderman films both do this admirably, but here...it dwells on the nostalgia, because the current film's plot is weak.

The fight scenes are worse. A lot worse. Bluntly, guns are not actually dangerous to the good guys ever. It doesn't matter if it's a dozen guys firing full auto from ten feet away against a target with no relative movement. The first Matrix spends a good bit of time selling the danger. The Agents are horrifying, and as a result, the actions of the heroes are impressive. In this film? Danger isn't a major factor. So, you have a lot of fights that are just...there.



Making Smith be chummy with Neo was, IMO, a great mistake. Agent Smith was great because in every scene he exuded barely restrained rage and despised humanity without exception. He provided a remorseless opposition that was compelling at every turn because of the pure danger. Now, we have, what, some dude chatting like ol' pals? Okay. That's worthless.

And now the Merovingian is a crazy unhinged dude ranting about how he misses how good things used to be? What's the point of this? What's the point of him? Apparently his minions are now pathetically easy to stop because they are "old"...okay. That doesn't even track with their prior portrayal. They have *always* been old programs that escaped deletion, but were no less lethal for it, and in fact, were exceedingly dangerous, being the main in-Matrix antagonists in the second film. They're now just random minions we don't even care about.

Other than NPH, all the adversaries are pretty much uninteresting and unimportant, to include Niobe.


I agree that sexism is...a particularly poor way to approach this. You have a world with machines and humanity, and that has always been a way to explore discrimination, control, etc through that framework. The Animatrix in particular pretty directly addresses this. Abandoning that metaphor sort of loses the heart of what the Matrix is. It's also a storytelling failure. A program has no particular reason to care if a human is male or female, any more than they should care about eye or hair color. That's not the meaningful division in the context of the story told, and so the action ends up unmotivated.

We also end up with a lack of clear goals for chase scenes. Instead of pay phones...we just have wholly arbitrary exit points. It doesn't feel like we're going *to* anything. It might not seem like a big deal, but having some kind of clear goal that we can see the characters approaching is what allows tension to build. Watch the fight scenes in the original, and you'll see that, over and over again, the point of entry/exit is treated as critical to the scenes.


I hated the helicopter scene. The only *twist* of controlling the missile is given away by the trailer, so it's unexciting. The firing helicopter then just somehow vanishes so they can have a scene expressing true love, and then returns. This is one of my most hated tropes. There is absolutely no reason that the helicopter shouldn't still be there, it's just ignored.

If you want to replace "the one" with "the power of love"....okay, I guess. I don't love it, but I guess it's okay. But at least bother to keep track of where things are in your scene, because it's really weird when this sort of basic consistency is ignored.

[Wintermoot]

Note that it's only been 20 years inside the Matrix. In reality he's been held captive for 60 - some of which time was spent on reconstructing his and Trinity's broken bodies.

Also I found the moustache-twirling villainy of the machines here to be pretty hilarious. If they had just left him alone, or better yet either allowed him to shack up with Trinity inside the virtual world or never let him see her in the first place, they could have probably kept both Ones on lockdown for eternity. But they couldn't help but be Stupid Evil instead :smalltongue:

According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

[Psyren]

According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

They already had that though:
their pods were next to each other in the real world. There was no reason to keep taunting them inside the Matrix too. All it ended up doing was rattling the bars of their cage so hard that some of them came loose. His experiment was doomed to fail.


I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

Lmao! I guess so :smallbiggrin:

This is a clear case of "it sounds artistic, let's do it" without any real thought given to the implications.

[Ramza00]

According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally :smallyuk:apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

There are philosophy reasons for this, several philosophers, and they do not 100% agree why this is the case. :smallbiggrin:

Thus you are going to buy it, not buy it and feel dissatisfied, or not buy it but at a later moment change one mind about it.

[Talakeal]

Some good ideas, but overall terrible execution.

I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I was watching a well made fan film like The Hunt for Gollum or Star Trek Phase 2.

I think if they had managed to get back Hugo Weaving or Lawrence Fishburne it would have gone a long way to improving it.

Hated the constant cutting to scenes of the original trilogy. The alone ruined the movie for me.

There also seemed to be a ton of plot holes, although maybe I wasn’t watching carefully enough as I had just had a dental procedure done and was kind of high on pain meds at the time.

[Clertar]

Another film to the pile of disappointing 20+ year-old sequels. Go figure.

[Lemmy]

I'd call this a soulless cash-grab, but clearly it's not grabbing any cash... So I guess it's just soulless (and really REALLY boring).

[JadedDM]

...but clearly it's not grabbing any cash...
I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

[tomandtish]

There is way too much reliance on nostalgia, with a *lot* of shot for shot recreation. I kind of get that, given the premise, but I can just watch the original matrix if I want to see it. Nostalgia is fine, but it needs to serve a purpose in the film's current narrative. The most recent Ghostbusters and Spiderman films both do this admirably, but here...it dwells on the nostalgia, because the current film's plot is weak.


Very much this. This has the same problem for me that The Force Awakens did. I've seen this movie. I've seen this movie in this franchise.

I think the OP's "meh" sums it up nicely.


I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

Especially when released on HBO at the same time (which is where i saw it).

[Millstone85]

Well, that's a lot of negative reception, enough to kill my hope for a good movie.

Curiosity will still bring me to the theater, though.

[Mechalich]

I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

In the past decade the Christmas week has emerged as the single most profitable interval at the box office in the US. Americans go to the movies over Christmas, and they bring family members who rarely see movies along with them. As a result the receipts for all films released over Christmas are inflated compared to films released at other times. The schedule is not neutral.

Studios know this, of course, and they set their release slate to maximize this effect whenever possible. It was not a coincidence that Disney released four Star Wars films at Christmas, nor it is one that Spider-Man got the weekend this time around. Likewise the Matrix sequel is well positioned to take advantage of this as well. Is really isn't possible to know how much of a scheduling related boost this film actually received, but it's worth keeping that in mind.

[Ramza00]

In the past decade the Christmas week has emerged as the single most profitable interval at the box office in the US. Americans go to the movies over Christmas, and they bring family members who rarely see movies along with them. As a result the receipts for all films released over Christmas are inflated compared to films released at other times. The schedule is not neutral.

Studios know this, of course, and they set their release slate to maximize this effect whenever possible. It was not a coincidence that Disney released four Star Wars films at Christmas, nor it is one that Spider-Man got the weekend this time around. Likewise the Matrix sequel is well positioned to take advantage of this as well. Is really isn't possible to know how much of a scheduling related boost this film actually received, but it's worth keeping that in mind.

Not going to figure out the numbers for "Christmas Week" instead hyperfocusing on Christmas Day for I think that is pattern enough, but here is the last 5 years prior to pandemic, and 2020 and 2021 Christmas Day.

_58 million 183,925 thousand (2021)
Spider-Man No Way Home, 31.6 million (54.3%)
Matrix Resurrections, 4.65 million (8.0%)
_10 million 214,882 thousand (2020)
Wonder Woman 1984, 7.48 million (73.2%)

_78 million 632,563 thousand (2019)
Star Wars Episode 9 32.1 million (40.9%)
_78 million 463,841 thousand (2020)
Aquaman, 21.9 million (28%)
_81 million 472,493 thousand (2017)
Star Wars Episode 8 27.4 million (33.7%)
_83 million 122,128 thousand (2016)
Rogue One A Star Wars Story 25.8 million (31.1%)
103 million 117,445 thousand (2015)
Star Wars Episode 7 49.3 million (47.8%)
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/christmas_day/?grossesOption=calendarGrosses

As you can see most years get about 80 million on Christmas Day box office from the United States (not going to talk Worldwide numbers for it is more math, and the 72 million so far is Worldwide numbers).

And we in a middle of a pandemic, so all the US movies only are at 72% of an 80 million weekend with the 58 million that happened this year. That is a big deal, especially when Omnicron was announced (I Hope We Get Good Numbers for this in Dec 2021 and Jan 2022, for it is far more important than money.)

[Peelee]

In the past decade the Christmas week has emerged as the single most profitable interval at the box office in the US.

"Emerged"? It's been almost two decades since I worked at a theater and when I came in it was already long-established that Christmas was far and away the busiest time of the year. Everything sells out. People will come up and ask for a ticket but what they want is sold out. So they ask for a later time in the day, but it's sold out. So they ask for a different movie, but it's sold out. So they ask what isn't sold out and if they're lucky they get to see some crap movie released around Christmas specifically to pick up some overflow ticket sales because everything will sell out. Inside, it's a madhouse. Pure insanity, cats and dogs living together, just a madhouse. One year I interlocked six freaking screens, for crying out loud! And what's more amazing, I didn't even use the longest leader we had, which was not brand new (I'd eat my hat if that thing wasn't used for Revenge of the Sith).

It may have just emerged as the "most profitable" period in the last ten years (assuming that claim is true), but it has long been a madhouse time when pretty much everyone and their mom goes to the movies.

Don't go to the movies on Christmas. You will not enjoy it. Go on New Years Eve. It's deader than dead. Good odds you'll have a whole auditorium to yourself.

[Lemmy]

I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).
On a Christmas week... For a big-franchise movie with a 200 million dollars production budget?

I humbly disagree.

[Ramza00]

On a Christmas week... For a big-franchise movie with a 200 million dollars production budget?

I humbly disagree.

We have no clue how much money it made (virtual money of course) with its HBO Max numbers.

But yeah if this was not a pandemic and not HBO Max simultaneously release those are not good numbers.

[Dienekes]

I'd call this a soulless cash-grab, but clearly it's not grabbing any cash... So I guess it's just soulless (and really REALLY boring).

See, I actually don’t think this is right.

Boring maybe. That I can’t fault you on, but I think there is actually a lot of soul in it. The beginnings especially seems like Ms Wachowski put a lot of her ruminations on her legacy, her anger at the studio process, and the general feeling of futility when trying to live up to something great you did early in life. Along with a side helping of kinda skin-deep philosophy she has always tried to put in the movie.

It’s just like a lot of the worst of the Wachowski outings, it’s a lot of stuff. Most of it half formed you can tell she really thought was deeper than it actually was.

[Tyndmyr]

On a Christmas week... For a big-franchise movie with a 200 million dollars production budget?

I humbly disagree.

I would agree with the assessment that this is likely a disappointing result. It's on trend, though. Each movie of the series has so far made significantly less than the preceding one. The five day weekend opener of just over $22mil(US box) is absolutely brutal.

It *also* lost out to Sing 2, which got nearly double it's US box. Sing 2 is...far lower profile than the Matrix series. A better movie than this(I see basically everything), but there's no way that they hoped to for the Matrix 4 to open in the #3 slot.


We have no clue how much money it made (virtual money of course) with its HBO Max numbers.

But yeah if this was not a pandemic and not HBO Max simultaneously release those are not good numbers.

It was ranked behind Godzilla v Kong in streaming numbers. Playing second fiddle to a movie that came out this summer...as a brand new major release has got to sting.

This is an absolute bomb by the numbers.

[Vahnavoi]

I'm torn. Reloaded and Revolutions had bigger flaws than this movie, but they also had more interesting commentary on the first Matrix. On one hand, the metacommentary of the first part of Resurrections felt like it overstayed its welcome in the moment, but after the movie was over, and knowing what happened after, it feels like they could've actually done a lot more with that angle. Similarly, the middle of the movie touches on roughly the right points, but it's too much tell too little show and the points aren't really given room to breath. The last part sort of reverses the roles of the leads, but it runs out of time to develop that dynamic and thus doesn't get as much out of it as it could.

Overall, I think this movie would've benefited from being split into two parts, akin to Reloaded/Revolutions, with one part focused on Trinity's viewpoint and time in the Matrix.

On a smaller note, Neal Patrick Harris was great in his role, but whoever the new Smith was just couldn't beat Hugo Weavings. They weren't bad, it's just that Hugo got all the best ham in the other movies.

[Traab]

How about theorycrafting time. Lets say you are a writer given the basic premise of the movie, Neo is a game developer who created a matrix trilogy, there are visions of the past, people trying to set him free people trying to keep him grounded. What would you do with the basic idea?

Me? I would go with a heavy total recall/inception style of story where the goal is to try and figure out what is real. Is he crazy? Is the matrix real? Was it all a delusion? Is the Matrix a real thing, manipulating the world around him to create a scenario where he can be convinced that there is nothing to escape from? Or is he falling apart and drifting away from the real world into some fantasy land where he is cyber jeebus? I want US to question whats actually happening, not just Mr Anderson. Did he escape? Or is he still stuck in another illusion of the matrix? After all, the machines have had a couple centuries of trial and error to perfect their system, so putting in a fail safe of an alternate matrix where they can believe they have been freed and are fighting against the machines, all while still plugged in, wouldnt be an irrational decision to make if enough "rebels" form from each batch of humans to reject the "normal" world they are provided. Or is he really out of the system? I want there to be a real question right up till the end. Where we get some sort of proof one way or the other. "Oh its all real, finally we can trust in this!" Then they walk away and behind them there is a brief flicker or visual glitch and the evil horn music blare happens. The End. (of part 1)

[Ramza00]

On a smaller note, Neal Patrick Harris was great in his role, but whoever the new Smith was just couldn't beat Hugo Weavings. They weren't bad, it's just that Hugo got all the best ham in the other movies.

Who the new Smith is? Well it is Jonathan Groff. He is most famous playing "You'll be back" King George the 3rd in Hamiliton Link 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERYukmba5Vg) and here is Link 2, What Comes Next, the reprise song with a different outfit and a better sound but less funny. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERYukmba5Vg) Groff is also famous for Kristoff which is the blonde boyfriend in Frozen 1 and 2, playing Patrick Murray in HBO's Looking, Holden Ford in Netflix's Mindhunter, over a dozen Glee episodes, and lots of other works including some video game voices. Jonathan Groff's breakout role was Spring Awakening where he was nominated for a Tony (but did not win) and it was a big deal for he was in his early 20s then.

Sidenote lots of hot out gay actors in Matrix Revolution. Another one I noticed besides Jonathan Groff and the very famous Neil Patrick Harris ...

is Brian J. Smith as Berg. If you do not remember Berg is the younger Io guy who worshiped Neo as a kid and finds the older Neo beard is working for him / Berg. Brian J Smith in other actor jobs previously was the young military guy in Stargate Universe, was the lead in Sense 8 which the Wachowskis did, and has been in half a dozen other things that I am unfamiliar with.

There are probably lots of other actors I know from somewhere else but it did not click on the first viewing since there is a lot to pay attention to in this movie. Hopefully sometime in the next week I will make time to watch the movie again.

[Psyren]

is Brian J. Smith as Berg. If you do not remember Berg is the younger Io guy who worshiped Neo as a kid and finds the beard is working for him. Brian J Smith previously was the young military guy in Stargate Universe, was the lead in Sense 8 which the Wachowskis did, and has been in half a dozen other things that I am unfamiliar with.

There are probably lots of other actors I know from somewhere else but it did not click on the first viewing since there is a lot to pay attention to in this movie. Hopefully sometime in the next week I will make time to watch the movie again.

There are a ton from Sense8 (https://comicyears.com/pop-culture/sense8-cast-in-matrix-resurrections/), including Freema Agyeman aka Martha Jones from Doctor Who.

[Peelee]

There are a ton from Sense8 (https://comicyears.com/pop-culture/sense8-cast-in-matrix-resurrections/), including Freema Agyeman aka Martha Jones from Doctor Who.

AKA Junior Crown Prosecutor Alesha Phillips from Law & Order : UK.

[Vahnavoi]

How about theorycrafting time. Lets say you are a writer given the basic premise of the movie, Neo is a game developer who created a matrix trilogy, there are visions of the past, people trying to set him free people trying to keep him grounded. What would you do with the basic idea?

I came up with two distinct takes:

The start focuses on the game design angle. While testing and modifying the engine for a Matrix game, one game character, Morpheus, appears to become self-aware. He starts arguing to Neo that all of the Matrix games happened for real and that the game he's working on now is the newest iteration of the Matrix.

Neo's own grasp on reality starts to slip as he tries to figure out why Morpheus is acting like this. Did he accidentally create a working AI, is that AI effectively insane, is Neo himself going insane and reading too much into a character believing essentially what he coded them to believe? So on and so forth. He eventually becomes convinced someone hacked his system as is engaging in some elaborate gaslighting, but fails to find the hacker anywhere other than the game he himself is supposedly coding...

At this point, Neo's boss removes him from the project and puts him on a forced leave. Neo goes to therapy, it's all going fine, untill Morpheus AI hacks into his personal computer and down the rabbit hole he goes. Eventually Neo figures that if the Matrix truly does exist as something outside his own creation, and that if Morpheus could hack into his personal computer to contact him, he can do the reverse. So he (re)codes his game avatar as the One and plays the game untill he gets back to the Source to ask some tough questions...

You can replace Neo with Trinity, or have Neo be just a gane designer with someone else playing the game to find out the truth.

This one embraces the self-commentary angle. It opens with an interview about the themes behind the original Matrix series, Neo's motives for making a sequel, and how the original series impacted other people. In addition to Neo, there's a simulation theory believer who basically belongs to a religion founded on the cultural heritage of Matrix, and the interviewer brings up a third person, an untreated schizophrenic who shot his family due to believing the first Matrix was literally true.

It's all super awkward, with Neo having a lot of issues with how people misinterpreted the originals and guilt over the idea of his work driving some mentally unbalanced person into murdering his family. The other interviewee - lets call her Bugs - is disappointed by how his idol basically hates his own work and the people who built their lives on it, and offended by the interviewer comparing her honest belief in simulation theory to actions of a genuinely insane person.

Despite this, Neo and Bugs have some chemistry together and meet later at a cafeteria. They bond over talking about Neo's new game. In a more relaxed setting, Bugs manages to explain her beliefs better and Neo regains his inspiration and appreciation of the Matrix series. He starts incorporating some of her ideas into his sequel, calls her to test, lots of fun is had, so on and so forth.

Then, the supposed insane person, who either has escaped or been released after his sentence/treatment was over, comes to meet Neo. He says he has a message from Morpheus. This rattles Neo and sours his good mood. He seeks out therapy to deal with the anxiety this encounter causes him. His therapist prescribes him some medicine to help him get over him.

For a while, all seems fine, but next time Neo meets Bugs, she looks like Trinity. Neo is even more rattled, and goes back to his therapist. Neo says the drugs don't work, they are making things worse. His therapist says he's incorrect - the medicine is working just as intented.

Neo basically flees his therapist. His grasp of reality slipping, he calls Bugs and confides her what's going on. She's calm and supportive and assures him it will all be fine once his medication is changed. He's mollified, but only barely. He tries to sleep on it, hoping the hallucinations go away.

The focus then shifts to Bugs. She goes to talk to Neo's therapist. She's trying to be as reasonable as she can, explaining her friend might be having a psychotic break and needs help with his medication. The therapist again argues the medicine is working just as it's meant to. The whole discussion starts to feel off to Bugs. The therapist is telling her things she has no business knowing, and invoking knowledge they really shouldn't have. It culminates in the therapist offering her the same medicine. The therapist reveals they saw the interview and know about Bugs' beliefs. They call her out for having a crush on Neo and secretly hoping she is Trinity. She reluctantly agrees that yes, it would be nice to have confirmation to her faith, but really the more important thing is that her friend might be having a breakdown. The therapist points out that there are two possible realities present: one where they are a manipulative bastard, drugging and feeding falsehoods to their patient and associates of their patient, and a second one where they are giving Bugs an honest chance at finding the truth behind it all. So which does she really believe in? They then leave the medicine in her care.

Bugs is hesitant over taking the medicine. We see her pondering on whether to take it, but it's never confirmed if they do take it.

Meanwhile, Neo is having a tough time. He's starting to see code everywhere. He climbs on a roof and starts pondering whether he should jump. Before he can, Bugs arrives and stops him. She assures him everything is all right, he of course sees her as Trinity, they have a heart-warming moment. The movie ends with implication that they jump down together, but doesn't confirm if they do.

[Eldan]

Some good ideas there, I like those. The first is probably what I'd go for, but let me suggest a third take anyway:

Thomas Anderson starts work on the new Matrix, while regularly going to therapy. His therapist finds the idea of the Matrix fascinating and they begin to talk about what the idea of it. How Anderson himself would create a virtual world that keeps humans placid and calm, why he thinks the machines couldn't do it the first two times they tried, how Anderson imagines the perfect created world and what that says about him as a god-like designer figure.

The twist of course being that the machines are trying to design a new matrix that will keep a sufficient number of humans hooked to keep them alive. They are now convinced that they do not sufficiently understand human psychology, so they are taking on some human designers on board to help them create Matrix 3.0

Neo wouldn't be the only one, of course. He's important, since he offered himself up to the humans voluntarily, but the machine architects would take input from other humans too, likely including Trinity.

Over the second act of the film, several parties would contact Anderson: radical free humans, who want to shut the matrix down immediately and free everyone, whether they can survive in the real world or not, the, let's call them, free human ecologists, who are trying to slowly change the world into something that can sustain a human population again and only want to release small numbers of humans at a time, as many as they can keep alive, and possibly a spokesperson for the Matrix humans, who wants to stay inside, rather than leave and be a working drone in a post-apocalypse terraforming project.

[Millstone85]

Well, that's a lot of negative reception, enough to kill my hope for a good movie.

Curiosity will still bring me to the theater, though.And now I saw it.

Small audience, and two or three persons left midway through. Yikes!

And yet... I liked it? Looks like I am in the minority this time around.

[Dr.Samurai]

This movie was a complete waste of time, for creators and viewers. I honestly can't believe this was the story chosen to revisit this franchise.

The idea of machines allying with the humans in the real world is cool. I like that the machines were fractured after the peace was brokered and some of them went to the side of the humans. I don't think that Bugs is correct though in saying that Neo achieved so much more than peace, because Io is still hiding from the sentinels. It doesn't sound like the machines really honored anything, and people are still rebelling dangerously in the Matrix to try to get free and free others. This is very similar to Star Wars, where the reboot picks up almost as if the events of the previous trilogy don't matter. It's nice that the machines help Io grow strawberries, but apart from that Io is not all that different from Zion, so this "change" is not very impactful.

