A Pair of Long, Well-Thought-Out Essays About the Matrix

A pair of long, well-thought-out essays about The Matrix

The Matrix Online - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Matrix Online - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My understanding is that the events of The Matrix Online are canonical, but it seems like there’s not much going on aside from civil war.

Matrix: Thought Strands

The more I think about The Matrix Revolutions, the better I think it was. Disappointing, yes, but I’m not sure that has to do with quality or events of the film itself, but more with it not being the movie I wanted it to be. (Spoilers ahead.)

I enjoyed watching it while it was on, but by the time it ended I just felt like I wanted the Wachowskis to start over and try again. Kenji attributes it to the film not lining up to our expectations. We watched the first one, and in our minds we thought that after it ends and Neo flies off all this cool stuff happens, though we don’t know what it’ll be. Then we see the sequels, and it’s not necessarily that they don’t live up, they just aren’t what anyone was picturing. Put another way, we all bought tickets to see The Phantom Menace expecting to see lots of Jedi and eventually Darth Vader, and out of nowhere we get gungans and a little kid. This isn’t to say that screenwriters should always pander to what their audiences expect, but I think Kenji’s idea explains why Reloaded and Revolutions didn’t satisfy me.

The problem I keep having is that the more I think about how the story had to end, the more I end up right where Revolutions ends. I had thought that it was supposed to be about Neo showing everyone in the Matrix that their world wasn’t real. But in Reloaded Morpheus says that they’re freeing people at a rapidly increasing rate, and The Kid’s Story shows that people can even wake themselves up. Put that together with the notion that even people living in Zion don’t believe that Neo is The One, and I think it shows that the people who are going to wake up do wake up, and people who don’t wouldn’t be able to handle it. So it can’t be just a story about Neo building up a following and convincing the world to follow him to Zion. I started Enter the Matrix again today, this time playing as Ghost. Playing it, I realized that it is exactly what I wanted out of the movies: lots of action inside the Matrix. While this is fun, it also shows me that the war can’t be won from inside the Matrix alone. Agents can’t be killed, and Neo’s already stronger than everything out (in) there. It also can’t be a war story about the fight between the machines and Zion. The Second Renaissance Part 2 shows us that even at the height of our military might the humans lost the war to the machines, so there’s no way a few hundred Zion guerrillas could do it in the present (and as we see in Revolutions, they don’t).

So by the end of Revolutions we have Smith having corrupted the Matrix to a point where the machines can’t stop him. We have Neo, who in choosing the wrong door has broken the cycle necessary to reboot the Matrix, and then we have the two of them destroying each other and leaving the Architect with no idea what to do. Nothing like this has happened before, as shown by Sati bringing color to the sky of the Matrix for the first time ever. By saying that those still in the Matrix will be free, the Architect is pointing to the Christian promise that our bodies will be returned to us at the end of days. What bothers me is not this ending (which I think I like), but that it’s an ending which even the omniscient characters in the story don’t understand. They’re for the first time ever in a situation where the don’t know what’s going to happen, so it just doesn’t feel complete.

And, of course, it isn’t complete. The Matrix is still running in some fashion, and from the press material The Matrix Online will take us into that world. My guess is that it will finally be the battle to convince everyone to wake up, now that the machines don’t have utter control over the world. I’d guess also that The Merovingian and the other rogue programs may have an opportunity to gain a foothold in the anarchy.

Matrix Revolutions Trailer

The trailer for The Matrix Revolutions is up at What Is The Matrix.com. It’s more of the same images that we’ve seen since promotions for The Matrix Reloaded were released. We get lots of fast cuts with Neo flying all over the place, swarming sentinels, and dozens of Agent Smiths being menacing. It doesn’t bother with much story teasing, because mainly we know that it’s continuing right from the last movie and that there’s a big fight ahead in a short amount of time. Just over a month to go now.

ascii m4tr1x

Anyone who has played DR can tell you that text is where it’s at. Who needs A/V anyway, huh? Just ask the teenage girls on the metro busy texting their American Idol votes a few months ago. Text is the way.

So who remembers Star Wars Asciimation? You know, that time some lunatic rendered thirty minutes or so of A New Hope into a text-based movie. But of course we know that that trilogy is soooo over these days (at least until Episode III comes out). These days the only trilogy anyone cares about is The Matrix (at least until Return of the King comes out). So now some new maniac has gone ahead and rendered a few seconds of Neo fighting an agent into ascii. Pretty damn cool.

Update: the German guy who made the ascii-movie has a bunch more on his site as well.

Press "R" for Bullet Time

I’m very much enjoying Enter the Matrix for my new Gamecube. It isn’t all that hard (being that your health replenishes really fast when you’re not getting hit), but I choose to play it at full speed and run straight at the cops while diving through the air in slow motion and blasting shot through the air. Also you can run on walls.

My refurbished TiVo Series 2 came today, but I can’t use it until Saturday when the cable guy comes.

Assimilation of the Matrix Thread

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.

What Does It All Mean?

Here’s an interesting analysis of the sets of myth that The Matrix is based on. I like reading these things because no one reviewer can quite commit to one particular myth-cycle or set of themes. Most are happy to jump between Old Testament mysticism, Christianity, Buddhism, and in this case Gnosticism. I’m sure really that the Wachowskis just weaved it all together however they felt like and when it’s all over we’re going to get a superbly postmodern (and yes, I’m using the term correctly) story.

Bias

I’ve been watching mostly MSNBC when I want to see the news lately, along with a smattering of CNN. At some point I’m going to gather up the courage to watch Fox News too see what they’re about.

One thing I’ve been looking for is political bias. The news networks have been showing with some frequency pieces of President Bush’s military base speech yesterday. At one point he finishes a pretty good section of his speech which is met with uproarious cheering and applause. Liberal-slanted CNN has been showing that clip cut right before the applause starts.

On a completely different subject, another short has been released from The Animatrix, titled “Detective Story.”

Update

News Flash!

The Second Renaissance Part 1 is now up at theanimatrix.com.

Animatrix

The first short from the Animatrix is supposed to go online today. They’re going to web publish four of them and then release those plus five more as a DVD before The Matrix Reloaded comes out. Look for it on the What is the Matrix? website.