I’ve just finished a very long thread on kottke.org about The Matrix Reloaded. Many people have opined aplenty about this film. I’m not going to do that, but I’ve synthesized and collected a number of the interesting tidbits I’ve read. (Do read Corporate Mofo’s article on the subject. None of the ideas that follow are entirely my own, but come from sources too varied to attribute.
The first film is about choice. Morpheus says so, and allows Neo to choose either the red pill or the blue pill. The second film asks, “what is choice?”
The Oracle offers Neo candy, which he declines. I’m pretty sure they were Hot Tomales, which look like red pills.
There are two meanings to the word “revolution,” the title of the third film. One means “to revolt,” as in to oppose authority. The other means “to revolve” as in to come full circle.
The Oracle tells Neo that he has already made his choice, he just has to understand why. Think of a calculator. If you ask it for the solution to “2+2,” if will think that it has “chosen” the answer “4.” But it hasn’t, it was programmed to choose that response.
The operator can upload a helicopter flight program into Trinity’s brain, and knowledge of every martial art into Neo’s. This means that people’s minds can be altered via their jacks. If you carry this far enough, it doesn’t seem out of belief that Agent Smith could upload himself into Bane, who is plugged into the Matrix. Similarly, this may be how Neo can be both a program and a person. The Matrix intelligence loaded The One program into him. He could also be a clone designed to lend himself to this purpose, fusing the biology with the mechanics.
The Architect is not God. If for no other reason because he is a program, and so had to be programmed. God is the only being who was no created but has always been, as most religions think, and since we know that the machines were created by man and evolved consciousness and intelligence over time, the Architect hasn’t always existed. This is important because it means that even he may not know the whole story. Something may have created him and know more than he. This I think is also why he speaks in over-intellectualized babbling. Though he never says anything false or necessarily incorrect, the film-makers want you to doubt him and think that he may be trying to decieve us/Neo via words. He may even be the Devil, who is the great deciever in most religions. Full text of The Architect’s speech is here.
I think Josh pointed this one out. If you re-watch the first film, there’s a very good shot right after Neo gets captured by the agents. You see a bunch of screens that all show Neo in his interrogation room. Without the second film, this seems to be just the securty/monitor room of the jail. Instead, this is undoubtedly The Architect watching Neo.
Someone on Kottke’s thread claims that if you watch the multiple Neos in the scene at the end, there are only 6 variants repeated over and over. If so, we are seeing each version of Neo plus ours. If that’s wrong, then we’re just seeing every choice Neo could make. I’m not so sure on this one…
This article is pretty good, especially down toward the bottom. It brings claims that a computer screen at the end of the film displays the text “Wake up Neo…” which is like the screen we see at the beginning of the first film.
Finally, the number 101 appears throughout each film. 101 is the room number in 1984 that Smith is taken to and eventually forced to believe that two and two equal five. Themes of deception abound. In addition, 101 is binary for the number “5.” Note that Reloaded opened on 5/15 and the Revolutions opens on 10/5, which is also Guy Fawkes’ Day, the anniversery of a major historical revolution. I don’t buy this one too much, but if Neo were the sixth One, then we could count the first One as v1.0, making our Neo v1.5.