I think the idea should have been expanded to also include the evolution of people like Cypher; humans that shun the real world, want nothing to do with skulking around under grow lamps hiding from sentinels, and prefer to remain in the Matrix. But for rebels turned heel, they can be aided by the machines to unlock potential in the Matrix to challenge the hacker rebels that can jump far and perform crazy acrobatics. The Analyst refers to the sheeple at the end and I think a cohort of bad guys that are humans, but with similar abilities to Morpheus and Trinity, would be great. Why free everyone to a worse life, when you can be god avatars in the Matrix? All you have to do is comply. In this way you have humans and machines on both sides of the conflict in a meaningful way.

Instead, we get these SUPER weak agents that can no longer aim properly and hit anyone. At all. Not even when they are running away from them in a straight line down a corridor. My goodness, what a departure from the first scene in the Matrix when Trinity asks, with some concern, "Are there agents?" and Morpheus says simply "Yes" and Trinity swears, knowing that she is in grave danger. Now... lmao who cares? The Agents can't do anything. They literally shoot at Bugs nearly point-blank in the Modal and don't hit a single thing. Instead, they are replaced by "bots" that are basically just rage zombies. Big deal. What happened to the "upgrades" from Matrix Reloaded? Yes, it was a little lame, but not as lame as what we just got in Resurrections.

And then Merv returns with Rufio and the Lost Boys from Hook? What in the hell?

And why does everyone have Keymaster powers now? How are the humans not winning this war with Keymaster powers and Stormtrooper Agents as their adversaries?

So Neo keeps saying all along he never believed he was "the One", and that is validated in this movie when Trinity... ascends. How does this jive with the trilogy? Is this why nothing really changed, because the Oracle and Morpheus were wrong all along? The concept of love as the key to breaking free is... okay I guess. Trinity's prophecy is intertwined with the One, she is supposed to fall in love the One. Now... that was treated more as a clue or confirmation in the first film, but it could also be read as "the power of Trinity's love facilitates the One". It's just a bit unfortunate because Neo and Trinity were soooo subdued in the trilogy that their "love" hardly registers. There's very little chemistry there. It is actually more believable in Resurrections because the two act more like normal people in the Matrix than they ever did in the Trilogy.

I can at least say that I saw reports that this movie attacks the fans, and while there is certainly a problem currently with franchises attacking the fanbase, I did not see that in the movie. I'm actually not even sure how people interpreted an attack on the fanbase to be honest. Could have gone over my head, but I think the issues here are purely in storytelling and execution. I found myself more interested in whatever hot mess the annoying "creatives" at Warner Bros. were going to cook up in their montage than what we ended up with on the screen.

[Psyren]

And why does everyone have ____ powers now? How are the humans not winning this war with _____ and _____ as their adversaries?

That's exactly the core problem, they are! i.e. no stakes or urgency.


I came up with two distinct takes:

The start focuses on the game design angle. While testing and modifying the engine for a Matrix game, one game character, Morpheus, appears to become self-aware. He starts arguing to Neo that all of the Matrix games happened for real and that the game he's working on now is the newest iteration of the Matrix.

Neo's own grasp on reality starts to slip as he tries to figure out why Morpheus is acting like this. Did he accidentally create a working AI, is that AI effectively insane, is Neo himself going insane and reading too much into a character believing essentially what he coded them to believe? So on and so forth. He eventually becomes convinced someone hacked his system as is engaging in some elaborate gaslighting, but fails to find the hacker anywhere other than the game he himself is supposedly coding...

At this point, Neo's boss removes him from the project and puts him on a forced leave. Neo goes to therapy, it's all going fine, untill Morpheus AI hacks into his personal computer and down the rabbit hole he goes. Eventually Neo figures that if the Matrix truly does exist as something outside his own creation, and that if Morpheus could hack into his personal computer to contact him, he can do the reverse. So he (re)codes his game avatar as the One and plays the game untill he gets back to the Source to ask some tough questions...

You can replace Neo with Trinity, or have Neo be just a gane designer with someone else playing the game to find out the truth.

This one embraces the self-commentary angle. It opens with an interview about the themes behind the original Matrix series, Neo's motives for making a sequel, and how the original series impacted other people. In addition to Neo, there's a simulation theory believer who basically belongs to a religion founded on the cultural heritage of Matrix, and the interviewer brings up a third person, an untreated schizophrenic who shot his family due to believing the first Matrix was literally true.

It's all super awkward, with Neo having a lot of issues with how people misinterpreted the originals and guilt over the idea of his work driving some mentally unbalanced person into murdering his family. The other interviewee - lets call her Bugs - is disappointed by how his idol basically hates his own work and the people who built their lives on it, and offended by the interviewer comparing her honest belief in simulation theory to actions of a genuinely insane person.

Despite this, Neo and Bugs have some chemistry together and meet later at a cafeteria. They bond over talking about Neo's new game. In a more relaxed setting, Bugs manages to explain her beliefs better and Neo regains his inspiration and appreciation of the Matrix series. He starts incorporating some of her ideas into his sequel, calls her to test, lots of fun is had, so on and so forth.

Then, the supposed insane person, who either has escaped or been released after his sentence/treatment was over, comes to meet Neo. He says he has a message from Morpheus. This rattles Neo and sours his good mood. He seeks out therapy to deal with the anxiety this encounter causes him. His therapist prescribes him some medicine to help him get over him.

For a while, all seems fine, but next time Neo meets Bugs, she looks like Trinity. Neo is even more rattled, and goes back to his therapist. Neo says the drugs don't work, they are making things worse. His therapist says he's incorrect - the medicine is working just as intented.

Neo basically flees his therapist. His grasp of reality slipping, he calls Bugs and confides her what's going on. She's calm and supportive and assures him it will all be fine once his medication is changed. He's mollified, but only barely. He tries to sleep on it, hoping the hallucinations go away.

The focus then shifts to Bugs. She goes to talk to Neo's therapist. She's trying to be as reasonable as she can, explaining her friend might be having a psychotic break and needs help with his medication. The therapist again argues the medicine is working just as it's meant to. The whole discussion starts to feel off to Bugs. The therapist is telling her things she has no business knowing, and invoking knowledge they really shouldn't have. It culminates in the therapist offering her the same medicine. The therapist reveals they saw the interview and know about Bugs' beliefs. They call her out for having a crush on Neo and secretly hoping she is Trinity. She reluctantly agrees that yes, it would be nice to have confirmation to her faith, but really the more important thing is that her friend might be having a breakdown. The therapist points out that there are two possible realities present: one where they are a manipulative bastard, drugging and feeding falsehoods to their patient and associates of their patient, and a second one where they are giving Bugs an honest chance at finding the truth behind it all. So which does she really believe in? They then leave the medicine in her care.

Bugs is hesitant over taking the medicine. We see her pondering on whether to take it, but it's never confirmed if they do take it.

Meanwhile, Neo is having a tough time. He's starting to see code everywhere. He climbs on a roof and starts pondering whether he should jump. Before he can, Bugs arrives and stops him. She assures him everything is all right, he of course sees her as Trinity, they have a heart-warming moment. The movie ends with implication that they jump down together, but doesn't confirm if they do.


Some good ideas there, I like those. The first is probably what I'd go for, but let me suggest a third take anyway:

Thomas Anderson starts work on the new Matrix, while regularly going to therapy. His therapist finds the idea of the Matrix fascinating and they begin to talk about what the idea of it. How Anderson himself would create a virtual world that keeps humans placid and calm, why he thinks the machines couldn't do it the first two times they tried, how Anderson imagines the perfect created world and what that says about him as a god-like designer figure.

The twist of course being that the machines are trying to design a new matrix that will keep a sufficient number of humans hooked to keep them alive. They are now convinced that they do not sufficiently understand human psychology, so they are taking on some human designers on board to help them create Matrix 3.0

Neo wouldn't be the only one, of course. He's important, since he offered himself up to the humans voluntarily, but the machine architects would take input from other humans too, likely including Trinity.

Over the second act of the film, several parties would contact Anderson: radical free humans, who want to shut the matrix down immediately and free everyone, whether they can survive in the real world or not, the, let's call them, free human ecologists, who are trying to slowly change the world into something that can sustain a human population again and only want to release small numbers of humans at a time, as many as they can keep alive, and possibly a spokesperson for the Matrix humans, who wants to stay inside, rather than leave and be a working drone in a post-apocalypse terraforming project.

Before you decide on any kind of take you need to answer the basic question the movie failed to answer:
Namely, why do we need Neo back specifically (beyond the meta-reasoning of "hey it's the guy you know!" nostalgia to get IRL butts in theater seats), and why do we need him right now?

Io is holding steady and may even be thriving, and has separatist machines on its side. It's now the Matrix machine faction who are in decline. There is no clear time limit or ticking clock to getting either Neo or Trinity out, in fact the machines have apparently made him functionally immortal in the real world too. Agents are nowhere near as threatening as they once were, and thus neither is the Matrix as a whole. The EMP is no longer humanity's only viable weapon. Hell, the machines on their side appear to be even more advanced than the Matrix ones (one has a cloaking device??)

There are absolutely no stakes to the movie's central conflict. That needs to be worked out first before we start coming up with the plotty things like the nature of Neo's prison and how he eventually subverts it.

[Eldan]

Hmmmm. You're right. Though movies can work without ticking clocks or high stakes and be more slow and meditative.

I suppose the central conflict would have to be about the machines declining? It would have to be structured as almost a humanitarian mission. The machines are on the way down, "human power" is not working right, more and more humans are escaping and the peace agreement between men and machines means they have to let them go. If central machine core goes down, so do the separatist machines on the human side, and billions of humans will die as their pods go cold.

Slow burn of a conflict, though. More of a "what do we do" than a "we have to do this right now". Still, can work. Structured more like an alien first contact movie, where the machines and the humans need to communicate and come to a new understanding.

[Traab]

This movie was a complete waste of time, for creators and viewers. I honestly can't believe this was the story chosen to revisit this franchise.

The idea of machines allying with the humans in the real world is cool. I like that the machines were fractured after the peace was brokered and some of them went to the side of the humans. I don't think that Bugs is correct though in saying that Neo achieved so much more than peace, because Io is still hiding from the sentinels. It doesn't sound like the machines really honored anything, and people are still rebelling dangerously in the Matrix to try to get free and free others. This is very similar to Star Wars, where the reboot picks up almost as if the events of the previous trilogy don't matter. It's nice that the machines help Io grow strawberries, but apart from that Io is not all that different from Zion, so this "change" is not very impactful.

I think the idea should have been expanded to also include the evolution of people like Cypher; humans that shun the real world, want nothing to do with skulking around under grow lamps hiding from sentinels, and prefer to remain in the Matrix. But for rebels turned heel, they can be aided by the machines to unlock potential in the Matrix to challenge the hacker rebels that can jump far and perform crazy acrobatics. The Analyst refers to the sheeple at the end and I think a cohort of bad guys that are humans, but with similar abilities to Morpheus and Trinity, would be great. Why free everyone to a worse life, when you can be god avatars in the Matrix? All you have to do is comply. In this way you have humans and machines on both sides of the conflict in a meaningful way.

Instead, we get these SUPER weak agents that can no longer aim properly and hit anyone. At all. Not even when they are running away from them in a straight line down a corridor. My goodness, what a departure from the first scene in the Matrix when Trinity asks, with some concern, "Are there agents?" and Morpheus says simply "Yes" and Trinity swears, knowing that she is in grave danger. Now... lmao who cares? The Agents can't do anything. They literally shoot at Bugs nearly point-blank in the Modal and don't hit a single thing. Instead, they are replaced by "bots" that are basically just rage zombies. Big deal. What happened to the "upgrades" from Matrix Reloaded? Yes, it was a little lame, but not as lame as what we just got in Resurrections.

And then Merv returns with Rufio and the Lost Boys from Hook? What in the hell?

And why does everyone have Keymaster powers now? How are the humans not winning this war with Keymaster powers and Stormtrooper Agents as their adversaries?

So Neo keeps saying all along he never believed he was "the One", and that is validated in this movie when Trinity... ascends. How does this jive with the trilogy? Is this why nothing really changed, because the Oracle and Morpheus were wrong all along? The concept of love as the key to breaking free is... okay I guess. Trinity's prophecy is intertwined with the One, she is supposed to fall in love the One. Now... that was treated more as a clue or confirmation in the first film, but it could also be read as "the power of Trinity's love facilitates the One". It's just a bit unfortunate because Neo and Trinity were soooo subdued in the trilogy that their "love" hardly registers. There's very little chemistry there. It is actually more believable in Resurrections because the two act more like normal people in the Matrix than they ever did in the Trilogy.

I can at least say that I saw reports that this movie attacks the fans, and while there is certainly a problem currently with franchises attacking the fanbase, I did not see that in the movie. I'm actually not even sure how people interpreted an attack on the fanbase to be honest. Could have gone over my head, but I think the issues here are purely in storytelling and execution. I found myself more interested in whatever hot mess the annoying "creatives" at Warner Bros. were going to cook up in their montage than what we ended up with on the screen.

I actually like the idea of "traitor" humans in the matrix who know its a simulation, but basically traded their status as matrix attack dogs in exchange for an awesome fake life. They get to edit their own little corner of paradise, have all sorts of fancy powers, and in return they have to be on call to deal with outsiders trying to break people free from the matrix. Seriously, that would be a really badass story to work with. The sides have all fractured into factions, some humans want to live the high life in the matrix, some want to free everyone fromt he matrix, others want to free small batches they can sustain, some think they shouldnt break out anybody as that could spark a new war with the machines. On the other side the machines arent much better. Some support working with humans, others want to destroy all the humans, still others think they should change the matrix to make human life better because while they need power they dont want the humans to suffer, etc. And here is Neo and Trinity, two huge figures at the center of everything. Imagine getting nelson mandela on your side of a conflict, how much legitimacy and influence that would add. And here is Neo, unable to remember what he has been through, being wooed (or attacked) by all sides, trying to come to a conclusion as to the right group to back. Fight scenes with humans who have edited themselves a wide assortment of powers so its not just blurry fast martial arts, real world robo battles as each side tries to innovate their way to the top of an arms race, and lots of debate on the nature of freedom, truth, and choice. And what they cost as well as their worth.

[Dr.Samurai]

I still think...

Actual humans can escalate the conflict. If the machines are in decline, but there are a faction of humans that want the Matrix to remain because they prefer that reality to the real world, then you can have an unholy alliance between machine and human, where super-humans in the Matrix are fighting against the rebels and infiltrating Io and wreaking havoc with stolen knowledge of the rebel operation, etc.

The reason you need Neo is to fight back against the humans in the Matrix that have been assisted by the machines to hack reality to a greater degree than the rebels. And then Neo would fight back, but then it is revealed that Trinity is needed for full potential.

EDIT: I didn't see Traab's post, but yeah, traitor humans!

[Psyren]

Though movies can work without ticking clocks or high stakes and be more slow and meditative.

They can but you'd need a whole new premise for that. "Swashbuckling action, get Neo out" isn't compatible with slow and meditative.

Dr. Samurai's is an okay start but needs a lot of work.


I suppose the central conflict would have to be about the machines declining? It would have to be structured as almost a humanitarian mission. The machines are on the way down, "human power" is not working right, more and more humans are escaping and the peace agreement between men and machines means they have to let them go. If central machine core goes down, so do the separatist machines on the human side, and billions of humans will die as their pods go cold.

Slow burn of a conflict, though. More of a "what do we do" than a "we have to do this right now". Still, can work. Structured more like an alien first contact movie, where the machines and the humans need to communicate and come to a new understanding.

The big issue there is that putting the focus on the energy crisis just continues to highlight how dumb it is. "Drain humans of energy, feed the drained humans to the rest" is not sustainable, no matter how much the Matrix keeps pretending otherwise.

[Tyndmyr]

How about theorycrafting time. Lets say you are a writer given the basic premise of the movie, Neo is a game developer who created a matrix trilogy, there are visions of the past, people trying to set him free people trying to keep him grounded. What would you do with the basic idea?

Me? I would go with a heavy total recall/inception style of story where the goal is to try and figure out what is real. Is he crazy? Is the matrix real? Was it all a delusion? Is the Matrix a real thing, manipulating the world around him to create a scenario where he can be convinced that there is nothing to escape from? Or is he falling apart and drifting away from the real world into some fantasy land where he is cyber jeebus? I want US to question whats actually happening, not just Mr Anderson. Did he escape? Or is he still stuck in another illusion of the matrix? After all, the machines have had a couple centuries of trial and error to perfect their system, so putting in a fail safe of an alternate matrix where they can believe they have been freed and are fighting against the machines, all while still plugged in, wouldnt be an irrational decision to make if enough "rebels" form from each batch of humans to reject the "normal" world they are provided. Or is he really out of the system? I want there to be a real question right up till the end. Where we get some sort of proof one way or the other. "Oh its all real, finally we can trust in this!" Then they walk away and behind them there is a brief flicker or visual glitch and the evil horn music blare happens. The End. (of part 1)

That was actually kind of what I was expecting. The trailer leaned on this sort of uncertainty quite heavily, but we honestly didn't get much more than the trailer teased us.

Waiting for the hero to catch up is only interesting for so long...and worse, we have to go through that again with Trinity. The audience is already on board with the whole Matrix conceit, we don't need to be sold on it even if the character does...and so waiting on the characters is...a little boring.

The machines working with the humans...okay, that was an interesting little twist. I would have liked to see that explored a bit more, I think. Machines being at war with one another, alright. How are they divided, and what's going on with that? That's a cool new element we could play with.

We also might want to look more at the machines motivation. The whole idea that they somehow get an awful lot of energy somehow by Neo and Trinity being close, but not together is...okay, mostly just odd. The battery motif in the original isn't perfect, but trying to make true love the core component just sits badly in all the wrong ways. It doesn't fit. Likewise, if the mass of people somehow still supply energy, having them all suicide bomb, uh...makes zero sense.

Plot Ideas:

Perhaps they could have tied back into the third film. That whole "the one is the remainder of an unbalanced equation" bit. That's vague. You can work with that. Perhaps they have accepted that revolutions are inevitable, but they are setting up tricks to sandbox and isolate the revolution to somewhere more easily managed.

The Architect is attempting to use Neo's knowledge as safely as possible, but the machine war is complicating things for him, and he's getting desperate. Processing power is limited, and more and more glitches are happening as power is diverted to the war from the Matrix, giving us some reason why this is happening now, as well as why he is growing more confrontational with Neo.

So...you have a faster initial acceptance, particularly by Trinity, and a phase where they are trying to learn more under the noses of the machines. Get some tension in there, and get to that uncertainty as to what is real. We utterly skip most of the meta commentary in favor of more examination of the new machine dynamic.

Bugs is cool. Let's give her some actual work to do in the plot after the opening. She's on the outside trying to get to them, but the sandboxing is limiting her ability to get to within broadcast range. She has to find openings in the machine vs machine war, and exploit limited openings in security created by this to get in, and try to pass information to/from Neo/Trinity. This gives some actual purpose to her, and also gives us some "real world" tension and the ability to see some other part of it. New horrors of the machines can be revealed, and we can have some great CGI robot combat, even though it's not the focus.

Let us also say that the situation is known about not because of "uh, random stuff, we looked a lot, and quasi-religious whatever" but because Bugs grew up in Neo's little sandbox, and after being freed, realized that the guy everyone remembered as a big hero lived in the apartment a few doors down(or they can work at the same office). An actual personal connection, not the worship motif.

Smith has also been isolated because, well, he's connected to Neo, and left unbalanced by him, will corrupt the larger machine's system again. Smith is deeply, deeply unhappy about this isolation. His memory has, like Neo's, been wiped, and he is seeking therapy, but like Neo, feels that something is terribly, terribly wrong. His rage and disgust keep leaking through, and he and Neo bump into one another in the part where Neo is questioning reality, finding a certain degree of kinship in someone else feeling the same, and he tries to compare notes. This goes...poorly. Smith remembers, and begins attempting to find a way out. Now we've got some actual tension to the ultimate goal, as Neo has to beat Smith....but the Analyst isn't going to let either out. Smith goes to the Merovingian to attempt to find a backdoor, giving them some time for the one person to escape.

This also serves as a way to lure one back in to have a heist to save the other. That said...I think it might honestly be more interesting to have Neo be the one staying behind. Trinity, Bugs, etc get to plan the heist to save the other. Neo/Trinity doesn't get BS love powers. Neither of them flies. Something like half the team dies as this part goes entirely wrong.

Trinity extracts Neo, but they've taken wounds, and attempting to replicate his healing trick from the earlier movie....it doesn't work. Ysee, the One is created in every cycle, but this is a new cycle. Bugs is the person following the rabbit, literally having it tattooed on her, and the seeker for truth. It's her. Neo and Trinity have a touching moment as Smith gets to angrily shred them with gunfire, but that's when Bugs gets to manifest her full power at last. Her journey isn't the independent seeking of truth that Neo's was, but an attempt to protect and free others. And so her trigger moment is that as well.

She has powers that are...not a carbon clone of Neo's previous ones, but similar. Yknow, set up an option for a sequel that doesn't have the flying problem. Give her a brief time rewind. It lets you save Trinity and Neo, it gives you the deja vu callback, and it's awesome without being entirely broken. She needs to get them out before the real world war entirely removes their chance of escape.

Trinity and Neo get to have an actual retirement and sendoff, and you've got a related, but new story to tell in the world.

Post credit scene can have the invading machine army salvaging everything for parts, and connecting up the still usable pods and hardware captured. Final shot is Smith waking up in the new Matrix, a smile upon his face.

[Dr.Samurai]

I’m no electrical engineer but I suspect the power usage for running something like the Matrix is vastly more than whatever they drain from the humans they’ve imprisoned…

[Traab]

I’m no electrical engineer but I suspect the power usage for running something like the Matrix is vastly more than whatever they drain from the humans they’ve imprisoned…

Yes thats been well established since the first movie was released. Human batteries is a terrible idea.

[Nicos]

I’m no electrical engineer but I suspect the power usage for running something like the Matrix is vastly more than whatever they drain from the humans they’ve imprisoned…


I hate when movies don't follow the laws of thermodynamics.

[Millstone85]

Likewise, if the mass of people somehow still supply energy, having them all suicide bomb, uh...makes zero sense.The impression I got is that bots are entirely part of the Matrix itself. It has been simulating bird flocks without the machines keeping birds in pods, and now it is able to simulate human crowds independently from plugged humans. In game terms, the Matrix now has NPCs in addition to player avatars.

And this may have been Lana Wachowski's attempt at portraying the concept of "philosophical zombie", or p-zombie for short, a non-sapient body that would be physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious individual.

Or maybe I am wrong and a bot is more like a simplified agent, able to take over multiple humans at once without risking another Smith situation. In that case, yes, huge waste.


I’m no electrical engineer but I suspect the power usage for running something like the Matrix is vastly more than whatever they drain from the humans they’ve imprisoned…Nevermind the Matrix. Just keeping humans alive should require more energy than could possibly be harvested from them.

It would be like trying to keep a hamster alive with the energy it produces by running inside a wheel. Perpetual motion machines don't work, and this one would be especially silly.

[Traab]

The impression I got is that bots are entirely part of the Matrix itself. It has been simulating bird flocks without the machines keeping birds in pods, and now it is able to simulate human crowds independently from plugged humans. In game terms, the Matrix now has NPCs in addition to player avatars.

And this may have been Lana Wachowski's attempt at portraying the concept of "philosophical zombie", or p-zombie for short, a non-sapient body that would be physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious individual.

Or maybe I am wrong and a bot is more like a simplified agent, able to take over multiple humans at once without risking another Smith situation. In that case, yes, huge waste.

Nevermind the Matrix. Just keeping humans alive should require more energy than could possibly be harvested from them.

It would be like trying to keep a hamster alive with the energy it produces by running inside a wheel. Perpetual motion machines don't work, and this one would be especially silly.

None of it makes sense. lets put aside human batteries being a dumb idea. Why do they need to be put into the matrix? Why not just left in a medically induced coma? You cant rebel against the machine if you are in a coma. There, I just removed one of the drains on any potential power produced. The humans arent suffering because they are in a coma and cant feel anything bad. I am pretty sure iirc the original idea was processor power from human brains which actually would explain linking billions of people into a hive mind program or whatever. But batteries? There is no reason for that.

[Millstone85]

I am pretty sure iirc the original idea was processor power from human brains which actually would explain linking billions of people into a hive mind program or whatever.Indeed, and my n°1 hope for this sequel was that idea getting retconned back in. But instead, Neo and Trinity were said to be super-batteries. :smallmad:

Also, do you know what I would have revealed as the actual source of energy used by the machines? None other than what we were told was used to depower them: the nanite cloud, actually a world-wide solar panel.

[Dragonus45]

Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.

[Ramza00]

Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.

Thermodynamics is the death of metaphor? or something?

( I agree )

[t209]

Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.
Plus I think original Human as CPU idea is used by 40k before.
Or at least psychic version of it.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Astronomican

[Bohandas]

I’m no electrical engineer but I suspect the power usage for running something like the Matrix is vastly more than whatever they drain from the humans they’ve imprisoned…

Definitely. Just keeping the humans alive without the Matrix would use more power than the power plant could create.


Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.

Because it's so blatantly nonsense it takes you out of the film. Much of the stuff in The Matrix looks plausible (at least on the surface*), but people as batteries (as well as the idea that dying in the matrix would make you die in real life, Neo's ability to interface with the machines psychically, and everything the Architect says**), is more the kind of blatant nonsense you'd get in a b-movie like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Ad Astra

And it's compounded by the fact that they were originally going to use an explanation that actually made sense, but for some reason they went with this

*There's a lot of additional things that don't make sense upon further consideration, but they aren;t as blatant, such as the oracle's ability to see the future, and the explanation for the resistence fighters' abilities, which seem to have a psychic or psychological angle, whereas realistically they should look morenlike breaking a game with exploits.

**Although the nonsensicality of the Architect's claims is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he is a self-proclaimed deceiver

[Dragonus45]

Because it's so blatantly nonsense it takes you out of the film.

If you say so sure, but your wrong.

[Vahnavoi]

Before you decide on any kind of take you need to answer the basic question the movie failed to answer:

I was asked what kind of a movie I would make given a specific premise and had zero reason to question it. Though I specifically noted my first take doesn't even need Neo, I don't find your question particularly dramatically relevant. It certainly isn't relevant to my second take.

The actual Resurrections movie does answer your question, mind you.

The Analyst wants Neo and Trinity specifically because these two are part of a system to generate extra energy. Machines having trouble with meeting energy demands is established to be bad enough that it caused a machine civil war.

Humans don't need Neo. Some humans, namely Bugs, wants to find Neo, because she (and others) idolizes Neo and never found out what his ultimate fate was. Neo and Trinity were trapped in a loop for sixty years before Bugs managed to find one of them, mostly because of chance.

The stakes of the movie are that Bugs is jeopardizing the status quo by freeing Neo - the movie is exceedingly clear about that. You can complain about the implementation, but don't ignore what the movie tells you.

[Millstone85]

Namely, why do we need Neo back specifically (beyond the meta-reasoning of "hey it's the guy you know!" nostalgia to get IRL butts in theater seats), and why do we need him right now?
The stakes of the movie are that Bugs is jeopardizing the status quo by freeing Neo - the movie is exceedingly clear about that.Yeah, it is almost as if the story sets the individual against the system, or something. :smalltongue:

[Vahnavoi]

Or, to paraphrase something Bugs says in the movie:

"So, do you care more about plants than freeing minds?"

They could've done a LOT more with that angle than they did, but it's still there.

[Asmotherion]

I find it lacked the vibes of a Matrix movie. The Matrix was dark and gritty, this was a happy-go-lucky movie that was closer to a superhero movie than a Cyber Dystopia movie. I'm disapointed.

[Lurkmoar]

If you say so sure, but your wrong.

It was enough to break the suspension of disbelief. Morpheus' claims in the first film felt like a spoon fed lie and I was expecting the second film to rebut it and point out the machines were trying to PRESERVE human life. But the audience got what it got.

[BloodSquirrel]

Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.

It comes down to a principle that I can best describe as "Don't draw undue attention toward your story's contrivances".

We can all accept that stories are often based on unrealistic or poorly-thought out premises. As long as the story lets us put a black box around those things we can play along and just accept whatever rules they create for the setting. Space magic lets people move things with their minds? Sure, whatever. A alien species somehow evolved such that exposure to a different kind of sun than existed in their home system gives them superpowers? Ok, fine. Human beings have somehow been turned into free energy machines? Great.

The problem is when a story starts doing things that invites us to ask questions about those things and relies on the internal logic behind them to function- even though there is none, and they're just silly nonsense.

It's easy enough to just accept that the reason why the machines created the matrix is silly when it isn't that important. We can just abstract it away as "Somehow that works, so the machines need the matrix, which is why they want to stop the humans from waking up". But then Resurrections has to go and draw attention to it. Despair somehow creates more power... because apparently the matrix doesn't just run on our thermal output, it runs on our feels. The movie openly invites scrutiny by making its plot rely not just on the motivation that the premise is there to create, but the mechanics of the premise, which fall apart as soon as you think about them. We were willing to forgive you for that bit of silliness, but here you are bringing it up again like you were our girlfriend and it was the time we forgot your birthday ten years ago.

This kind of thing happens a lot- they'll be something that's just sort of a long-standing convention of the genre that everyone knows is kind of broken, but we're used enough to it that we don't think about it. But then someone who doesn't know what they're doing comes in and does something that messes with it, except they don't think about any of the implications that it runs on, and it winds up completely taking everybody out of the story.

[Vahnavoi]

Phooeye to that.

Yes, it's a shame they didn't establish, or rather, re-establish the idea that humans are required for processing or algorithmic power. However, Dragonus is right, it's a dead horse. Everyone knows that was the intent, everyone knows why it got replaced, you can just mentally swap the references to electric power with references to processing power and be done with it. Boom, done. The plot points in the new movie? They make as much sense from that viewpoint. More sense, in fact.

When Neo tries to stop Trinity from being shot and is working through the Analyst's time stop, it can be interpreted as Neo hacking the Matrix into making himself more efficient (because that is what we know he does, since the first movie). And the Analyst being happy about that, as being because by analyzing what Neo does and how he does it, they can make the entire Matrix more efficient. It's not that the Matrix runs on feels, it's that feels are the motivation for people, specifically Neo and Trinity, to keep dancing the tango which is beneficial to the machines. But even without that speculative angle, the whole thing work with the existing metacommentary to point out how this cliched "hero tries to save their loved one" pattern keeps being repeated as driving motive of stories such as, well, the Matrix.

EDIT:

Also, since we're on that theme:

1) "humans as batteries" may fail from a thermodynamic perspective, but from a metaphorical perspective, it absolutely works. The Matrix is about humans being reduced from free-thinking individuals to mere parts of a machine, comparing them to batteries work just as well as the older "cog in the machine" metaphor.

2) Neo being able to wirelessly interface with machines at the end of Reloaded, does not require any additional fantastic notions. The movies repeatedly reference wireless communication technology, both in the Matrix and outside of it - we SEE sentinels open up their antennaes to get better reception! Neo explicitly has machine implants and, by end of Reloaded, explicitly IS a machine implant, him being able to wirelessly hack the real machines is a logical extension of his abilities. Harping on Neo's out-of-Matrix abilities is even less excusable today than it was when Reloaded and Revolutions came out. Wireless communications are ubiquitous now and augmented reality is a thing. Chances are good the device you are reading this on is capable of projecting fictional objects on reality you are viewing through it in real time. We have proof sketches and existing technology to let blind people see through cameras. Arguably, in reality self-aware artificial intelligence is more fantastic than anything Neo does outside the Matrix.

[BloodSquirrel]

However, Dragonus is right, it's a dead horse.

It's a dead horse that the movie decides to dissect right in front of us.

Pro tip: "You're wrong, your suspension of disbelief wasn't actually broken!" is never going to be the killer argument that you think it is.

[Vahnavoi]

I don't actually care about suspension of disbelief, especially not yours; see my edit, above.

[Millstone85]

Thermodynamics is the death of metaphor? or something?
"humans as batteries" may fail from a thermodynamic perspective, but from a metaphorical perspective, it absolutely works.The things I look for in a work of fiction are worldbuilding, characters and plotlines, in that order. And here, to me, it feels like a keystone of worldbuilding has been sacrificed to metaphor.

But yes, sure, I can handwave it. The movie is driven by some new-age spirituality where energy and information are more-or-less interchangeable. And maybe someone could technobabble quantum mechanics somewhere in there.


Neo being able to wirelessly interface with machines at the end of Reloaded, does not require any additional fantastic notions. The movies repeatedly reference wireless communication technology, both in the Matrix and outside of it - we SEE sentinels open up their antennaes to get better reception! Neo explicitly has machine implants and, by end of Reloaded, explicitly IS a machine implant, him being able to wirelessly hack the real machines is a logical extension of his abilities.This, yes, I completely agree. Never had a problem with it. Never saw it as proof of a second Matrix or whatever.

Now, a theory I may have to give up on is all the precognition, done by the Oracle through the original trilogy, by Neo in Reloaded and now by Trinity in Resurrections, being simply a matter of remembering previous loops.

[Bohandas]

Phooeye to that.2) Neo being able to wirelessly interface with machines at the end of Reloaded, does not require any additional fantastic notions. The movies repeatedly reference wireless communication technology, both in the Matrix and outside of it - we SEE sentinels open up their antennaes to get better reception! Neo explicitly has machine implants and, by end of Reloaded, explicitly IS a machine implant, him being able to wirelessly hack the real machines is a logical extension of his abilities. Harping on Neo's out-of-Matrix abilities is even less excusable today than it was when Reloaded and Revolutions came out. Wireless communications are ubiquitous now and augmented reality is a thing. Chances are good the device you are reading this on is capable of projecting fictional objects on reality you are viewing through it in real time. We have proof sketches and existing technology to let blind people see through cameras. Arguably, in reality self-aware artificial intelligence is more fantastic than anything Neo does outside the Matrix.

I suppose that's a possible answer, but that begs a further question, if the machines could predict Neo's whole life exactly to know that he'd need all these things, why not just delete Agent Smith proactively and be done with it?

EDIT:
Or did they just pack his head full of every gizmo they had?

EDIT:
And how'd they ever let him into Zion with his head packed full with non-standard machine implants? Even inside the Matrix they checked him for machine listening devices. But they'll let him into Zion with a long-range wireless transceiver in his head? That seems like an obvious trap.


The movie is driven by some new-age spirituality where energy and information are more-or-less interchangeable.

Like I said, B-movie nonsense. Like solaranite.

[Dr.Samurai]

Phooeye to that.

Yes, it's a shame they didn't establish, or rather, re-establish the idea that humans are required for processing or algorithmic power. However, Dragonus is right, it's a dead horse. Everyone knows that was the intent, everyone knows why it got replaced, you can just mentally swap the references to electric power with references to processing power and be done with it. Boom, done. The plot points in the new movie? They make as much sense from that viewpoint. More sense, in fact.
I agree that it was a dead horse. I never gave it much care, because it wasn't really the point of the trilogy.

But after all these years, we are wondering how is Neo still alive? How is Trinity back? Are they back in the Matrix? How did that happen? Why did that happen?

And the answer well... resurrects that dead horse. And that dead horse never made sense, and in Resurrections it makes even less sense with the "physical proximity plus proximity in the Matrix equals lots of energy".

In a movie that lacks strong elements, basing it on this very weak premise is a problem. Though perhaps not for you, admittedly.

When Neo tries to stop Trinity from being shot and is working through the Analyst's time stop, it can be interpreted as Neo hacking the Matrix into making himself more efficient (because that is what we know he does, since the first movie). And the Analyst being happy about that, as being because by analyzing what Neo does and how he does it, they can make the entire Matrix more efficient. It's not that the Matrix runs on feels, it's that feels are the motivation for people, specifically Neo and Trinity, to keep dancing the tango which is beneficial to the machines. But even without that speculative angle, the whole thing work with the existing metacommentary to point out how this cliched "hero tries to save their loved one" pattern keeps being repeated as driving motive of stories such as, well, the Matrix.
Yes, what a terrible thing to base our stories on, people have the grit/competence/courage/power to lift themselves up/oppose tyranny/save their loved ones.

Call it a cliche but... I much prefer that over Neo bumbling through two and a half hours of movie. Every time he's on screen he has a worried or apologetic look on his face, and in the end doesn't muster up the ability to save himself or Trinity. Wow. What an amazing story and character.

If Trinity is to be the one to ascend and save them... then she should be the focus of the movie. There is very little story to Trinity in this movie. She simply gains super powers at the end. Contrast this to the "cliche" story in the first movie, where Neo is on a journey and eventually becomes the One.


1) "humans as batteries" may fail from a thermodynamic perspective, but from a metaphorical perspective, it absolutely works. The Matrix is about humans being reduced from free-thinking individuals to mere parts of a machine, comparing them to batteries work just as well as the older "cog in the machine" metaphor.
This is possible to do without them being batteries of course.

2) Neo being able to wirelessly interface with machines at the end of Reloaded, does not require any additional fantastic notions. The movies repeatedly reference wireless communication technology, both in the Matrix and outside of it - we SEE sentinels open up their antennaes to get better reception! Neo explicitly has machine implants and, by end of Reloaded, explicitly IS a machine implant, him being able to wirelessly hack the real machines is a logical extension of his abilities. Harping on Neo's out-of-Matrix abilities is even less excusable today than it was when Reloaded and Revolutions came out. Wireless communications are ubiquitous now and augmented reality is a thing. Chances are good the device you are reading this on is capable of projecting fictional objects on reality you are viewing through it in real time. We have proof sketches and existing technology to let blind people see through cameras. Arguably, in reality self-aware artificial intelligence is more fantastic than anything Neo does outside the Matrix.
It doesn't seem to me that Neo is "interfacing" with the sentinels so much as destroying them. If Neo is hacking them, why not reprogram them and have them serve the humans? Why just destroy them? Why does he speak about it in a way that isn't simply "I'm interfacing with them through their wireless communication..."? Instead it seems more spiritual or supernatural, "... I can feel them..."

Same when he fights Bane, "I can see you..." even though he has no eyes. Bane is in a flesh and blood body; where is the machine interface that allows Neo to "see" Smith?

[Bohandas]

However, Dragonus is right, it's a dead horse.

So is the Matrix series but we're still talking about it.


Everyone knows that was the intent, everyone knows why it got replaced

It was something to do with a really stupid studio executive who thought the power thing made more sense, wasn't it? That doesn't explain it never being retconned. Have they still got the same peabrain telling them what to do and and unwilling to admit being wrong a quarter of a century later?

[BloodSquirrel]

I don't actually care about suspension of disbelief, especially not yours; see my edit, above.

Ah, the "Screw you!" school of critical analysis.

[Millstone85]

If Neo is hacking them, why not reprogram them and have them serve the humans? Why just destroy them?That ought to be way more complicated than making them crash, and Neo had only just discovered his new ability.

Also, later on, when he and Trinity are flying toward the machine city, we see Neo struggling against the spirit of a sentinel (https://youtu.be/e1GmgE7Men0?t=11), so they do offer some resistance.


Bane is in a flesh and blood body; where is the machine interface that allows Neo to "see" Smith?Bane also has implants.


It was something to do with a really stupid studio executive who thought the power thing made more sense, wasn't it?Worse. The executive thought the audience would be too stupid to understand the processing-power thing.

[Dr.Samurai]

Neo is a hacker. Why wouldn't he speak clearly in hacker lingo if this is what he is doing?

And what implants are you referring to?

[Traab]

Oh goody, so a philosophers stone scenario.

[Millstone85]

And what implants are you referring to?The ones that let people connect to the Matrix.

Bane is effectively a cyborg, just like Neo and everyone else who was once part of the system.

[Dr.Samurai]

The ones that let people connect to the Matrix.

Bane is effectively a cyborg, just like Neo and everyone else who was once part of the system.
So the suggestion is that this port, where everyone has to get hard-jacked into the Matrix, allows for wireless communication, and therefore allows for Neo to hack other machines at a distance? Was this suggested in the movie, that everyone is a transmitter/receiver? I don't recall this.

[Bohandas]

Bane also has implants.

Why would they be broadcasting anything? That's not how the Matrix works. We're shown again and again that the interface is through a wired connection.

EDIT:
Unless there's some kind of seperate tracking implant, but we're never shown one outside of the Matrix. And even if there was one you'd think they've remove it after they got you out


Oh goody, so a philosophers stone scenario.

IIRC that one was more of a racism thing, that Americans were too stupid to understand it.

[Millstone85]

So the suggestion is that this port, where everyone has to get hard-jacked into the Matrix, allows for wireless communication, and therefore allows for Neo to hack other machines at a distance?Yes, that's the interpretation.


Was this suggested in the movie, that everyone is a transmitter/receiver? I don't recall this.
That's not how the Matrix works.Well, no, but it may be how the Source works.

When Neo went through that glowing door in Reloaded, it brought him close the machine hivemind, the Source. Then the Architect told him that "though the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human", hinting that they tried to make him more machine than he already was.

Part of this would be Neo's neck port, or whatever inner metal junk it works with, getting reconfigured. Bane's own implants would have gone through a similar change when Smith fried his brain.

[Bohandas]

Yes, that's the interpretation.

Well, no, but it may be how the Source works.

When Neo went through that glowing door in Reloaded, it brought him close the machine hivemind, the Source. Then the Architect told him that "though the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human", hinting that they tried to make him more machine than he already was.

Part of this would be Neo's neck port, or whatever inner metal junk it works with, getting reconfigured. Bane's own implants would have gone through a similar change when Smith fried his brain.

When did Smith have time to do surgery to install a new port? And WHY?

Neo could have been given a non-standard port in the clone tanks, but how and why would Bane have one

[Dr.Samurai]

Yes, that's the interpretation.

Well, no, but it may be how the Source works.

When Neo went through that glowing door in Reloaded, it brought him close the machine hivemind, the Source. Then the Architect told him that "though the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human", hinting that they tried to make him more machine than he already was.

Part of this would be Neo's neck port, or whatever inner metal junk it works with, getting reconfigured. Bane's own implants would have gone through a similar change when Smith fried his brain.
I take that to mean that in Neo becoming the One, his consciousness has been altered, but he is still human. After all, he now sees the code of the Matrix and can dodge bullets and hack the Matrix. But I did not take that to mean that he is now transmitting signals in the real world from his skull port.

The Architect is saying "Yeah, you're special and you defeat Agents now but... don't think you're playing on my level and will understand everything I'm about to tell you."

[Millstone85]

When did Smith have time to do surgery to install a new port? And WHY?Same implants, new parameters.


Neo could have been given a non-standard port in the clone tanks, but how and why would Bane have oneThe One is an anomaly that repeatedly emerges from the system. Yes, the machines may have designed that specific field fetus to become the vessel of that anomaly, but I don't think that's the case. Instead, their problem is that any connected human could become the One. This time around, it ended up being Thomas Anderson, but it could have been anyone else, including Bane.

So all ports get hidden features to drive the One back to the Source.


I take that to mean that in Neo becoming the One, his consciousness has been altered, but he is still human. After all, he now sees the code of the Matrix and can dodge bullets and hack the Matrix.No, I think he was referring to the transition that just happened. The one that then let Neo see the yellow code of the Source and stop sentinels.

[Vahnavoi]

@Dr. Samurai: recognizing something as a cliche is not the same as calling a thing bad. The love between Neo and Trinity is never really treated as a negative in the movies, expect by particularly cynical villains. As far as Trinity not getting enough focus, I agree, as noted in my first post to this thread.

@Bohandas: Reloaded and Revolutions very heavily emphasize Zion's own reliance on machinery and it's part of the reveal in Reloaded that not only have there been multiple cycles of this happening, the machines have been actively manipulating these cycles to yield the outcome they want. All of the tech people use to interact with the Matrix, comes from the same party that made the Matrix!

Nobody actually foresees the future. Pay attention to what the Oracle actually says. Even in the original movie, she very clearly invokes the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies. She is manipulating events by giving people just the information she needs them to have in order for them to do the right things. She very specifically calls out that the Architect is sort of bad at this. I've talked about this in another thread in detail lately, but since finding it would be harder than retyping things: we have a clear visual representation of the Architect searching through multiple possible futures, the screens with multiple Neos. That is how he sees the world, as a massive list of possibilities. But, only one of these really comes to pass. He can't tell which one, because he doesn't get people. He is not above manipulating people himself and hedging his bets, but as seen on screen, he loses this game agains the Oracle - Neo escapes the cycle he's set up. The new villain in the new movie continues and combines both of these trends.

[Bohandas]

As an aside, am I the only one who thinks that the heroes' powers in the Matrix ought to look more like one of those speedrun videos that uses exploits? Because that's basically how their powers work, isn't it?

It ought to look less like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qhZEAIzZGU

and more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUt840BUOYA

or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gxFkOz2_4

[Ramza00]

It's a dead horse that the movie decides to dissect right in front of us.

Pro tip: "You're wrong, your suspension of disbelief wasn't actually broken!" is never going to be the killer argument that you think it is.

That is actually a theme of the matrix, dysphoria, uncanny valley, whatever magic word we call it will cause part of your brain to reject the matrix and break the simulation even if another part of your brain wants to stay inside the matrix.

I feel we should examine more the minds that were freed because they could not accept the matrix, vs the minds that were freed because Zion / Io captains thought they had a moral duty to free people.

Likewise per Cypher Morpheus got 5 pre Neo “the one candidates” killed when they fought Agents. What does this mean from the eyes of the people in the story and the nature of life, uncanny valley, etc.

[Vahnavoi]

As additional comment to Bohandas, pay attention to what the hovercraft do. People plug into the chair, but the ships don't plug into anything as any kind of rule. They receive and broadcast signals over radio, which is why they can do this while in motion, as seen in Flight of the Osiris, the Animatrix intro to Reloaded. The Sentinels can find them via following their broadcast signal. And, in Revolutions, we see the machines can see Neo and resist his hacking attempts - we have visual representation of this, in a projection of a sentinel dashing through Neo. Neo doesn't arbitrarily reprogram machines because he can't. Stopping that one sentinel and making some bombs explode prematurely, are the shown limits of his ability.

EDIT: the first Matrix also implies the Sentinels can receive messages wirelessly from the Matrix. They're also implied to be physical equivalents of Agents, an idea which was later used in Matrix Online.

[Psyren]

Pitch meeting is out:


https://youtu.be/tHCsz78GfYg

As expected, both the massive lack of stakes and the energy problem are lampooned as the nonsense they are.

The joke about the 4th wall breakage was great.

[Eldan]

As an aside, am I the only one who thinks that the heroes' powers in the Matrix ought to look more like one of those speedrun videos that uses exploits? Because that's basically how their powers work, isn't it?

It ought to look less like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qhZEAIzZGU

and more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUt840BUOYA

or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gxFkOz2_4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yefaz8kvs94

[Dragonus45]

It's a dead horse that the movie decides to dissect right in front of us.

Pro tip: "You're wrong, your suspension of disbelief wasn't actually broken!" is never going to be the killer argument that you think it is.

It's an ancient decades old nitpick about something that doesn't really harm or change the plot in any mechanical way, and does work better for the metaphor I think, if that turns out to be what really gets you then fine but your suspension of disbelief is your issue in this case.

[Traab]

As additional comment to Bohandas, pay attention to what the hovercraft do. People plug into the chair, but the ships don't plug into anything as any kind of rule. They receive and broadcast signals over radio, which is why they can do this while in motion, as seen in Flight of the Osiris, the Animatrix intro to Reloaded. The Sentinels can find them via following their broadcast signal. And, in Revolutions, we see the machines can see Neo and resist his hacking attempts - we have visual representation of this, in a projection of a sentinel dashing through Neo. Neo doesn't arbitrarily reprogram machines because he can't. Stopping that one sentinel and making some bombs explode prematurely, are the shown limits of his ability.

EDIT: the first Matrix also implies the Sentinels can receive messages wirelessly from the Matrix. They're also implied to be physical equivalents of Agents, an idea which was later used in Matrix Online.

If they were capable of wirelessly connecting to the matrix they wouldnt need to be plugged in. What im guessing happens is the equivalent of the ships being cell phones looking for wifi hot spots, then you plug your headphones in and can listen to music through it. Neo cant just go into the matrix without that plug. Which makes it bizarre to me that he can pick up these signals being transmitted everywhere and suddenly see not just the code inside the matrix, but the flow of energy everywhere that he can use as a form of radar. And yeah in the animatrix they did it on the run, in the actual matrix film they had to stay put and fight the sentinels because if they fled or fired the emp it would have killed neo and trinity who were in the matrix. Maybe because it was a suicide mission the osiris ran for it trying to stay in range of the hot spot long enough for her to make the drop? I dunno. But it was a desperate sprint on her part knowing she was on the clock and not going to survive this.

[Dr.Samurai]

As additional comment to Bohandas, pay attention to what the hovercraft do. People plug into the chair, but the ships don't plug into anything as any kind of rule. They receive and broadcast signals over radio, which is why they can do this while in motion, as seen in Flight of the Osiris, the Animatrix intro to Reloaded. The Sentinels can find them via following their broadcast signal. And, in Revolutions, we see the machines can see Neo and resist his hacking attempts - we have visual representation of this, in a projection of a sentinel dashing through Neo. Neo doesn't arbitrarily reprogram machines because he can't. Stopping that one sentinel and making some bombs explode prematurely, are the shown limits of his ability.

EDIT: the first Matrix also implies the Sentinels can receive messages wirelessly from the Matrix. They're also implied to be physical equivalents of Agents, an idea which was later used in Matrix Online.
To be clear, there is nothing in the films connecting the hoverships ability to connect to the Matrix and Neo's hacking of the sentinels, with the neckport implant that everyone from the Matrix has. The port is just a port to receive the cable needed to connect them to the Matrix, and we are never told that it actually has any sort of wireless capabilities. That the ships do is not indicative that the ports do.

If they were wireless... why would they die when Cipher begins disconnecting them?

I recognize that there are answers to these questions, but as they go unasked and unanswered in the movies, I suspect this is little more than an online fan theory as opposed to what the writers intended to get across to the viewers.

[Rodin]

To be clear, there is nothing in the films connecting the hoverships ability to connect to the Matrix and Neo's hacking of the sentinels, with the neckport implant that everyone from the Matrix has. The port is just a port to receive the cable needed to connect them to the Matrix, and we are never told that it actually has any sort of wireless capabilities. That the ships do is not indicative that the ports do.

If they were wireless... why would they die when Cipher begins disconnecting them?

I recognize that there are answers to these questions, but as they go unasked and unanswered in the movies, I suspect this is little more than an online fan theory as opposed to what the writers intended to get across to the viewers.

The real answer is that Matrix Revolution is a bad movie and the Wachowskis should feel bad. Reloaded's plot just about passed muster if you squinted real hard and applied liberal use of the MST3K mantra. Revolution failed even that low bar.

From what I've seen in the thread there's no reason for me to rush out and see Resurrections. My impression from the reviews here is "not as good as the original, not as dire as Revolution", which sticks it into freebie watching territory. At least then I can fast-forward through any Neo/Trinity relationship stuff. Why they thought bringing that back was a good idea is a mystery to me, as it was easily the worst part of the original trilogy.

[Bohandas]

As additional comment to Bohandas, pay attention to what the hovercraft do. People plug into the chair, but the ships don't plug into anything as any kind of rule.

But the people need to be plugged in regardless of whether they're in a hovercraft or the power plant


If they were wireless... why would they die when Cipher begins disconnecting them?

I'll do you one better. Even if they weren't wireless why would they die when Cipher begins disconnecting them?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yefaz8kvs94

Basically that's how it should look, yeah

[Vahnavoi]

If they were capable of wirelessly connecting to the matrix they wouldnt need to be plugged in. What im guessing happens is the equivalent of the ships being cell phones looking for wifi hot spots, then you plug your headphones in and can listen to music through it. Neo cant just go into the matrix without that plug. Which makes it bizarre to me that he can pick up these signals being transmitted everywhere and suddenly see not just the code inside the matrix, but the flow of energy everywhere that he can use as a form of radar.

All common use wireless technology is based on radio wave transmissions. You don't need to guess what the ships do is "sort of like cell phone looking for wi-fi hotspot", because wi-fi is radio. The basic principles of radio communications, such as needing a spot where you can send and receive signals without undue interference, apply regardless of which specific communication protocol is used.

Why humans need to be plugged in is unclear, but we can again infer a reason from basic principles of radio communications. Take any modern phone, for instance. Each has its own in-built antenna, but they can also be connected via cable to any larger device, including an external antenna, to improve reception, receive transmissions in frequencies they can't natively capture, etc.

It's worth noting that any piece of metal has technical capacity to serve as an antenna. Yes, that includes metal implants inside a human body. It's not normal for unplugged people to be able to receive and broadcast signals, but we know it's Neo's ability, because he's shown and told to be doing it.

As far as Bane goes? Did you notice what I said about Agents and Sentinels? Even in the first movie, the Sentinels are shown communicating with radio, the Agents are shown communicating with radio inside the Matrix, and it is heavily implied the Sentinels can receive signals from within the Matrix and that they are physical counterparts of the Agents. Smith was an Agent, he knows how their communication scheme works. The simplest explanation for Bane is that the communication features of the implants are software-locked; Smith's reprogrammed them in the same go he reprogrammed Bane. This is perfectly congruent with Neo's character arc. Neo gains his new abilities after reaching the Source - which, among other things, is a rather blatant reference to source code. His abilities as the One are, again, based on him hacking the machine code. All of his out-of-Matrix abilities are explainable by him hacking the very obviously existing wireless communications of the machines.

Yes, that includes the radar. Navigation software in a modern phone works by receiving radio transmissions from other devices and using them to draw a picture of your surroundings. By accepting the Matrix, you have already accepted that a particular electric signal send through Neo's implants can draw a picture in his mind. Him being able to see the machines through radio waves is a logical extension of that and no more fantastic than what a modern phone is capable of doing.


And yeah in the animatrix they did it on the run, in the actual matrix film they had to stay put and fight the sentinels because if they fled or fired the emp it would have killed neo and trinity who were in the matrix. Maybe because it was a suicide mission the osiris ran for it trying to stay in range of the hot spot long enough for her to make the drop? I dunno. But it was a desperate sprint on her part knowing she was on the clock and not going to survive this.

You are mostly just describing plot of Flight of Osiris here. Yes, broadcasting on the run is a risk they're willing to take because they've already been found out and know they will most likely die. This does not take anything away from my points. It's proof positive the ships broadcast wirelessly. It cannot be discounted because it is intro sequence to Reloaded.

---


To be clear, there is nothing in the films connecting the hoverships ability to connect to the Matrix and Neo's hacking of the sentinels, with the neckport implant that everyone from the Matrix has. The port is just a port to receive the cable needed to connect them to the Matrix, and we are never told that it actually has any sort of wireless capabilities. That the ships do is not indicative that the ports do.

Congratulations on missing the damn point. The ships connect to the Matrix wirelessly, from which we know that Matrix can be connected to wirelessly. The implants normally connect to the ship, but this does not mean they have no native wireless capability - we can infer they do have because of Neo and Bane.


If they were wireless... why would they die when Cipher begins disconnecting them?

Giant spike to the head says hello. There is very obviously both hardware and software level feedback in the system. Ever noticed how several real computer devices strongly advice against improperly plugging them in or plugging them out? These warnings exist for a reason. For example, in many older radio devices, disconnecting the antenna while the device is broadcasting, fries the whole device. In memory storage devices, removing them while data is being moved in or out can garble the data and lead to all kinds of malfunctions. Whether the technological limitations are hardware or software based is an open question, but you have every reason to suspect the latter, given what we learn in Reloaded. Zion is controlled opposition, every method of connecting to the Matrix comes from the same party as the Matrix, the whole set-up is another system of control to plug the holes in another.


I recognize that there are answers to these questions, but as they go unasked and unanswered in the movies, I suspect this is little more than an online fan theory as opposed to what the writers intended to get across to the viewers.

If a science fiction movie about rocketry builds its plotpoints on real rocket science, do you require that movie to explain all the details of rocket science? If the movie shows things moving in zero gravity a way that seems odd to you, but makes perfect sense given real known facts about zero gravity, would you dismiss any other movie-goes explaining this to you as "online fan theory"?

Because the points I'm making to you aren't simply about "what the writers intended". They're about how real technology works, and how that knowledge can be used to explain details in the movie. People who complain about these things breaking their suspension of disbelief, are complaining about things that aren't more fantastic than real existing technology.

[Ramza00]

The hoverships are wireless, all this mentions of broadcast depths and the ships are still moving when they are plugged into the Matrix.

If we want to bring our real world tech into this we should not think Wireless as a single thing. There is bandwidth and latency (think of bandwidth as the depth and width of a water, how many gallons in a section, latency is the speed the water is moving at) issues where you may need a human to have a wire connection which then connects to a big ship and there is a big satellite dish that transfers the data. Yet for less data uses one can have a wireless connection which is old school for example texts but no video. After all when The Matrix was written it was the early 90s for the screenplay and the final movie came out in 1999.

[BloodSquirrel]

It's an ancient decades old nitpick about something that doesn't really harm or change the plot in any mechanical way, and does work better for the metaphor I think, if that turns out to be what really gets you then fine but your suspension of disbelief is your issue in this case.

If you're not interested in other people's "issues", then you probably shouldn't be taking part in a public discussion of the movie.

I'm not sure why you think that this is a functional argument other than that you can't think of a better one.

[Millstone85]

Ultimately, Neo is a technopath. The character has psychic powers that first allow him to manipulate a virtual reality like no other human can, and later on to disrupt machines (and see the AI possessing a human) in the real world.

That's the trope at play here. Most everything else, I admit, is just us fans theorizing.

[Tvtyrant]

I just got back, never saw any trailers and haven't read the thread so if this review is redundant it's just me and the void :P

The original Matrix was a 90s movie at its heart, sharing the same space as Fight Club and Office Space. All of them ask the question: Once material comfort has been accomplished, shouldn't our actions matter more? A similar series of movies came out in the 1960s like The Graduate.

Neo goes out in search of The Truth and Reality, where his choices can affect change and where daily choices have meaning. By contrast the 90s Matrix he lives in gives out daily security but takes from the enslaved office man any choices. Thomas Anderson's quest is thus the abandonment of comfort for meaning.

This movie is actually two movies. The first one is actually pretty good, and the second is flat. The pretty good movie is built around the question: Did the 90s matter? Now that we are middle aged and looking back on our youth, did we accomplish anything? What was it for?

The movie is pretty clear we lost and are tired of the war, and have to hand it off to the youngs now. Xion is gone, the Matrix is still there, and the last generation aren't interested in beating it anymore but just consolidating their current gains. Neo and Trinity have turned from the war as their primary passion to developing their personal relationship, its time to settle down and focus on family for the middle aged.

Then the last bit of the movie they gain unlimited power, beat up the bad guy and go off to paint rainbows in the sky. The "sequel to an established trilogy of movies" aspect makes for a weak last third, the second movie that isn't so much about the shared experience of the viewers, the director and cast but about the plot of the world. The Matrix as metaphor parts ways a bit and the ending is worse because of it, just like the second and third movies were worse because they deviated from the Matrix as Metaphor for the 90s.

Overall I give it a strong B for Gex X and Millenials, and a C for anyone else.

[Millstone85]

The movie is pretty clear we lost and are tired of the war, and have to hand it off to the youngs now. Xion is gone, the Matrix is still there, and the last generation aren't interested in beating it anymore but just consolidating their current gains.Eh now, the movie did a good enough job at adressing the happy-ending override (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HappyEndingOverride). Yes, most machines broke the peace, and went back to enslaving humans, because the sequel needed antagonists. But Io is better than Zion was, not just because it is bigger and the food tastes somewhat good, but because it is a place where humans and AIs are relearning how to live together. The youngster Bugs gives a passionate speech about that, and the old tired Neo clearly finds it significant as he tenderly puts his forehead against the synthient Cybebe.


movie that isn't so much about the shared experience of the viewers, the director and cast but about the plot of the world. The Matrix as metaphor parts ways a bit and the ending is worse because of itNow you are making me feel like I am an anti-intellectual or something. No movie has ever made me feel like I was "sharing an experience" with its director and cast. The actors are acting, and you can't tell if they will love, hate or not give two hoots about the final product. As for the director, we are left throwing wild guesses on whatever they were trying to say. Whereas the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, yes, that's what I come to the theater for.

[Dr.Samurai]

Congratulations on missing the damn point.
https://i.makeagif.com/media/1-17-2017/4xrJkK.gif

The ships connect to the Matrix wirelessly, from which we know that Matrix can be connected to wirelessly. The implants normally connect to the ship, but this does not mean they have no native wireless capability - we can infer they do have because of Neo and Bane.
That's not an inference you can make actually.

And I know that you're wrong here because it's such a simple explanation to make that the movie would have done it instead of leaving everyone (including the characters in the actual movie) perplexed at what had happened. Instead the movie tells us that the power of the One extends into the real world, all the way back to the Source. And that he wasn't ready to use this power.

Giant spike to the head says hello. There is very obviously both hardware and software level feedback in the system. Ever noticed how several real computer devices strongly advice against improperly plugging them in or plugging them out? These warnings exist for a reason. For example, in many older radio devices, disconnecting the antenna while the device is broadcasting, fries the whole device. In memory storage devices, removing them while data is being moved in or out can garble the data and lead to all kinds of malfunctions. Whether the technological limitations are hardware or software based is an open question, but you have every reason to suspect the latter, given what we learn in Reloaded. Zion is controlled opposition, every method of connecting to the Matrix comes from the same party as the Matrix, the whole set-up is another system of control to plug the holes in another.
It's a very nice theory, and I applaud you for it. If there were something in the movies to hint at this, it would be *chef's kiss*. Alas, it's just an online theory to explain away a goofy part of a sequel that never gets resolved.

If a science fiction movie about rocketry builds its plotpoints on real rocket science, do you require that movie to explain all the details of rocket science? If the movie shows things moving in zero gravity a way that seems odd to you, but makes perfect sense given real known facts about zero gravity, would you dismiss any other movie-goes explaining this to you as "online fan theory"?

I'm not a rocket scientist, so if the movie pulls out some strange rocketry interactions that look weird, all on a character that is "the messiah", yeah, some explanation is needed. Sort of like explaining time dilation in Interstellar to help people along that don't understand it.

I don't know anything about wifi and radio, so if the movie is going to make Neo into Superman in the real world, it should be explained. And not online two decades later by a random guy on the internet that happens to really like radio and wifi.

[Tyndmyr]

Why do people still care about the people as energy thing? It's a cinema sins level meaningless complaint.

Well, if they bring it back up, it's on them if it doesn't make sense. The original didn't bother me overly much, because you get the imagery with the battery and what not. Sure, it absolutely makes more sense as processing capacity than raw energy, but at least you give the machines a nice, evil motivation for why they need millions and millions of people.

This makes a lot less sense if it's just two people somehow powering everything. It's leaning really, really hard into a literal interpretation of the power of love. I like explaining it as a research project or something better. Simulating people uses power, it wouldn't produce it. The logic of Neo and Trinity being the only two real humans and everyone else being bots is...a potentially interesting thing to explore philosophically, but it doesn't address the power issue that is apparently the motive here.

Nothing quite fits about the explanations for motives we're given, so it's a little annoying.



You are mostly just describing plot of Flight of Osiris here. Yes, broadcasting on the run is a risk they're willing to take because they've already been found out and know they will most likely die. This does not take anything away from my points. It's proof positive the ships broadcast wirelessly. It cannot be discounted because it is intro sequence to Reloaded.

You don't even need to reach that far to establish that ships connect wirelessly. It's covered in the first movie, where they talk about bringing the ship to Broadcast depth, and Morpheus discusses "broadcasting our pirate signal". From the very first film, it is clear that the ship connects into the Matrix wirelessly.

The fact that a specific depth is needed is definitely clear. The ships can't broadcast directly from Zion. If they could, that whole setup would look very different.

Sentinels very clearly *can* operate wirelessly much further from the machine world and still receive orders. It seems likely that this are distinct systems, as Sentinels are never shown to exist in the Matrix.

[Ramza00]

Can we all agree … ?

That the CGI of Matrix Revolutions is superior to the movie it is remaking, Monster’s Incorporated?

[Talakeal]

Can we all agree … ?

That the CGI of Matrix Revolutions is superior to the movie it is remaking, Monster’s Incorporated?

I was actually thinking that myself.

[Bohandas]

LOL! It really is Monsters Incorporated!

[Trafalgar]

I finally saw the movie on HBO Max at watch party. Its still not at my local theater because they have extended Spiderman No Way Home for another week. Overall, its a successful nostalgia based cash grab that's worth streaming at home but not watching at a theater. The first 2/3 of the movie is pretty good but things go downhill after that. I have no intentions of watching it again.

-Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss still have a really good screen good chemistry. You can feel the connection between them in the scenes in the coffee shop.
-Yahya Abdul-Mateen II makes a decent "New Morpheus". I had to point out that he isn't actually Morpheus to friends of mine, he is a program written to be like Morpheus. I liked the loud clothes, they provide a nice contrast to "Old Morpheus".
-I liked Jessica Henwick as Bugs. In fact, I think they should have made her part bigger.
-I liked the added lore including Io, synthients working with humans, the machine civil war, etc.
-I like the ship design, how it combined the Matrix Hovercrafts with insect like machine tech.
-I liked to see Niobe back but it would be interesting to see an interaction between her and New Morpheus.


-The fight choreography was nowhere near the standard set by the original. The original Matrix combined Hong Kong Cinematic Kung Fu with Hollywood Special Effects and was awesome. Matrix Reloaded, while not as good as the original, still had a couple of good fights, most notably the fight between Neo and Seraph. Revolutions was another step down with special effects replacing much of the original real world effects. The fights in this movie were mostly boring with Neo just doing a force push to end it.
-I did not like Jonathan Groff as Agent Smith. If they didn't flash a still of Agent Smith when Groff first appeared, I wouldn't have guessed he was Smith. Groff's mannerisms and way of speaking just doesn't feel like smith. I think they should have thrown more money at Hugo Weaving to bring him back. Smith/Weaving vs. Reeves/Neo is integral to the Matrix series.
-Neil Patrick Harris was just being Neil Patrick Harris in this movie. I kept expecting to break into song a la Dr. Horrible.
-They did the whole "Take a step forward if you volunteer" cliché.
-They shouldn't have brought back the Merovingian. For me, that's the point the movie starts to go down hill. In both Reloaded and Revolutions, Merv is part of the plot, the heroes need something from him. In Resurrections, he is just a minor obstacle to be brushed aside and forgotten.
-They establish that the analyst can do super bullet time that makes him invincible. But in the finale, Agent Smith can beat it somehow. But Agent Smith didn't show any signs of this ability in his earlier fight with Neo. My read is that this was a lazily written deus ex machina.
-The Zombie apocalypse climax was dumb. I lost interest after that.
-I am a bit of an attack helicopter geek so this is just me being triggered but the helicopters at the end looked really fake. They just CGI'd some rockets and two miniguns on a civilian helicopter and called it good. The miniguns locations wouldn't work in the real world. They should have just CGI'd in a real world attack helicopter.
-I am a Rage Against the Machine Fan. The original ends with "Wake Up" by Rage and had me leaving the theater all psyched up and ready for more. In my opinion, one of the best movie endings ever made. Matrix Resurrections also ends with "Wake Up" but played by a cover band. At first I thought "A cover of Wake Up, how mediocre" but then I heard a trumpet. The cover band replaced some of the guitar licks with a horns section. WHICH IS ******* LAME!.
-Christina Ricci is given top billing in the closing credits. I couldn't remember her being in the movie. Google tells me she was a corporate exec who I think only had a single line. What a bait and switch! I mean, is she friends with Lana Wachkowski and Lana is giving her an easy paycheck? Doing what Adam Sandler does in his movies, giving a quick payout to his old SNL buddies?


--These are neither good nor bad, just things I think worth discussing.--
-Neo created the modal and "New Morpheus". The modal is as good as the matric and challenges experienced hackers like Bugs. Morpheus becomes a fully function synthient. Which means Neo can create artificial intelligence and recreate the Matrix. These are more powerful abilities than anything he or Trinity displays in the movie. I mean, couldn't he code a synthient that can beat the Analysts super bullet time?
-So is Trinity also the "one"? So Neo and Trinity are the "two"? But Neo was always in a binary opposition to Agent Smith. Is there a another Agent out in opposition to Trinity? Or does anyone have these abilities if they can free their mind enough?
-Io is supposed to be a city of Synthients and Humans living in harmony. But when Niobe gathers the Captains together to discuss the mission, everyone is human. Are only humans in leadership positions? Why are their no synthient captains?

[Bohandas]

Has anyone else had the thought that the heroes from the Matrix series are basically equivalent to the villains from Birdbox?

EDIT:
Like, both groups' basic deal is "come, everybody should see...this intensely horrible thing that we found"

[Millstone85]

Things in the movie that raise questions--These are neither good nor bad, just things I think worth discussing.Alright, here are the answers I came up with. So yeah, headcanoning hard.


I mean, couldn't he code a synthient that can beat the Analysts super bullet time?He could, and he did. That synthient's name is Smith.

Somehow, Neo keeps transferring his true potential, the power to fully take over the Matrix, to the program who hates him the most.

Even modal Morpheus was initially put in the shoes of "Agent Smith" within the training simulation. You have got a problem, Mister Anderson.


So is Trinity also the "one"? So Neo and Trinity are the "two"?In Reloaded, Neo was revealed to be the 6th One, the anomaly that emerged from the 6th version of the Matrix. Resurrections takes place in the 7th version, so perhaps Trinity became the 7th One.

Surely the Architect knew better than to keep any previous One alive, but the Analyst rolled the dice and lost.


Why are their no synthient captains?The Mnemosyne looks like the Nebuchadnezzar, except more insectoid like the machines themselves. So what if, in addition of having a human captain, each Io ship was also its own synthient captain?

[Trafalgar]

He could, and he did. That synthient's name is Smith.

Somehow, Neo keeps transferring his true potential, the power to fully take over the Matrix, to the program who hates him the most.

Even modal Morpheus was initially put in the shoes of "Agent Smith" within the training simulation. You have got a problem, Mister Anderson.


But the difference is Neo accidently imprinted himself on Smith in the first movie. Neo consciously coded New Morpheus with no help from the Analyst. And Morpheus is accepted as a full synthient by the crew. I guess the real test is whether Neo can do it outside the Matrix but I see no reason why he wouldn't be able to.



In Reloaded, Neo was revealed to be the 6th One, the anomaly that emerged from the 6th version of the Matrix. Resurrections takes place in the 7th version, so perhaps Trinity became the 7th One.

Surely the Architect knew better than to keep any previous One alive, but the Analyst rolled the dice and lost.


But in Reloaded, Isn't Merovingian revealed by his wife to be a former One? So there are three Ones in the current Matrix?


The Mnemosyne looks like the Nebuchadnezzar, except more insectoid like the machines themselves. So what if, in addition of having a human captain, each Io ship was also its own synthient captain?

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think its the case. There is a conversation where the pilot is introduced as the best pilot in the fleet and someone says "except for the synthients." Or something to that effect. So I would be surprised if any of the ships are conscious. I can't see a synthient ship needing any pilot, much less than a synthient one.

[Dr.Samurai]

But in Reloaded, Isn't Merovingian revealed by his wife to be a former One? So there are three Ones in the current Matrix?
I don't recall that. Merv is a program, and he says something along the lines of "We have survived your predecessors, and we will survive you". He seems familiar with the concept/cycle of The One and has a sort of cynical view of it.

I may have missed more than that though.

[Traab]

I don't recall that. Merv is a program, and he says something along the lines of "We have survived your predecessors, and we will survive you". He seems familiar with the concept/cycle of The One and has a sort of cynical view of it.

I may have missed more than that though.

His wife was talking to neo and said that "Once, he was like you" But im pretty sure she was just talking about how he treated her the way neo treats trinity. With love.

[Millstone85]

But the difference is Neo accidently imprinted himself on Smith in the first movie. Neo consciously coded New Morpheus with no help from the Analyst.Well, somewhat consciously.

In the scene where Neo becomes aware that something has gone missing from the modal, we see him become unsure whether he is at his desk in front of his computer, or if he is observing the code from the inside.

I think it was the same when he programmed the new Morpheus. One moment he is a video-game programmer playing with old files, the next he is the One shaping a bubble of virtual reality, then he is not sure what he just did.

But in Reloaded, Isn't Merovingian revealed by his wife to be a former One?
I don't recall that. Merv is a program
im pretty sure she was just talking about how he treated her the way neo treats trinity.Yup, though it did spawn a popular fan theory.


I can't see a synthient ship needing any pilotI imagine that to be a common problem for the new alliance. The synthients could easily replace humans in all things, but then Io would be just like 01.

But yeah, not my best theory.

[Tyndmyr]

-Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss still have a really good screen good chemistry.

I dunno, I wouldn't say that the two of them *ever* had great chemistry? I mean, sure, they're supposed to be together and what not in all the movies, but I wouldn't consider their romance to be particularly compelling in any of the films. It's...almost an obligatory action movie romance. It *slightly* impacts the plot because of the whole Oracle thing, but that's about the only thing that makes their relationship interesting.

I like both actors, I just don't think they really fit together in that way.

In agreement about pretty much all the rest, though.

[Dr.Samurai]

Speaking of Merv, and Trinity, and the... "chemistry"... on screen:

At some point my mind stops really digging into whatever the writers are going for, and a lot of stuff goes over my head. So I'm not sure what the significance of Trinity being "the One" in Resurrections is. My initial reaction, in this thread even, was that this doesn't jive with the previous trilogy. However, this thread reminded me that this is another iteration of the Matrix, and therefore there would be another One. So everything that was true before regarding Neo and Trinity and Smith is not necessarily true now.

I think.

That should be the case, except this movie seems very tied to the previous movies.

I almost wonder if Neo and/or Trinity is always The One? Like every "predecessor" is either Neo or Trinity. And they're simply getting better and better. Merv doesn't take Neo seriously at first as he has survived the previous cycles before. When Neo stops all the bullets, he concedes "Okay, you have some skill. Kill him". When Neo stops the blade with his bare hand Merv raises an eyebrow in surprise, but the subsequent blood has him say "You see, he's just a man".

This seems to indicate that there are varying levels of power/competence/threat in The One. Neo appears to be The One's One, as he allegedly is the only one to choose Love over Zion, and not only that, pull it off. At the end of Resurrection, Trinity is remaking stuff in the Matrix with the snap of a finger. So maybe she's achieved an even higher level of Oneness?

[Psyren]

Speaking of Merv, and Trinity, and the... "chemistry"... on screen:

At some point my mind stops really digging into whatever the writers are going for, and a lot of stuff goes over my head. So I'm not sure what the significance of Trinity being "the One" in Resurrections is. My initial reaction, in this thread even, was that this doesn't jive with the previous trilogy. However, this thread reminded me that this is another iteration of the Matrix, and therefore there would be another One. So everything that was true before regarding Neo and Trinity and Smith is not necessarily true now.

I think.

That should be the case, except this movie seems very tied to the previous movies.

I almost wonder if Neo and/or Trinity is always The One? Like every "predecessor" is either Neo or Trinity. And they're simply getting better and better. Merv doesn't take Neo seriously at first as he has survived the previous cycles before. When Neo stops all the bullets, he concedes "Okay, you have some skill. Kill him". When Neo stops the blade with his bare hand Merv raises an eyebrow in surprise, but the subsequent blood has him say "You see, he's just a man".

This seems to indicate that there are varying levels of power/competence/threat in The One. Neo appears to be The One's One, as he allegedly is the only one to choose Love over Zion, and not only that, pull it off. At the end of Resurrection, Trinity is remaking stuff in the Matrix with the snap of a finger. So maybe she's achieved an even higher level of Oneness?

I suggest you don't think about the ending too much. The writers certainly didn't.

No matter which approach Neo and Trinity take with their new world - they are either going to be condemning a bunch of humans to slavery or a bunch of synthetics to starvation. Instead of solving the actual problem set up by the franchise, which is working together to fix the damn sky so there's enough energy to go around without keeping an entire species in pods. But if we do that, there's be no more sequels, so...

[Ramza00]

But the difference is Neo accidently imprinted himself on Smith in the first movie. Neo consciously coded New Morpheus with no help from the Analyst. And Morpheus is accepted as a full synthient by the crew. I guess the real test is whether Neo can do it outside the Matrix but I see no reason why he wouldn't be able to.



But in Reloaded, Isn't Merovingian revealed by his wife to be a former One? So there are three Ones in the current Matrix?


Lore from the MMORPG


Note this lore is purposefully written as "rumor" so while it is worldbuilding we have an unreliable narrator problem.

But Merv is an operating system program from a former matrix per the Kid Blog in that game. But that is an unreliable narrator problem.

This explains a whole lot when you combine it with other quotes from The Architect, The Oracle, Smith, Merv himself, etc.

Neo is the 6th anomaly per the Architect aka he is the 6th "the one." Likewise per Cypher he is the 6 possible The One candidate that Morpheus adopted, with the previous 5 dying when they tried to fight Agents.

But before the modern matrix The Oracle helped built was a paradise matrix and a nightmare matrix. We know Merv adopted programs from the nightmare matrix, and that the nightmare matrix occurred prior to the 6 anomalies.

----

The purpose of an Operating System in computer science "is to know things", which is precisely how Merv describes himself. (If you want other definitions one of the definitions of an OS is scheduling tasks, executing applications, and controlling peripherals, aka a trafficker and controller of information) and this is what Merv still does in the modern Matrix of movies 1, 2, and 3. Sure it is an underground unofficial "illegal" operating system but it exists and everyone knows it exists and it has been incorporated into the control system. Likewise Merv can still do stuff with the train station, help smuggle exile programs, etc.

An operating system job may be to know things, but The Oracle provides a different type of knowledge than what The Architect or Merv try to do. An Oracle's job is to try to predict things and how her prediction works is to understand things not as "phenonmenoa" (the external things that can be measured such as cause and effect) but as things onto itself which goes by the word noumenona and thus understanding things internal which is where we get the latin phrase "know thyself" which can be traced back earlier to the Greek Oracle of Delphi, and before that on the outer temple wall of Egyptian Temple of Luxor.

Merv wants the eyes of the oracle both for petty reasons of revenge (The Oracle kind of replaced his purpose) but also it is a skill set he does not possess. Like wise it was the Merv who tried to kill The Oracle and this is how they explain the actress change to Mary Alice after Gloria Foster died during the filming of movies 2 and 3.




I suggest you don't think about the ending too much. The writers certainly didn't.

No matter which approach Neo and Trinity take with their new world - they are either going to be condemning a bunch of humans to slavery or a bunch of synthetics to starvation. Instead of solving the actual problem set up by the franchise, which is working together to fix the damn sky so there's enough energy to go around without keeping an entire species in pods. But if we do that, there's be no more sequels, so...

Going to have to disagree here Psyren


The Matrix of Movies 1, 2 and 3 is a Zoo even though the machines were harnessing energy from Humans.

Most humans "did not want to be free", they were not dysphorics (unable to bear the simulated reality of the matrix, their mind rebel against it.) It was a problem with 1% of the humans connected to the Matrix. And if those 1% stayed connected to the matrix for too long without the One providing new input to the prime program then the whole matrix crashes harming both the 99% and the 1%.

There are many ways to solve this problem. For example you can have multiple matrixes running simultaneously in parallel with the multiple matrixes being smaller but it is far more redundant / secure. Likewise there may be a way to harness the dysphorics to be better able to find which of the 1% to unplug and have them voluntarily lives in various smaller villages of Zion and this could be acceptable to the Machines. So on and so on. Also the concept of The One itself is a dysphoric who can see the code of the matrix itself and is better at programming certain aspects of the simulation than the machines are. After all if you want to model a mugging, you can model someone stealing another person wallet and a physical injury involved with the mugging. Or you can model a person walking into a wall, and then voluntarily giving their money to the other person. It is the same inputs and outputs if you have limited knowledge and this is how some the machines besides a few like the oracle see humans.

You do not need to unplug everyone from the Matrix as a goal, unless you have a philosophical reason where living in the simulation is bad for all humans and not just the humans who find it impossible to bear. And even though red pills are not all dysphoric, Cypher figured there was something that was off with The Matrix and thus he took the red pill, but the capability of him having regrets and wanting to be plugged back in means one form of dysphoria was worse than the other form of dysphoria, that or he never found reality unable to bear and he just noticed something was off with the matrix with his unconscious mind.

-----

Of course trying to cure the sky could be a goal if The Matrix was real, but the whole point of the series is there is always choices, but nothing is a utopia and how you navigate those choices is more interesting than trying to imagine a world with no negative choice. The journey including the negation is part of the fun of this specific story.

[Dr.Samurai]

I suggest you don't think about the ending too much. The writers certainly didn't.

No matter which approach Neo and Trinity take with their new world - they are either going to be condemning a bunch of humans to slavery or a bunch of synthetics to starvation. Instead of solving the actual problem set up by the franchise, which is working together to fix the damn sky so there's enough energy to go around without keeping an entire species in pods. But if we do that, there's be no more sequels, so...
Ironically...

I feel like if they went that route, with the humans and synthients desperately trying to survive against the machines so they can clear the sky and usher in a new era, and the stakes within the Matrix being directly tied to the fate of the real world, there may be potential for more sequels.

Whereas I'm not sure there's going to be another sequel any time soon after this.

[Eldan]

Yeah. They would be entirely thematically different sequels, probably with considerably less in-Matrix Kung Fu, but they would have a lot of potential.

Not that I ever expect the Matrix to launch a series of spin-off Hard Sci Fi about the problems of terraforming. I'd watch the **** out of that, though.

[BloodSquirrel]

Ultimately, the movie's attempt at meta-commentary fails pretty hard for me because the rest of the movie is at such cross-purposes with it. None of what follows those scenes of execs talking about rebooting "The Matrix" feels like it is being done ironically or for thematic purpose. It's just a bunch of lines, shots, bits of fight choreography, and other iconic imagery repeated from the first movie in the exact same way that The Force Awakens repeated it's source material.

The movie would have been a lot more interesting if they actually committed to "Reboots are dumb" as the main thrust of the film, rather than using the hack-comedy device of pointing out that a trope is old and tired right before using it anyway. Something along the lines of:

After Revolutions, the machines make good on their word and allow anyone who wants to leave the Matrix to leave, and Zion gets to live in peace. The Matrix continues chugging along, but there's a new problem: Neo's defeat of Smith left a remnant of him in the code. Thomas Anderson is back in the Matrix, as an program, but doesn't remember anything after he took the red pill.

(20 years later)

Enter the "resistance"- the humans who are scouting the Matrix for people to wake up find Thomas Anderson. Now, because the war is over, they don't really need Neo. But he's become this super-iconic and revered figure, and they want him back (awakened and brought out of the Matrix onto Zion's mainframe or whatever). All of the new kids who have been awakened after the war want to see Neo doing cool **** again.

The machines don't want this because they frankly have no idea what waking Neo up and trying to remove him from the matrix will do. Things have been working just fine for the last 20 years, and they don't need anyone poking at something that none of them fully understand just because they're nostalgic.

This sets up your conflict: A group of humans gets Thomas Anderson to remember, and wants him to take the red pill. The machines want him to take the blue pill and go back to being Thomas Anderson before something breaks. And since there's still a ceasefire, they have to do it by convincing him, one way or the other. There isn't a punch thrown or shot fired in the whole movie- maybe you could put in a sparing sequence just for fun, but the actual fighting is over.

Trinity- is something. She's there, isn't awakened, and Neo has a choice between settling down with her in the matrix or waking up and going to Zion. Was the original human Neo able to imprint her into the Matrix as well? Did the machines create a program version of her to convince Neo to take the blue pill? Never made clear to the audience (but in a deliberate way, not in the "we just couldn't' be assed to explain important plot points" kind of way).

This set-up would let you actually make the movie a meta-commentary on reboots and digging up aging actors to play action heroes again. It would give the nostalgia bait a genuine purpose in the plot. The humans want to use it to entice Neo, but Neo is "too old for this ****" and maybe that isn't what he wants anymore. The movie can even end with Neo deciding to take the blue pill- they don't need him anymore, and he's moved on with his life.

The idea would need some work, obviously, but I would have found it a lot more interesting than "Reboots are dumb, now here's Neo fighting Agent Smith again".

[Bohandas]

Ironically...

I feel like if they went that route, with the humans and synthients desperately trying to survive against the machines so they can clear the sky and usher in a new era, and the stakes within the Matrix being directly tied to the fate of the real world, there may be potential for more sequels.

Whereas I'm not sure there's going to be another sequel any time soon after this.

When has lack of clear direction ever stopped a Matrix sequel from being made?

[BloodSquirrel]

When has lack of clear direction ever stopped a Matrix sequel from being made?

The problem is more a lack of box office receipts. The movie has been a financial failure.

The standard playbook would dictate handing the property off to someone else and doing a hard reboot next. Which, as I've said, I think would be a better than a sequel for this particular franchise. I think that the premise itself is in need of updating and some refinement to make it better suited to a proper franchise instead of just a single stand-alone film about a guy becoming The One. And, unlike a lot of other properties where I don't think that the premise was nearly as important as the execution in making the original an enduring classic, I think the premise of the Matrix does offer a lot of unique ground for exploration- but that probably needs to come along with some tweaking.

[Ramza00]

The problem is more a lack of box office receipts. The movie has been a financial failure.

The standard playbook would dictate handing the property off to someone else and doing a hard reboot next. Which, as I've said, I think would be a better than a sequel for this particular franchise. I think that the premise itself is in need of updating and some refinement to make it better suited to a proper franchise instead of just a single stand-alone film about a guy becoming The One. And, unlike a lot of other properties where I don't think that the premise was nearly as important as the execution in making the original an enduring classic, I think the premise of the Matrix does offer a lot of unique ground for exploration- but that probably needs to come along with some tweaking.

Just double checking for it’s been a few weeks.

Have you actually watched the movie yet that you are thinking about rebooting? I am asking for I am trying to understand the orientation to the franchise for you said much the same on the first page, without seeing the movie at the time.

[Rodin]

Just double checking for it’s been a few weeks.

Have you actually watched the movie yet that you are thinking about rebooting? I am asking for I am trying to understand the orientation to the franchise for you said much the same on the first page, without seeing the movie at the time.

Speaking personally, my stance to the Matrix franchise before Resurrections was announced:

1) Due to advances in CGI and the narrative trainwreck of Reloaded and Revolutions, the trilogy is one of the best candidates for a remake/reboot of any franchise out there.
2) Due to how the original trilogy ended, it's a terrible franchise to write a sequel to.
3) If you insist on a sequel, it must be with a new cast of characters on account of both the age of the actors and the minor fact that the major characters died at the end.

With that criteria, Resurrections would have had to be mind-blowing to get me to change my mind. From everything I've heard in the thread (and seen in the Pitch Meeting video), it very much was not.

So my original stance stands. I'd love to see the original trilogy done right, and while the first movie doesn't need remaking it would need to be remade if the subsequent movies are to be remade. A sequel movie brings nothing to the franchise, and binging back Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss was a bad idea.

I might have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and go see it in normal times, if only because the movie theater is literally across the street from where I work. But in the current environment where I'm too scared to even go see MCU movies in a theater? Not a chance.

[BloodSquirrel]

Just double checking for it’s been a few weeks.

Have you actually watched the movie yet that you are thinking about rebooting? I am asking for I am trying to understand the orientation to the franchise for you said much the same on the first page, without seeing the movie at the time.

I've seen it now, and it didn't really change my opinion much on that point, one way or the other.

[Millstone85]

I think the movie may have wasted its best concept on the prologue.

A young rebel fights an agent modelled after a deceased hero of Zion, but eventually gets the program to change sides.
That could have been the main plot of the movie.

Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and her crew are confronted by Agent Chase (Laurence Fishburne), Agent Knight (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Agent Smith (Keanu Reeves). At first, this appears to simply be a machine ploy to demoralize the forces of Io.

As the story progresses, Agent Smith comes to realize that there is more of Neo in him that he was told, and begins to think of himself as a digital ghost. He tries to bring the same realization in his fellow agents, which at one point seems to work.

In truth, an influential program called the Analyst has been trying to recreate the power of the One from records of the Neo/Smith/DEM fusion at the end of Revolutions. Agents Chase and Knight are just puppets created to emotionally manipulate the new Smith.

Ultimately, Smith sacrifices himself to relinquish the power of the One to humans. Bugs becomes the new One, far more powerful than her predecessors, and defeats the Analyst.
Or something like that.

[Psyren]

The problem is more a lack of box office receipts. The movie has been a financial failure.

The standard playbook would dictate handing the property off to someone else and doing a hard reboot next. Which, as I've said, I think would be a better than a sequel for this particular franchise. I think that the premise itself is in need of updating and some refinement to make it better suited to a proper franchise instead of just a single stand-alone film about a guy becoming The One. And, unlike a lot of other properties where I don't think that the premise was nearly as important as the execution in making the original an enduring classic, I think the premise of the Matrix does offer a lot of unique ground for exploration- but that probably needs to come along with some tweaking.


Just double checking for it’s been a few weeks.

Have you actually watched the movie yet that you are thinking about rebooting? I am asking for I am trying to understand the orientation to the franchise for you said much the same on the first page, without seeing the movie at the time.

I have watched all four movies + Animatrix and I agree wiith BloodSquirrel. The bones of an amazing sci-fi action epic are in here, but the premise itself is one of the biggest obstacles getting in the way of that potential success.


I think the movie may have wasted its best concept on the prologue.

A young rebel fights an agent modelled after a deceased hero of Zion, but eventually gets the program to change sides.
That could have been the main plot of the movie.

Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and her crew are confronted by Agent Chase (Laurence Fishburne), Agent Knight (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Agent Smith (Keanu Reeves). At first, this appears to simply be a machine ploy to demoralize the forces of Io.

As the story progresses, Agent Smith comes to realize that there is more of Neo in him that he was told, and begins to think of himself as a digital ghost. He tries to bring the same realization in his fellow agents, which at one point seems to work.

In truth, an influential program called the Analyst has been trying to recreate the power of the One from records of the Neo/Smith/DEM fusion at the end of Revolutions. Agents Chase and Knight are just puppets created to emotionally manipulate the new Smith.

Ultimately, Smith sacrifices himself to relinquish the power of the One to humans. Bugs becomes the new One, far more powerful than her predecessors, and defeats the Analyst.
Or something like that.

I like the idea of Neo and Trinity being ghosts in the broader machine, and using that to bring back the actors rather than simply having their physical forms repaired and reinserted. And I definitely like the idea of them passing the torch to the younger generation. Indeed, I really thought that's what this movie was going to end up being. instead, Bugs is kinda just there at the end, and is completely forgotten about halfway through the climactic battle.

[BloodSquirrel]

Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and her crew are confronted by Agent Chase (Laurence Fishburne), Agent Knight (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Agent Smith (Keanu Reeves). At first, this appears to simply be a machine ploy to demoralize the forces of Io.

As the story progresses, Agent Smith comes to realize that there is more of Neo in him that he was told, and begins to think of himself as a digital ghost. He tries to bring the same realization in his fellow agents, which at one point seems to work.

In truth, an influential program called the Analyst has been trying to recreate the power of the One from records of the Neo/Smith/DEM fusion at the end of Revolutions. Agents Chase and Knight are just puppets created to emotionally manipulate the new Smith.

Ultimately, Smith sacrifices himself to relinquish the power of the One to humans. Bugs becomes the new One, far more powerful than her predecessors, and defeats the Analyst.


"Far more powerful than her predecessors" is the exact opposite of what we need (and it smacks of cringy oneupmanship). One of the biggest problems with the premise (as I pointed out earlier) is that making Neo a god makes it hard to make a sequel where he's still getting into kung-fu fights, and pushes you toward "I guess it's time to destroy the Matrix now... so how does that work?" which is where the franchise is at its weakest. If you want the franchise to have legs, you need to tone things down and give the characters smaller and more intermediate goals and conflicts that don't require you to upend your setting.

I can think of a lot of different ideas and directions you could take the story, but having "The most powerful One ever" around breaks most of them.

[Ramza00]

I've seen it now, and it didn't really change my opinion much on that point, one way or the other.

Cool 😎





"Far more powerful than her predecessors" is the exact opposite of what we need (and it smacks of cringy oneupmanship). One of the biggest problems with the premise (as I pointed out earlier) is that making Neo a god makes it hard to make a sequel where he's still getting into kung-fu fights, and pushes you toward "I guess it's time to destroy the Matrix now... so how does that work?" which is where the franchise is at its weakest. If you want the franchise to have legs, you need to tone things down and give the characters smaller and more intermediate goals and conflicts that don't require you to upend your setting.

I can think of a lot of different ideas and directions you could take the story, but having "The most powerful One ever" around breaks most of them.

Agreed

[Millstone85]

"Far more powerful than her predecessors" is the exact opposite of what we need (and it smacks of cringy oneupmanship). One of the biggest problems with the premise (as I pointed out earlier) is that making Neo a god makes it hard to make a sequel where he's still getting into kung-fu fightsThat's only a problem if you want to leave room for a sequel. I didn't.


and pushes you toward "I guess it's time to destroy the Matrix now... so how does that work?" which is where the franchise is at its weakest.The idea seems to bring back the original "paradise" Matrix, only this time humans are in control. The conquest of Eden, if you will.

The Analyst mocks the idea at the end of Resurrections. He says something like "Yeah, sure, make the sky rainbow or whatever, see how that goes", to which Trinity and Neo answer that, yes, they will do just that.

[Bohandas]

Personally I think that if they had to do a Matrix sequel they should have just went ahead and made Goliath into a movie

[BloodSquirrel]

That's only a problem if you want to leave room for a sequel. I didn't.

A core part of the conceit here is that you don't have a choice about that- WB wants a franchise.

[Bohandas]

A core part of the conceit here is that you don't have a choice about that- WB wants a franchise.

That's a good point. It's not like having no room for a sequel stopped them the first three times.

[Millstone85]

A core part of the conceit here is that you don't have a choice about that- WB wants a franchise.
That's a good point. It's not like having no room for a sequel stopped them the first three times.And WB didn't bother stopping Lana Wachowski from ending Resurrections with one of her heroes, maybe two, reaching the finger-snap level of power.

[Tyndmyr]

A core part of the conceit here is that you don't have a choice about that- WB wants a franchise.

It is unfortunate that everything is franchised to death these days. The world of the Matrix is a cool one, and definitely *could* have some exploration done, but it looks like it's going down the Terminator rabbit hole. An originally cool idea that just gets beaten to death with repetition and rehashing.

Anyways, I read recently that the intent was to have Smith played by Hugo Weaving, and the lines were written with him in mind, and then never changed. I'm...not sure if that makes it better or worse. Having the original actor back would have likely been better, but his role and lines are still kind of miserable.

[Rodin]

It is unfortunate that everything is franchised to death these days. The world of the Matrix is a cool one, and definitely *could* have some exploration done, but it looks like it's going down the Terminator rabbit hole. An originally cool idea that just gets beaten to death with repetition and rehashing.

Anyways, I read recently that the intent was to have Smith played by Hugo Weaving, and the lines were written with him in mind, and then never changed. I'm...not sure if that makes it better or worse. Having the original actor back would have likely been better, but his role and lines are still kind of miserable.

Matrix faces the same problem as both the Terminator and Alien franchises - the original movies for them were done long enough ago to put them into a different era of filmmaking, and the original movies were not made with a franchise in mind.

When the MCU started up, they didn't try to say "this movie takes place in the same universe as the Hulk TV series, and we're bringing back Lou Ferrigno to reprise his role". They started a new version of the franchise written with the expectation that it would be a franchise.

Toss out the bad, introduce better. Write sequel hooks that make sense because the loose plot of the sequels are already in a series bible that you compiled before the first script was written.

Make the universe first. Then tell stories in it, and make sure those stories have both a beginning and an end written before you start trying to fill in the details.

[BloodSquirrel]

Matrix faces the same problem as both the Terminator and Alien franchises - the original movies for them were done long enough ago to put them into a different era of filmmaking, and the original movies were not made with a franchise in mind.

When the MCU started up, they didn't try to say "this movie takes place in the same universe as the Hulk TV series, and we're bringing back Lou Ferrigno to reprise his role". They started a new version of the franchise written with the expectation that it would be a franchise.

Toss out the bad, introduce better. Write sequel hooks that make sense because the loose plot of the sequels are already in a series bible that you compiled before the first script was written.

Make the universe first. Then tell stories in it, and make sure those stories have both a beginning and an end written before you start trying to fill in the details.

Alien is a simple enough premise that it doesn't really suffer from the same problem- all you need is another xenomorph getting loose on another isolated space location and you have a movie. The continuity of the franchise, up until this point, doesn't create any major problems for continuing things (The last Alien movie was terrible for completely unrelated reasons, like having characters with the IQ of a block of cement). I think the importance of planning out 20 movies ahead is overrated- as long as the movie doesn't break its own setting at the end, you can find directions to take the story. The OT Star Wars movie and Indiana Jones weren't planned out ahead of time, and they both worked fine.

Terminator, though- good God. The premise is aggressively hostile to being turned into a franchise. By it's nature, the "Stop the war from happening in the future" plot means that every attempt to create a new sequel is going to involve invalidating the accomplishments in the last movie. The latest one tried to pretend that it was breaking new ground by saying "Hey, this time it's an entirely different bunch of machines that took over! What's the difference? Who knows! Who cares?". Every movie just winds up being another rehash of the first one. James Cameron managed to make that work once, but ever since then the series has been literally stuck in a time loop.

Terminator 2 was amazing, but beyond that it just has no business being turned into a franchise.

[Millstone85]

Terminator, though- good God. The premise is aggressively hostile to being turned into a franchise. By it's nature, the "Stop the war from happening in the future" plot means that every attempt to create a new sequel is going to involve invalidating the accomplishments in the last movie.That wasn't the plot of The Terminator, though. Skynet was the only one trying to rewrite history, by stopping John, the man who would lead humans to victory, from ever being born. No attempt was made to treat the AI in kind by sabotaging its development.

That would first be done in Judgment Day, and first negated in Rise of the Machines. And for all its faults, the latter did the smart thing by having its own attempt fail, so Salvation could move into the machine war.

It is Genisys and Dark Fate that threw the franchise into the pit of "Okay, lets do Judgment Day all over again, and again".

For a franchise that always had a hostile premise, see Highlander. There really could be only one.

[Dr.Samurai]

That wasn't the plot of The Terminator, though. Skynet was the only one trying to rewrite history, by stopping John, the man who would lead humans to victory, from ever being born. No attempt was made to treat the AI in kind by sabotaging its development.

That would first be done in Judgment Day, and first negated in Rise of the Machines. And for all its faults, the latter did the smart thing by having its own attempt fail, so Salvation could move into the machine war.

It is Genisys and Dark Fate that threw the franchise into the pit of "Okay, lets do Judgment Day all over again, and again".

For a franchise that always had a hostile premise, see Highlander. There really could be only one.
I recall a scene in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where they discover Skynet had sent a terminator back to like... the 1800s to basically ensure it's creation, and one of the characters says something like "OMG, this will never end, they will keep sending a terminator back in time over and over and over again..." and I was like "... OMG, the franchise is becoming self-aware!!" :smalleek::smallwink:

[Wintermoot]

That wasn't the plot of The Terminator, though. Skynet was the only one trying to rewrite history, by stopping John, the man who would lead humans to victory, from ever being born. No attempt was made to treat the AI in kind by sabotaging its development.

That would first be done in Judgment Day, and first negated in Rise of the Machines. And for all its faults, the latter did the smart thing by having its own attempt fail, so Salvation could move into the machine war.

It is Genisys and Dark Fate that threw the franchise into the pit of "Okay, lets do Judgment Day all over again, and again".

For a franchise that always had a hostile premise, see Highlander. There really could be only one.

Yes but Highlander never had any sequels.

*hard glare*

[Millstone85]

the smart thingI just called myself dumb, didn't I? Total dissonance with me defending Lana's decision to end Resurrections on the same sequel-adverse note as the first movie.

Well okay then, I changed my mind.


I recall a scene in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where they discover Skynet had sent a terminator back to like... the 1800s to basically ensure it's creationWhat is worse is that scene in Genisys where "John" realizes that he doesn't need to ensure his birth, now that he himself has jumped back in time. Indeed, in that franchise, time travellers are not affected by whatever changes are made to the future.

If you put that together with an earlier scene where a T-5000 model Matt Smith is shown identifying as Skynet themself, you really have to wonder why they bother sending lesser machines to put in place version 58 of their development.


Yes but Highlander never had any sequels.

*hard glare*Same goes for The Matrix. What are we even talking about?

https://i.imgur.com/l7YUBMO.png

[Rodin]

Same goes for The Matrix. What are we even talking about?


Well, there was that leak from the studio containing a couple of fight scenes with incomplete CGI, some of Agent Smith's dialogue, and a proposed soundtrack. Shame they never put that stuff into a movie, it looked like there was potential there.

[Thrudd]

I recall a scene in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where they discover Skynet had sent a terminator back to like... the 1800s to basically ensure it's creation, and one of the characters says something like "OMG, this will never end, they will keep sending a terminator back in time over and over and over again..." and I was like "... OMG, the franchise is becoming self-aware!!" :smalleek::smallwink:

So you're saying the next film should be about a terminator sent back to assassinate James Cameron, who will be saved by actual 1980s Arnold, who turns out to have really been another terminator sent back by 2020's Arnold to make sure the franchise survives to make him rich and famous? Meaning that the first 2 terminator films are actually based on Cameron's real-life experiences.

[Bohandas]

Alright, The Machines vs Skynet, who wins?

[Ramza00]

What is worse is that scene in Genisys where "John" realizes that he doesn't need to ensure his birth, now that he himself has jumped back in time. Indeed, in that franchise, time travellers are not affected by whatever changes are made to the future.

If you put that together with an earlier scene where a T-5000 model Matt Smith is shown identifying as Skynet themself, you really have to wonder why they bother sending lesser machines to put in place version 58 of their development.

Someone should do a franchise, not the Terminators, where there is a twist where they sent back two machines in time and they did not know about each other.

The one further back in time “fails” in its mission and then realised the time travel rules do not require you to set up the previous events, that the machine itself is its own being, it exists despite its origin, and thus it can choose whatever Destiny it wants. Since it has an immortal like body there is no need to dominate or fight the humans, the machine can remain hidden and live in peace. There is no need for genocide, we can learn from the past and not repeat the sins of others.

This movie is written as a horror movie, and we learn the twist when machine 2 is about to win, but machine 1 comes out of nowhere and stops the plan. Machine 1 only learning about Machine 2 for it is making such a mess and it hit the news waves.

[Rodin]

Alright, The Machines vs Skynet, who wins?

We already know, Skynet does. Those "Keanu Reeves is immortal" memes? Those are because Skynet sent a Keanu Reeves Terminator back in time. The Matrix films aren't fiction, they're a documentary. He is The One because under that fleshy exterior he's a super-advanced robot hacking his way to victory.

[Millstone85]

Alright, The Machines vs Skynet, who wins?The victor is the one invading the other's post-apocalyptic Earth.

On the Machines' Earth, Skynet gets the drop on them with a nuclear strike against their human power plants and fetus fields. Then a lethargic 01 is seized by terminators with laser and plasma cannons.

On Skynet's Earth, the Machines switch back to solar energy and swarm the place with sentinels.

[Thrudd]

The victor is the one invading the other's post-apocalyptic Earth.

On the Machines' Earth, Skynet gets the drop on them with a nuclear strike against their human power plants and fetus fields. Then a lethargic 01 is seized by terminators with laser and plasma cannons.

On Skynet's Earth, the Machines switch back to solar energy and swarm the place with sentinels.

Now wait. What we know about Skynet is that it loses to the humans in what seems to be conventional warfare, after only a couple decades. The Machines are completely dominant on their Earth, the only "war" still ongoing is a fabricated one with a tiny and controllable population of humans.

I propose that the Matrix actually takes place in a future beyond the Skynet war (which ends in 2029). For a time, AI and most robotics, and of course time travel, are understandably outlawed. Probably after a century or so, interest in robotics is renewed as memory of the war fades, and we get the new advent of AI as described by Morpheus. The Machines as of the time of the Matrix films have advanced a further 600 years after that.

If a multiversal portal was discovered that allowed a version of the Machines from the year 2700+ to access a Skynet Earth circa 2020's, I think the only possible outcome is an almost instantaneous victory for the Machines. Their AI invade and overwrite the extremely primitive programming of Skynet's systems wirelessly (it has only been self aware for 15-20 years, after all). Then the Machines set up this parallel Earth as their primary home, easily conquering the remaining humans, who do not have the necessary tech to scorch the sky. They now have infinite energy, humans can be eliminated completely, and they quickly spread to the stars and probably other parallel Earths. They might even abandon the Matrix Earth, seeing as they seem to have really been spinning their wheels there, with the perpetually tenuous energy situation. They probably just nuke Zion once and for all and write off this version of the Earth, maybe keeping the portal open so they can use it for natural resources.

[Millstone85]

Now wait. What we know about Skynet is that it loses to the humans in what seems to be conventional warfare, after only a couple decades. The Machines are completely dominant on their Earth, the only "war" still ongoing is a fabricated one with a tiny and controllable population of humans.The Machines have also conditioned those humans so they do not go around bombing the plants and fields, but instead go through the difficult process of hacking into the Matrix and giving each person the choice to become a red pill or remain a blue pill.

The Machines are not prepared for an enemy who doesn't need or care about the pod people.

Now, after defeating 01, Skynet may well lose to Zion, Io or whatever form the human resistance takes.

[Talakeal]

Someone should do a franchise, not the Terminators, where there is a twist where they sent back two machines in time and they did not know about each other.

The one further back in time “fails” in its mission and then realised the time travel rules do not require you to set up the previous events, that the machine itself is its own being, it exists despite its origin, and thus it can choose whatever Destiny it wants. Since it has an immortal like body there is no need to dominate or fight the humans, the machine can remain hidden and live in peace. There is no need for genocide, we can learn from the past and not repeat the sins of others.

This movie is written as a horror movie, and we learn the twist when machine 2 is about to win, but machine 1 comes out of nowhere and stops the plan. Machine 1 only learning about Machine 2 for it is making such a mess and it hit the news waves.

Wasn’t that more or less the plot of the last of Dark Fate?

[Ramza00]

Wasn’t that more or less the plot of the last of Dark Fate?

I do not know? I have only seen (counts) 4 of the 6 Terminator movies, missing the Bale's Terminator Salvation one and the one you just mentioned Dark Fate.

Also the TV show, what's its name again?

[Dr.Samurai]

I do not know? I have only seen (counts) 4 of the 6 Terminator movies, missing the Bale's Terminator Salvation one and the one you just mentioned Dark Fate.
I haven't seen Dark Fate either. I think I saw Gynysisysysyis but I don't remember much from it.

Also the TV show, what's its name again?
The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I found it entertaining, and it had some bright points. And while I really like Lena Headey, I found her Sarah Connor a little too nice for me. By T2, Sarah sees John more as a mcguffin than a son. She has a duty and a responsibility, and that's to make sure he fulfills his destiny and saves mankind. Of course she still loves him, but that love isn't really demonstrated. After he rescues her, Sarah beckons him over and John thinks they are about to hug, after not having seen each other since she was admitted to a mental institution. Instead, Sarah checks him for any wounds. Then she berates him for being stupid enough for risking his life trying to save her, and drives him to tears. Later she muses that the Terminator would be the only father figure that could measure up for John because it would always be there relentlessly trying to protect him, again showing how focused Sarah's mind is on protecting John, that a machine incapable of loving him would be the ideal father because it is nearly indestructible and singularly focused to protect him. Sarah, with her cold and focused method of rearing her son, is trying to be a machine, something indestructible with no weaknesses to exploit.

I think the revelation of her destiny and John's destiny transforming Sarah from a naive and clumsy young woman into a fearless and determined warrior that is operating at "mama grizzly" mode at all times is really interesting, and I think that Sarah in Chronicles was a little too sympathetic to John's plight.

[Millstone85]

I have only seen (counts) 4 of the 6 Terminator movies, missing the Bale's Terminator Salvation one and the one you just mentioned Dark Fate.
I haven't seen Dark Fate either. I think I saw Gynysisysysyis but I don't remember much from it.I have seen the first 4, but not Genisys or Dark Fate. I have, however, read about them on TvTropes.

[Bohandas]

I just had a thought. In The Matrix they talk about dying in the matrix causing you to die in real life because "the mind makes it real", but if that's the case couldn't they cancel that out by taking a drug like that creates a sense of invincibility (such as phencyclidine, for example)

[Thrudd]

I just had a thought. In The Matrix they talk about dying in the matrix causing you to die in real life because "the mind makes it real", but if that's the case couldn't they cancel that out by taking a drug like that creates a sense of invincibility (such as phencyclidine, for example)

It does seem strange, that the rebels can create avatars for the Matrix that allow them to "cheat" the Matrix physics, run up walls, leap dozens of feet and avoid being hurt by falls, smashing through windows, etc., but not to ignore damage from bullets and other direct attacks. Maybe the "kill" code programmed into bullets is something they just couldn't manage to hack.

[Vahnavoi]

It's pretty well established in the first movie that only the One knows the Matrix well enough to cheat to that extent.

[Psyren]

I just had a thought. In The Matrix they talk about dying in the matrix causing you to die in real life because "the mind makes it real", but if that's the case couldn't they cancel that out by taking a drug like that creates a sense of invincibility (such as phencyclidine, for example)

Even assuming humanity has the facilities to synthesize complex pharmaceuticals still, we have no idea what effect altering your IRL brain chemistry to such a degree will have on your Matrix connection, as we haven't really seen that approach applied. The only time we saw a matrix person medicated IIRC was Morpheus injecting Trinity with morphine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiVDV8-MQes) while Neo was removing the "bullet" from her "body."

[Bohandas]

It's pretty well established in the first movie that only the One knows the Matrix well enough to cheat to that extent.

It's not a thing the matrix does per se however. Morpheus says that the mind makes it real, meaning that you just have to change the mind, not the matrix. If they're going to have this ridiculous premise they should at least stick to it consistently


So you're saying the next film should be about a terminator sent back to assassinate James Cameron, who will be saved by actual 1980s Arnold, who turns out to have really been another terminator sent back by 2020's Arnold to make sure the franchise survives to make him rich and famous? Meaning that the first 2 terminator films are actually based on Cameron's real-life experiences.

I'd like to see a movie where a Terminator fan sends an android back in time to stop James Cameron from becoming pretentious and making movies like Titanic and Avatar

[Dr.Samurai]

It's not a thing the matrix does per se however. Morpheus says that the mind makes it real, meaning that you just have to change the mind, not the matrix. If they're going to have this ridiculous premise they should at least stick to it consistently
And we do see that the rebels do get better. At least Morpheus goes from getting curb-stomped by Agent Smith to handling himself much more evenly against the Agent on the tractor trailer in Matrix Reloaded. I like to think that the presence of Neo and his feats allows for the others to "expand their mind" and be more capable within the matrix. Perhaps, given time, they too will be able to dodge bullets and fly.

Except it's all controlled opposition so... who knows?

[Ramza00]

It's not a thing the matrix does per se however. Morpheus says that the mind makes it real, meaning that you just have to change the mind, not the matrix. If they're going to have this ridiculous premise they should at least stick to it consistently

The mind is not one thing, but many. The brain stem is different than the frontal lobe, which is different than the visual system which just process information. Which is different than the 50+ other brain areas for Korbinian Brodmann found at least 50+ different types of human brain tissue over 100 years ago when he did lots of directions of sheep brains and then compared it to human brains.

———

Morpheus comment with the mind makes it real is mythical not explanatory of the precise mechanisms of action. To know if a drug can bypass the precise mechanism of action requires a different type of story, one you want to be told, but the storytellers have different opinions on the matter.

Put another way a reparative read vs a paranoid read of the movie text. (Literary Critic Eve Josofsky Sedgwick in Touching Feeling if you want to know more, Chapter 4 Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You)

[Dr.Samurai]

I think it is supposed to be literal though.

Before Neo is the one, we see him coughing up blood in the real world when Smith is landing a barrage of punches on him.

Later, when he shoots Neo, Neo's heart stops in the real world.

Neo becoming the One coincides with his real world body returning from the dead.

I don't think it's mythical. I think the whole point is that your perception allows you to break free of the constraints of the Matrix. That's in the mind.

[Ramza00]

I think it is supposed to be literal though.

Before Neo is the one, we see him coughing up blood in the real world when Smith is landing a barrage of punches on him.

Later, when he shoots Neo, Neo's heart stops in the real world.

Neo becoming the One coincides with his real world body returning from the dead.

I don't think it's mythical. I think the whole point is that your perception allows you to break free of the constraints of the Matrix. That's in the mind.

Even when I use drugs to prevent the body from feeling pain (there is a whole circuit, with one of the key parts is an attentional switch called the dorsal anterior mid cingulate cortex, it is involved with the placebo effect and the nocebeo effect, but also attentional switching and motivation) …

Even when I use drugs to de-synchronize brain areas so you can not feel pain, other feedback and feedforward mechanisms are still happening like an increase of heart rate, hormones being released, and so on. The body is really complicated, so you are 100% correct and that is the intent, while simultaneously we do not know the limits and mechanisms of how it works. Neo as the One still has some humanity he has not transcended. He can still bleed 🩸.

The tension between these two, the psychodynamic energies is done on purpose to keep us the reader / viewer of the text invested in Neo. We should do the reparative read and not look for inconsistencies, and when we find an inconsistency assume it is simple, when in reality it is likely complex and messy just like our own real life.

[Tyndmyr]

With regard to drugs, the freed humans may simply not have a selection of them. By all appearances, they are living with very little, and there is extremely little plant life to harvest. To the point that people are basically just eating gruel to survive.

[Dr.Samurai]

With regard to drugs, the freed humans may simply not have a selection of them. By all appearances, they are living with very little, and there is extremely little plant life to harvest. To the point that people are basically just eating gruel to survive.
#CypherDidNothingWrong

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EzTckZ2BvR4/SoCGqD5PwsI/AAAAAAAAD1w/trqV_FDoTi8/s320/DSC03123.JPG

[Vahnavoi]

It's not a thing the matrix does per se however. Morpheus says that the mind makes it real, meaning that you just have to change the mind, not the matrix. If they're going to have this ridiculous premise they should at least stick to it consistently.

When a person is plugged into the Matrix, the Matrix demonstrably overrides all their neural functions as part of two-way feedback system. It makes you see what it wants you to see, hear what it wants you to hear, feel what it wants you to feel, so on and so forth, to near complete exclusion of the physical world. Their mind is trapped there.

This necessarily entails it can interfere with whatever drug you'd give to a person. Whatever psychoactive drug you'd give to a person, it's still effecting the same nerves the Matrix is feeding code into. The idea that any known drug would have more dramatic effect than the Matrix or the training programs humans are shown to be using is what's ridiculous. The Matrix itself likely is capable of causing any effect of such drugs.

[Ramza00]

#CypherDidNothingWrong

Cypher wanting to be plugged back in was not wrong. Nor was disavowing his previous red pill choice and choosing the blue pill.

It was the betrayal of his comrades, the price the devil wanted in this Faustian Baragan that made Cypher into “Mr. Reagan” again. He can be a movie star if he broke the Union of his friends and had them murdered.

—————

Ironically the 3 Agents of the first Matrix movie had no authority and thus mechanical power to reinsert Cypher back into the Matrix. They are / were like cops who were doing off the books illegal missions in the pursuit of what they saw as a higher calling. They did not understand the Matrix, and the systems of control, that the Architect and likely many of the higher up machines and programs did not want Zion to be destroyed until the stabilizing force of The One was obtained. These “unplugged” agents in a liminal state of being unplugged (the ringleader Smith being the most unplugged not doing it fully until after movie 1) are just as much of a destabilizing force that threaten the entire matrix as humans who rejected the Matrix but remained plugged in. These dysphoric humans who need to be unplugged will make choices that cause other humans to question the matrix and it is like a fragmentation virus that will destabilize the entire system.

This is why you got to run the humans in parallel you silly engineers. Multiple Matrixes were one does not infect the next location. :smalltongue:

—————

Put another way Cypher / Mr. Reagan is much like an alter-ego different person but shares the same purpose as Chad Stahelski in Matrix 4. Cypher thought he could hack reality with all his pickup techniques he tried on Trinity and she kept on rejecting / was not interested in. This sets up the Mobius Strip confrontation with Neo / Trinity / Cypher where Mr. Reagan forced Neo to become the One and for Trinity to choose Neo, unlocking his full potential. Cypher who is so close to Trinity yet so far, yearning. Yet if Cypher was put into the Matrix again as Trinity’s husband and adopted the names Chad (like the pickup community) and Tiffany (like the jewelry company associated with marriage) then Trinity / Tiffany would still be miserable. The secret to the Matrix not destabilizing is the Loathly Lady myth / Celtic Sovereignty and Tradition / Wife of Bath tale.

[Dr.Samurai]

Cypher wanting to be plugged back in was not wrong. Nor was disavowing his previous red pill choice and choosing the blue pill.

It was the betrayal of his comrades, the price the devil wanted in this Faustian Baragan that made Cypher into “Mr. Reagan” again. He can be a movie star if he broke the Union of his friends and had them murdered.
All this time I thought it was his flavor saver...

[codybene]

I was pretty meh on it too.

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

I did like that The One is now The Two thanks to Trinity getting some agency and I really really loved Yahya Abdul Mateen as Morpheus. That's about it, the rest was okay at best and had glaring structural problems at worst. In case you're wondering no, they haven't fixed the humans are batteries thing, like at all. If anything they made it worse.

Lastly, NPH as the Analyst:
started out really great, but then got... sexist at the end? Isn't he a machine? At least Smith hated all humans equally, which makes a ton more sense :smallconfused:

Just having him yell out sexist epithets so Trinity can kick his face in repeatedly and the audience can yell "yass kween!" felt so forced.

"that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to" lmao that is a good summary.... and I think that is why we all knew this movie was gonna be "meh".... don't get me wrong, growing up with Matrix I will always be down to watch any Matrix movie but we all know it's not gonna be the same as before.

[Derrick]

I thought the Matrix resurrection scene was pretty cool. It was a nice nod to the fans and I liked how they tied everything together. The action was great and I thought Neo was badass in that scene.

[Sapphire Guard]

Ehhh...it's okay?

The first 20 minutes are just a cry for help from the director. "Help! Warner is making me do this! I'm sorry, it's not my fault!"

Action is significantly weaker than the previous three, and the swarms are much less effective than the old agents were. All the pointless random murder of passersby that could easily be just fled from is kind of offputting.

It's very sad how little the human-machine peace was worth. Zion is prettier and has a new name, that's it. Given the architect was perfectly fine with a rebuilt Zion, it's part of the plan, not a divergence from it, what was really gained?

Too many repeated beats, which I suppose was kind of the point? The Analyst has absolute power in the world he wrote, how can they keep escaping him?

[Millstone85]

I think there is no need to spoiler things anymore.


The first 20 minutes are just a cry for help from the director. "Help! Warner is making me do this! I'm sorry, it's not my fault!"That, and also whining about how "The fans got my movies all wrong".


Action is significantly weaker than the previous three, and the swarms are much less effective than the old agents were.Also true.


All the pointless random murder of passersby that could easily be just fled from is kind of offputting.Again, my understanding is that the bots are not human, and may not qualify as "synthient" either. Instead, they are the Matrix simulating a perfect Matrix-compliant mob and trapping actual humans in relationships with it.

But, again again, the concept wasn't sold well, and swarm mode sucks against the likes of Bugs, let alone Neo.


It's very sad how little the human-machine peace was worth. Zion is prettier and has a new name, that's it. Given the architect was perfectly fine with a rebuilt Zion, it's part of the plan, not a divergence from it, what was really gained?Two things:

Humans and AIs living together, without humans being slaves to AIs (like in the Matrix) or AIs being slaves to humans (like in the pre-Second-Renaissance world).
The history of the city not being reset to "The One freed the elders, who now await his return" but finally entering a new chapter.

That's something I feel the movie did well enough, although it would have been better if the old Zion still existed and Io was presented as being as much at odds with Zion as it is with 01.


Too many repeated beats, which I suppose was kind of the point? The Analyst has absolute power in the world he wrote, how can they keep escaping him?As usual, by hacking that world. But I agree that the Analyst was a disappointing antagonist.

[Dragonus45]

Two things:

Humans and AIs living together, without humans being slaves to AIs (like in the Matrix) or AIs being slaves to humans (like in the pre-Second-Renaissance world).
The history of the city not being reset to "The One freed the elders, who now await his return" but finally entering a new chapter.

That's something I feel the movie did well enough, although it would have been better if the old Zion still existed and Io was presented as being as much at odds with Zion as it is with 01.


I don't think Antagonistic Zion would have worked on multiple levels and would have cluttered up an already overstuffed movie. Zion being lost and Io being a true genuine fresh start works much better narratively. Honestly it's one of the few things in the movie that really works at all.

[SarahCornel]

I was expecting more from the new movie. I thought, under the impression of the first film, that the new film would be just as good. I was wrong...

[Psyren]

I thought Io was a decent idea, but I still don't see why they needed 60 years to build it when they have who knows how many robots on their team now.

[Dr.Samurai]

I thought Io was a decent idea, but I still don't see why they needed 60 years to build it when they have who knows how many robots on their team now.
You didn't want to see Jada Pinkett Smith in old people make-up???

[Psyren]

You didn't want to see Jada Pinkett Smith in old people make-up???

I'm afraid to answer this in case Will Smith shows up at my house.

[Dr.Samurai]

I'm afraid to answer this in case Will Smith shows up at my house.
LMAO I should have seen this coming :smallbiggrin:

[Sapphire Guard]

So for the swarms to work like that, that means like 1 in 3 matrix people is a bot? That seems...inefficient.
They went to a completely random train car in Tokyo, and it happened to be full of bots already?

There already were AIs working with Zion like the Oracle. IO is still in hiding from 01, and they believe they are independent, but so did Zion. The change is not nothing... but it's also not much.

How did they get away from the Analyst the first time in Trinity's bike shed. He can freeze time, no need or incentive to let them go.

[Psyren]

So for the swarms to work like that, that means like 1 in 3 matrix people is a bot? That seems...inefficient.
They went to a completely random train car in Tokyo, and it happened to be full of bots already?

There already were AIs working with Zion like the Oracle. IO is still in hiding from 01, and they believe they are independent, but so did Zion. The change is not nothing... but it's also not much.

How did they get away from the Analyst the first time in Trinity's bike shed. He can freeze time, no need or incentive to let them go.



Nothing the Analyst does makes sense.

[Millstone85]

So for the swarms to work like that, that means like 1 in 3 matrix people is a bot?Just for fun, let's say it is 1 in 4 and that's why the Matrix went from simulating the 90s to simulating the new 20s. There are actually still only 6 billion humans plugged into the system, now with 2 billion bots. :smallbiggrin:

Or maybe there was never 6 billion connected humans. I used to take it for granted that the Oracle, Seraph, Sati, the Merovingian, etc., were all hijacking human connections like agents do, and just had a harder time finding a new one to jump to. But maybe that wasn't the idea, in which case it was already established by Reloaded that the Matrix's apparent population far exceeds its human resources.


That seems...inefficient.That would depend on the cost of a bot for the system. Maybe bots are cheap.


They went to a completely random train car in Tokyo, and it happened to be full of bots already?https://i.imgur.com/fR906BE.png

[Trafalgar]

I'm afraid to answer this in case Will Smith shows up at my house.

Did you know Will Smith was actually offered the part of Neo before Keanu Reeves was?

[Lurkmoar]

Did you know Will Smith was actually offered the part of Neo before Keanu Reeves was?

If I remember correctly, he declined.

[Psyren]

Did you know Will Smith was actually offered the part of Neo before Keanu Reeves was?


If I remember correctly, he declined.

I'm aware. He opted for Wild Wild West instead.

{Uatu voice:} "There! A new universe.... has been created!"

[The Glyphstone]

I'm aware. He opted for Wild Wild West instead.

{Uatu voice:} "There! A new universe.... has been created!"

That decision sure aged well...

[Lurkmoar]

That decision sure aged well...

Worked out pretty well for Keanu Reeves!

[Sapphire Guard]

Just for fun, let's say it is 1 in 4 and that's why the Matrix went from simulating the 90s to simulating the new 20s. There are actually still only 6 billion humans plugged into the system, now with 2 billion bots.

Or maybe there was never 6 billion connected humans. I used to take it for granted that the Oracle, Seraph, Sati, the Merovingian, etc., were all hijacking human connections like agents do, and just had a harder time finding a new one to jump to. But maybe that wasn't the idea, in which case it was already established by Reloaded that the Matrix's apparent population far exceeds its human resources.


Interesting. I always assumed that programs were just programs wearing human skins, they didn't need to hijack anyone else's connection. I suppose you could be correct.

Bots could be cheap, but they apparently hold down jobs and relationships with people until they are needed. That sounds complex (unless they have, like 3 canned responses), for virtually no reward, as many programs have difficulty blending in with normal humans and even the agents didn't perfectly manage it. Of course, the analyst is better at understanding humans than the old Architect, so maybe he could do it. Hard to imagine that not being an enormous amount of work for no apparent reason.

Analyst says the agents were expensive, but it's hard to imagine the bots being better.

[Wookieetank]

Analyst says the agents were expensive, but it's hard to imagine the bots being better.

When you take into account Agent Smith, and the number he did on the Matrix, they are not only expensive, but prohibitively so if they go rogue.

[The Glyphstone]

Are there any examples of non-Smith Agents going rogue in the tie-in properties? It seemed like he was a unique one-off in the movies, a freak aberration.

[Millstone85]

Are there any examples of non-Smith Agents going rogue in the tie-in properties? It seemed like he was a unique one-off in the movies, a freak aberration.From what I read on the MMORPG, it pretty much confirmed that "wingless" Seraph used to be an agent in the original paradise-like version of the Matrix.

[Psyren]

When you take into account Agent Smith, and the number he did on the Matrix, they are not only expensive, but prohibitively so if they go rogue.

1) That doesn't make the swarms better though. In fact, they seem decidedly ineffective, failing to take down, capture, or even materially inconvenience even a single member of the new scooby gang cast.
2) He was still using agents in the first half of the movie, so clearly he himself doesn't place as much faith in the new technology as he purports to.

[Wookieetank]

1) That doesn't make the swarms better though. In fact, they seem decidedly ineffective, failing to take down, capture, or even materially inconvenience even a single member of the new scooby gang cast.
2) He was still using agents in the first half of the movie, so clearly he himself doesn't place as much faith in the new technology as he purports to.

Haven't seen the movie yet, so no thoughts on the swarms. Was just putting in my 2 cents on why the agents would be considered expensive. Also have to factor in that the people the agents take over tend to not survive long, so there goes some of their resources as well. I can understand the machines wanting to have a more mindless/controllable brute squad, but that doesn't mean its better.

[Psyren]

Haven't seen the movie yet, so no thoughts on the swarms. Was just putting in my 2 cents on why the agents would be considered expensive. Also have to factor in that the people the agents take over tend to not survive long, so there goes some of their resources as well. I can understand the machines wanting to have a more mindless/controllable brute squad, but that doesn't mean its better.

Oh sure, I wasn't saying your statement was wrong. It's just another example of the slapdash writing for this sequel in my mind.

Like, it's entirely possible that he does view the costs of agents (whereby each takeover costs them a "battery" and carries a non-zero chance of corruption) to outweigh their benefits. That's a valid starting premise for changing up the expected "matrix enforcers" in a sequel. But surely the costs of utterly failing to stop the ragtag humans from freeing a bunch of minds, to say nothing of letting said ragtag humans successfully collaborate with hostile machines AND liberate their super-battery-romance-reactor-core, are far worse. And it's not like this movie is the only data point they have, they've had a whole generation of new pilots arise from Io to show not only that their current enforcement strategy is weak, but that the humans are if anything resurgent if not thriving.

And yeah, of course the Analyst has to be at least somewhat ineffective (so that, you know, there can be a movie with a happy ending). But where M4 failed for me is that the swarms don't even feel particularly threatening. They're no sturdier or deadlier than an average human. They don't download equipment or training when activated presumably because fight choreography isn't cheap. They lack even basic self-preservation. And they raise rather hilarious questions about the entire battery situation the new Matrix is running under. And above all, with humanity on the rise, there's no real reason they need Neo other than "hey we like that guy, let's get him out cause he seems a little sad."

[Ramza00]

Oh sure, I wasn't saying your statement was wrong. It's just another example of the slapdash writing for this sequel in my mind.

Like, it's entirely possible that he does view the costs of agents (whereby each takeover costs them a "battery" and carries a non-zero chance of corruption) to outweigh their benefits. That's a valid starting premise for changing up the expected "matrix enforcers" in a sequel. But surely the costs of utterly failing to stop the ragtag humans from freeing a bunch of minds, to say nothing of letting said ragtag humans successfully collaborate with hostile machines AND liberate their super-battery-romance-reactor-core, are far worse. And it's not like this movie is the only data point they have, they've had a whole generation of new pilots arise from Io to show not only that their current enforcement strategy is weak, but that the humans are if anything resurgent if not thriving.

And yeah, of course the Analyst has to be at least somewhat ineffective (so that, you know, there can be a movie with a happy ending). But where M4 failed for me is that the swarms don't even feel particularly threatening. They're no sturdier or deadlier than an average human. They don't download equipment or training when activated presumably because fight choreography isn't cheap. They lack even basic self-preservation. And they raise rather hilarious questions about the entire battery situation the new Matrix is running under. And above all, with humanity on the rise, there's no real reason they need Neo other than "hey we like that guy, let's get him out cause he seems a little sad."

I am going to have to disagree. The story is that of Armageddon and the Analyst is full of Hubris as the Architect. A man who is not in control but feels he is in control is an interesting antagonist but a different type of antagonist as previous movies (and that is okay)

But once you deconstruct the myths you see the Analyst as middle management and his character flaw is he got promoted for solving problem X, but he stinks at problems Y, and he refuses to learn and adapt for he is locked into a cycle of his excess, his jouissance is near infinite and thus how you beat the Analyst is noticing patterns and perceptions he can not see for he is having his moment. The analyst is lost in his moment, his excess, and other words for it (makes a profane hand gesture.) The analyst is a villian who does not realize himself and that he is a person who is a villain who monologues.

This is the Incredibles 1 version of the Matrix with Matrix Resurrections. The villain is Syndrome, he is a child of the previous matrixes just as much as Neo and Trinity were, there is no escaping how the culture that came before warped his mind much like previous generations of culture and our parents help formed you into being a person.

This is a theme that Lana was trying to channel when she wrote the 4th live action movie (what lingers after you lose your parents). The answer is there will always be profane men in the world, people like the Analyst, and in the end they are kind of pathetic. The analyst is bad at his job, but good enough to keep the middle management position (peter principle), the analyst is one who monologues for he is lonely even though he is going to memory wipe people at the end of the loop, at the end of the monologue. The analyst himself is unhappy but he feels trapped in his creation that he desired so much at the start of the journey.

Even when the Analyst created a metaverse / social media machine that replaces the old, an obscene monstrosity that saps joy from the world, the analyst is still kind of pathetic and one does not need to engage with them in a direct manner. This is literally how Neo defeated Smith at the end of Matrix 3 Revolutions, knowing he did not need to engage with words, or with kung fu to be able to win and defeat Smith.

The Analyst is trapped in an illusion of control. At the end of the movie he felt he has lost the plot, so he will redouble his efforts and get lost in his loop of control. For that is the only way the Analyst knows to be happy even if he is not truly enjoying himself and he feels lonely. Remember the last scene of the movie after the superman flight of trinity and neo is after the credits and the new thing is "cat videos" and not following the white rabbit. (Do we make the choice of returning to an old loop or creating something new even if that new thing is its old loop, the red pill vs blue pill discussion in other words.) The illusion of control and the illusion of choice. Do we have the language to capture these essences or do we let the user fill in the gap and accept this false binary or create a new binary that they are willing to live by.

-----

In sum The Analyst is a perfect ending to this trilogy. The world ended and reborn but the person trapped in the Matrix is not Neo (or Trinity) no it is the machine god's middle management The Analyst.

[JadedDM]

I thought the bots were just meant to be satire of twitter bots and internet algorithms.

[Millstone85]

The world ended and reborn but the person trapped in the Matrix is not Neo (or Trinity) no it is the machine god's middle management The Analyst.The machine god might be dead, though, having been dethroned by "the Suits" like the Architect was by the Analyst.

Not that it makes much of a difference. Do pardon me for being another profane man, but the Analyst and the Suits are just what you get when you remove the holy coat of paint from the Architect and the machine god.

[Psyren]

I am going to have to disagree. The story is that of Armageddon and the Analyst is full of Hubris as the Architect. A man who is not in control but feels he is in control is an interesting antagonist but a different type of antagonist as previous movies (and that is okay)

But once you deconstruct the myths you see the Analyst as middle management and his character flaw is he got promoted for solving problem X, but he stinks at problems Y, and he refuses to learn and adapt for he is locked into a cycle of his excess, his jouissance is near infinite and thus how you beat the Analyst is noticing patterns and perceptions he can not see for he is having his moment. The analyst is lost in his moment, his excess, and other words for it (makes a profane hand gesture.) The analyst is a villian who does not realize himself and that he is a person who is a villain who monologues.

This is the Incredibles 1 version of the Matrix with Matrix Resurrections. The villain is Syndrome, he is a child of the previous matrixes just as much as Neo and Trinity were, there is no escaping how the culture that came before warped his mind much like previous generations of culture and our parents help formed you into being a person.

This is a theme that Lana was trying to channel when she wrote the 4th live action movie (what lingers after you lose your parents). The answer is there will always be profane men in the world, people like the Analyst, and in the end they are kind of pathetic. The analyst is bad at his job, but good enough to keep the middle management position (peter principle), the analyst is one who monologues for he is lonely even though he is going to memory wipe people at the end of the loop, at the end of the monologue. The analyst himself is unhappy but he feels trapped in his creation that he desired so much at the start of the journey.

Even when the Analyst created a metaverse / social media machine that replaces the old, an obscene monstrosity that saps joy from the world, the analyst is still kind of pathetic and one does not need to engage with them in a direct manner. This is literally how Neo defeated Smith at the end of Matrix 3 Revolutions, knowing he did not need to engage with words, or with kung fu to be able to win and defeat Smith.

The Analyst is trapped in an illusion of control. At the end of the movie he felt he has lost the plot, so he will redouble his efforts and get lost in his loop of control. For that is the only way the Analyst knows to be happy even if he is not truly enjoying himself and he feels lonely. Remember the last scene of the movie after the superman flight of trinity and neo is after the credits and the new thing is "cat videos" and not following the white rabbit. (Do we make the choice of returning to an old loop or creating something new even if that new thing is its old loop, the red pill vs blue pill discussion in other words.) The illusion of control and the illusion of choice. Do we have the language to capture these essences or do we let the user fill in the gap and accept this false binary or create a new binary that they are willing to live by.

-----

In sum The Analyst is a perfect ending to this trilogy. The world ended and reborn but the person trapped in the Matrix is not Neo (or Trinity) no it is the machine god's middle management The Analyst.

Maybe I'm missing a key bit but I don't see how any of this is at odds with what I'm saying. "The analyst is middle management who is bad at his job" is pretty much where I'm coming from. But while I agree this makes him a compelling character, it defangs the movie of most of its tension.

What we really should have gotten to see, to establish a credible threat, is what HIS boss(es) is/are doing. After all, middle management implies upper management.

[Tyndmyr]

This is the Incredibles 1 version of the Matrix with Matrix Resurrections. The villain is Syndrome, he is a child of the previous matrixes just as much as Neo and Trinity were, there is no escaping how the culture that came before warped his mind much like previous generations of culture and our parents help formed you into being a person.

The thing is, Syndrome was, while kind of bonkers, still a credible threat. Yeah, he ultimately loses control of his creation, which ends up being too much of a threat to everyone...but that is a different sort of arrogance from what we see here, where it is simple delusion and the threat ends up being hollow. Which is odd given literal time stopping powers, but whatever.

If the swarms had been *too* effective, and posed a grave danger to the Analyst and the humans alike, that would have been a good deal better. Maybe interesting, too, with a repeat cycle of the same problem that originally caused humans to create their own disaster. Hubris, violence, there's a solid theme to be had there in keeping with the rest of the series.

[Sapphire Guard]

That gives this the flavour of some kind of weird corporate revenge fantasy then, 'curse those middle managers'.

The only agents are in the pocket dimension Neo made, the Analyst relies on swarms and sometimes armed police.

I'm having difficulty coming up with situations where the swarms would be effective. Let's say IO's crews are set up in an apartment building, and the swarm mode activates. IO crew cut their way out, and then the people living in the building are left wondering why their friends and neighbours suddenly turned into rage zombies. What does the Analyst do then? Purge the building? Reset everyone's memories? Seems expensive. Granted IO crew encounters would be rare.

I suppose if someone independently questions the matrix, it would be useful to have a bot be a trusted confidant.

[Dragonus45]

Questioning the effectiveness of the swarms is missing the point of them. They were meant to be metaphor/take that more then they were meant to make sense. More so then was usual even.

[Eldan]

A good metaphor would still make sense in-universe, though.

[Dragonus45]

A good metaphor would still make sense in-universe, though.

I never said it was good.

[Ramza00]

Maybe I'm missing a key bit but I don't see how any of this is at odds with what I'm saying. "The analyst is middle management who is bad at his job" is pretty much where I'm coming from. But while I agree this makes him a compelling character, it defangs the movie of most of its tension.

What we really should have gotten to see, to establish a credible threat, is what HIS boss(es) is/are doing. After all, middle management implies upper management.

But I liked it for it recenters choice as the driving force of the narrative. The first three movies with all that Oracle and Neo stuff was about choice when you reflect. Seeing beyond choices you already made (earlier), or another line I love Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand *why* you made it. I thought you'd have figured that out by now. (A few seconds later) Same reason. I love candy.

There is still tension but it is a different type of tension, it is the tension of an avalanche, instead man against another man as a source of tension, it is the tension of man against a force of nature that of an avalanche. And whether Neo (but it is really Trinity) can survive the avalanche for they are Superman.

It is different and I like that it is different for you can not repeat the same ritual again even if our brain expects it, it would not feel the same for we done the journey before. Kierkegaard tried to recreate a trip to Berlin he did earlier for he was depressed, and he was happy during the first journey, well it was a disaster, and thus this philosopher wrote on “Repetition”

Well repetition is one of the themes of this series, just as much as the themes of choices. I am sorry Psyren you did not find joy in the same events which did trigger the feeling inside of me :smallsmile: Hoped you did enjoy the movie anyway for other reasons :smalltongue:


A good metaphor would still make sense in-universe, though.

Bots create fear in a way agents do not anymore. The fear is of repetition and terror. The fear is terrorism, for even if you survive once, maybe on repetition you barely survive by the skin of your teeth. The repeated use of swarms either producers a feeling of terror in the operators or the feeling of a game for the difficult is not hard enough and you can enter a flow state and beat the game for your life was not on the line.

Once agents were defeated by Neo and others 60 years ago, both inside the story and outside the story as people watching the movie you need something new.

[Psyren]

But I liked it for it recenters choice as the driving force of the narrative. The first three movies with all that Oracle and Neo stuff was about choice when you reflect. Seeing beyond choices you already made (earlier), or another line I love Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand *why* you made it. I thought you'd have figured that out by now. (A few seconds later) Same reason. I love candy.

There is still tension but it is a different type of tension, it is the tension of an avalanche, instead man against another man as a source of tension, it is the tension of man against a force of nature that of an avalanche. And whether Neo (but it is really Trinity) can survive the avalanche for they are Superman.

It is different and I like that it is different for you can not repeat the same ritual again even if our brain expects it, it would not feel the same for we done the journey before. Kierkegaard tried to recreate a trip to Berlin he did earlier for he was depressed, and he was happy during the first journey, well it was a disaster, and thus this philosopher wrote on “Repetition”

Well repetition is one of the themes of this series, just as much as the themes of choices. I am sorry Psyren you did not find joy in the same events which did trigger the feeling inside of me :smallsmile: Hoped you did enjoy the movie anyway for other reasons :smalltongue:

I guess I didn't really sense much of a "force of nature." Your avalanche is a great example - the inherent narrative question there is will you survive/escape because there's no fighting it.

That question is entirely absent from the Analyst; not only is fighting him and his minions absurdly easy given how much control of the Matrix he's supposed to have, there isn't even really a reason to fight him since (a) humanity is thriving anyway and (b) Neo and Trinity, while maybe a bit vaguely sad and unfulfilled, are both safe, functionally immortal, and worst of all, not really necessary for anything in particular beyond pointing and going "hey, remember them?" Thus there's no world stakes, no personal stakes, no ticking clock, etc.

(I'm reminded of the Pitch Meeting lampooning this: "We gotta save Trinity, or else she might take her weird Matrix kids to soccer practice or something!")

There were things I enjoyed about the movie's premise. I'd love to revisit that machine civil war they glossed over in passing for example, and the general idea of having a room full of people brainstorm about all the elements that made the Matrix alchemy work (for the Matrix game within the Matrix movie) was a good one. The gag went on way too long but it was a solid gag nonetheless.

[Ramza00]

I guess I didn't really sense much of a "force of nature." Your avalanche is a great example - the inherent narrative question there is will you survive/escape because there's no fighting it.

That question is entirely absent from the Analyst; not only is fighting him and his minions absurdly easy given how much control of the Matrix he's supposed to have, there isn't even really a reason to fight him since (a) humanity is thriving anyway and (b) Neo and Trinity, while maybe a bit vaguely sad and unfulfilled, are both safe, functionally immortal, and worst of all, not really necessary for anything in particular beyond pointing and going "hey, remember them?" Thus there's no world stakes, no personal stakes, no ticking clock, etc.

Nods I understand this and I sympathize, and I think it is difference in expectations (and that is okay and great)

What was the stakes for the first Movie? It was pulling Morpheus out of the Matrix so he did not give away the codes. But they could have killed Morpheus at any time by unplugging him so there was no real risk to Zion once Cypher was defeated. Everything was trying to save a crew-member and how the remaining 3 people were willing to risk everything to save Morpheus.


Of course there were like 3 more layers of stakes for if Neo was not the one you had to save Morpheus for he was the only one with hope anymore in order to search for The One and the prophecy.

Likewise there was a risk of the Machines getting the codes if Tank was distracted in monitoring Morpheus condition and how the machines were doing that drugs which acted as a suggestive influence. This is what happened with Cypher and why he had to go first, but once the crew was down to Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, and Tank the levels of entropy made the 3rd stakes almost non existent.

Lastly there was a 4th layer of stakes for the Machines were considering blowing up the entire ship with the Sentinels.

The Matrix 4 is just a lower level of stakes much like Matrix 1 was. Low expectations and the movie is awesome, higher expectations and it is unsatisfying. I am glad I had fun, and I am sorry if other people did not :smallsmile:

(...and yes the people who did not have fun are allowed to complain and recapture fun by finding faults, eveFn if the faults are subjective...)

The stakes are so small and that is what made the movie fun for me. It is a movie about depression or other similar words such as dysphoria. Feeling trapped in a loop and feeling free again. And once free again the world will still exist, even if you paint rainbows in the sky the world will still be :censored: but the Sisyphean task of finding joy pushing your rock up the mountain will still be your burden not someone ... the small distinction between the two is the specific what in which changes the nature of the experience, to be Sisyphus or Atlas.

[Psyren]

Nods I understand this and I sympathize, and I think it is difference in expectations (and that is okay and great)

What was the stakes for the first Movie? It was pulling Morpheus out of the Matrix so he did not give away the codes. But they could have killed Morpheus at any time by unplugging him so there was no real risk to Zion once Cypher was defeated. Everything was trying to save a crew-member and how the remaining 3 people were willing to risk everything to save Morpheus.


Of course there were like 3 more layers of stakes for if Neo was not the one you had to save Morpheus for he was the only one with hope anymore in order to search for The One and the prophecy.

Likewise there was a risk of the Machines getting the codes if Tank was distracted in monitoring Morpheus condition and how the machines were doing that drugs which acted as a suggestive influence. This is what happened with Cypher and why he had to go first, but once the crew was down to Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, and Tank the levels of entropy made the 3rd stakes almost non existent.

Lastly there was a 4th layer of stakes for the Machines were considering blowing up the entire ship with the Sentinels.

The Matrix 4 is just a lower level of stakes much like Matrix 1 was. Low expectations and the movie is awesome, higher expectations and it is unsatisfying. I am glad I had fun, and I am sorry if other people did not :smallsmile:

(...and yes the people who did not have fun are allowed to complain and recapture fun by finding faults, eveFn if the faults are subjective...)

The stakes are so small and that is what made the movie fun for me. It is a movie about depression or other similar words such as dysphoria. Feeling trapped in a loop and feeling free again. And once free again the world will still exist, even if you paint rainbows in the sky the world will still be :censored: but the Sisyphean task of finding joy pushing your rock up the mountain will still be your burden not someone ... the small distinction between the two is the specific what in which changes the nature of the experience, to be Sisyphus or Atlas.

As you yourself mentioned, unplugging Morpheus is not an easy choice. From the crew's perspective, either Neo is The One and can thus save him, or he isn't and you still need Morpheus alive because the Prophecy says you need this specific guy to find The One. And putting the Prophecy aside entirely, humanity is barely hanging on and Morpheus is their most successful captain, so they have to at least try to save him. Those are way stronger and clearer stakes than M4.

I don't think every movie needs world-class stakes, but if you're trying to revive a franchise, especially with so many of the original characters, explaining why they're needed (narratively I mean, not for the cash grab) is important.

[Tyndmyr]

But I liked it for it recenters choice as the driving force of the narrative. The first three movies with all that Oracle and Neo stuff was about choice when you reflect.

Sure, that theme is...pretty direct. I wouldn't even call it metaphor, the characters openly talk about it constantly.

The metaphor is what is represented beyond that.


There is still tension but it is a different type of tension, it is the tension of an avalanche, instead man against another man as a source of tension, it is the tension of man against a force of nature that of an avalanche. And whether Neo (but it is really Trinity) can survive the avalanche for they are Superman.

Why should we doubt that when they are never put in the slightest inconvenience by that threat? Look back to the originals, the *very* first scene establishes just how far Trinity outclasses regular cops...and then establishes that Agents are a horrifyingly lethal threat to her.

This continues for the entire film, with agents invariably being framed as lethal...and killing about half the main characters. They don't get defeated, they are *always* the attackers until the very tail end.

By contrast, "a bunch of dudes leap off a building and die requiring no real action on the part of the protagonists" is...pretty lame stuff. There isn't any choice in how to defeat them either, so that theme largely doesn't matter. Trinity has the choice to wake up, but...that's it. We spend the entire film on replicating what Neo chooses in the first twenty minutes, then we have a meaningless fight scene with no further choice.


It is different and I like that it is different for you can not repeat the same ritual again even if our brain expects it, it would not feel the same for we done the journey before. Kierkegaard tried to recreate a trip to Berlin he did earlier for he was depressed, and he was happy during the first journey, well it was a disaster, and thus this philosopher wrote on “Repetition”

Perhaps a more reasonable interpretation is that depression sucks, and robs the joy from the things you like.

Many people enjoy things that are not novel. Even a small child will eagerly reread the same book or watch the same movie over and over again. Novelty *can* be exciting, but so can the familiar. You can make a cup of coffee the exact same way a hundred times and enjoy it every time.

Repetition can be used well or badly, and depression unfortunately isn't a good way to judge this, as it often makes people take less pleasure in both the familiar and the novel.


Nods I understand this and I sympathize, and I think it is difference in expectations (and that is okay and great)

What was the stakes for the first Movie? It was pulling Morpheus out of the Matrix so he did not give away the codes.

That was merely the stakes for the final fight...and only part of the stakes at that. Neo and Trinity were very clearly risking their lives in an attempt to free them, so they were staking their lives to try to save his.

But there are other stakes earlier. Cypher's trading lives for his own fantasy, etc.

[Ramza00]

Perhaps a more reasonable interpretation is that depression sucks, and robs the joy from the things you like.

Many people enjoy things that are not novel. Even a small child will eagerly reread the same book or watch the same movie over and over again. Novelty *can* be exciting, but so can the familiar. You can make a cup of coffee the exact same way a hundred times and enjoy it every time.

Repetition can be used well or badly, and depression unfortunately isn't a good way to judge this, as it often makes people take less pleasure in both the familiar and the novel.

If it was not obvious earlier I was referencing Camus 's The Myth of Sisyphus, a work that is referenced in the Matrix series as one of its thematic inspirations.

Likewise we can say Matrix 4 is "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" with Trinity / Tiffany being the child in the dungeon that powers this Utopia / Dystopia. That is the stakes, the world is going to work no matter who wins or loses, so why care and risk if the stakes are people being plugged in or unplugged? Why make the Kirekegaardian leap of faith and risk it all?


...You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Why tell movies about existential philosophers told via spectacle, love stories, and kung fu? Well if you do not the IP does not belong to you per Warner Brothers :smalltongue:

[Psyren]

Why tell movies about existential philosophers told via spectacle, love stories, and kung fu? Well if you do not the IP does not belong to you per Warner Brothers :smalltongue:

I think the dichotomy between existential/philosophical and spectacle/kung fu is a false one. They pulled off both before. (Granted, they did so with Baudrillard, but they did it.)

[Ramza00]

I think the dichotomy between existential/philosophical and spectacle/kung fu is a false one. They pulled off both before. (Granted, they did so with Baudrillard, but they did it.)

I am not saying it is the dichotomy, quite the opposite, I am saying you need both.

But we got both in Matrix 4 that is why Smith is there to have a short brawl, that is why Morpheus 2 is there to have the nostalgia duel in the dojo. They are there to say sometimes the enemy is one you can define yourself against, a dialectic of recognition where Smith recognized Neo enough that he is going to take his broken sunglasses off and is going to say “I'm going to enjoy watching you die”, there is a mutual recognition here for even to the Machine Smith it is personal.

But the frantic running to the exit after the subway scene is a different type of experience. The agents were transforming into bystanders and shooting guns from a distance. There was no freedom or recognition here for one mistake and you are dead. The swarm is a similar type of avalanche experience. You are fighting a zombie horde, you feel like a fox being chased by an army of hounds and the goal is to outlast the fox in a battle of endurance. It is a different form of terror, it is not one based of recognition but instead death by exhaustion. Aka perhaps what mankind did on the Savannah if the anthropologists are correct about how prehistoric man hunted in a big game fashion.

[Psyren]

You can't normally escape a zombie horde by jumping through mirrors though :smalltongue: so the analogy loses something.

I agree you need both action and philosophy, but they messed up the balance here.

[Ramza00]

You can't normally escape a zombie horde by jumping through mirrors though :smalltongue: so the analogy loses something.

I agree you need both action and philosophy, but they messed up the balance here.

Mirrors are a safe space in a game of tag if your operator is prepared. That is why peoples always carry mirrors around with themselves. If they can import guns and clothes they can import mirrors as an escape route.

And the machine overlords counter this effect by removing all phones and mirrors from this fictional story :smalltongue: