#Even if he's not Exact - personally I don't think it matters lol the Narrator isn't /meant/ to have a fixed form imo - it's still flustering

[skaruresonic]

every once in a while my feed recommends thinkpieces on the Matrix films written by authors who miss the point of said films, so I guess it's time for yet another thrilling round of "watch the films"

Did. Did you see the part where Neo wakes up in his bed thinking the interrogation was just a dream. Because. Agents wiping people's memories is an established plot point.

Also, the Architect implies in Reloaded that most people plugged into the Matrix are aware deep down that they live in an artificial reality, but they agree to live in it at that near-subconscious level because they've been given the choice to accept or reject it. He says this was the most elegant solution the Oracle created to address the problem of people rejecting the dream world en masse. As long as people are made to believe they have a choice, even the illusion of choice will suffice. It paints a rather depressing portrait of humanity and its complacency, tbh.

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No kidding.

The animated short detailing the history of the machines portrays scorching the sky as mankind's last-ditch effort to gain an advantage following a gruesome war. It wasn't something they approached lightly. Never mind the fact that mankind isn't exactly known for its long-term thinking and well-considered rationale in the face of terror (neither are the machines, for that matter; nuance whomst?). Morpheus furthermore claims that they don't know who struck first, machines or humans, but they do know humans "scorched the sky."

The original script specified the machines used human minds to boost the Matrix's processing power, but because that was a concept that would have flown over the audience's heads in the nineties, they changed it to "the machines harvest humans for energy."

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To be fair, the sequels do take Morpheus somewhat to task for his dogma. His faith gets noticeably shaken by the events of Reloaded and Revolutions. Not everyone believes what he believes, but his beliefs do not require them to.

I won't argue that Morpheus is particularly righteous or even accurate most of the time, but I do think the notion that "anyone that hasn't been unplugged can turn into an Agent and kill you at any time" ought to be taken into account. Is it a little extreme that he calls every unplugged human "our enemy"? Yes. But… he kind of has good reason to, tbh. Agents can't exactly be reasoned with. The crew were fully prepared to pop a cap in Neo's ass "for [their] protection," as Trinity says, despite Morpheus' conviction that he was the man they were looking for.

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Eh. Neo's muscle atrophy appears later, though I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of having a hard-hitting scene. Watch less CinemaSins, it's good for you. ironically enough, The Matrix is the narrator's favorite movie. lol and lmao

"Furthermore, there's an unresolved issue of why the spider-like machine simply doesn't kill him (and every other revived human) as they wake up."

Because you can't kill something you think is a corpse.

The maintenance machine removed Neo's cables because it registered him as dead… as a result of Neo taking the red pill. Morpheus says taking the red pill disrupts a person's input/output signals, meaning the connection between one's RSI and body has been severed, something that only happens if a podbound human dies. The signal disruption allows the rebels to pinpoint Neo's exact location in the real world.

While you could argue this technique potentially harbors its fair share of flaws - one can only assume human batteries die every so often, so how would they be able to pick Neo out from the unattended dead? - asking why the machine didn't kill him tells me you weren't exactly paying attention.

Things get a little more complicated in Reloaded when the Architect implies that the machines do willingly let a small portion of humans go as a sort of pressure valve to prevent the Matrix from collapsing under its own critical mass. Even then, the first film provides a coherent enough explanation that we don't need Reloaded's. You're assuming the machine believes Neo is alive when clearly it doesn't. It sees him struggle, yes, but because the red pill makes Neo emit the machine equivalent of an ant's death pheromones, the bot goes "welp, another one bit the dust" and proceeds to flush the "corpse" down the drain.

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People always act like this is some fresh new take.

Well. That's kinda the whole point of his betrayal. To make you wonder what you would do in his situation. It's all well and good to speculate on what-ifs from the comfort of the fourth wall, but the film frames an otherwise abstract moral quandary in very clear terms. Is a life of hedonistic bliss better than one where you are painfully aware of the artifice of reality and constantly fighting for your life? It's not an accident---you're meant to ponder the question.

The Matrix franchise approaches the concept of freedom from a nihilistic lens. Nihilism often gets strawmanned in movies (Smith's own views function as a mouthpiece for such edgelord flanderizations) as a defeatist attitude of "Nothing matters, so why bother living?" Rather, a more accurate portrayal of nihilism contends that, because nothing has intrinsic meaning, you are free to create your own meaning. That it is dangerous to chase meaning as defined by premade structures like religion or philosophy, because these will dictate your thinking and keep you under another's control. In so doing, you surrender your freedom to truly discover for yourself what it is that makes life worth living to you. And indeed, Neo transcends Morpheus' and the Oracle's understandings of the Matrix and what it means to be The One in order to walk his own path.

The films ask you, "If freedom felt more like prison, would it still be worth striving for? What is the value of a freedom where you stand to lose more than you gain? Does freedom have inherent value, or is it hailed because of what it represents as yet another variable within these multi-tiered systems of control?"

Tbf, Cypher's resentment towards Morpheus was more understandable in earlier drafts of the script, where it's stated that Cypher was freed from an extremely young age and Morpheus had actually wound up killing five previous candidates he'd assumed to be The One. Some speculate that Cypher is jealous of Neo on the basis of having been a previous candidate, but I don't exactly think that's strictly necessary to understand his desire for a mindlessly hedonistic lifestyle.

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Okay, I'll give you that one. Never really was sure how Cypher managed to catch the Agents' attention without getting shot on sight. Perhaps Smith recognized an offer he couldn't refuse, and, both characters being opportunists, he and Cypher leaped at the chance to strike a bargain.

It may also have something to do with Smith's ability to at least somewhat mimic human mannerisms on occasion. Agent Brown and Agent Jones are about as personable as cardboard, so it's my pet theory that Smith was designated to be the "human whisperer" of the trio. Hence why Cypher conducts his negotiations with Smith at a restaurant while the other two stand guard.

The scene where Neo sneaks up on Cypher implies Cypher had been doing some hacking in order to prepare for his meeting with Smith. He turns the screens off immediately afterwards.

Moreover, Enter the Matrix implies people are able to plug into simulations without help from others. I would assume Cypher used the same kind of equipment to plug himself into the Matrix.

During Morpheus' torture, the Agents manage to figure out that Cypher has been killed, thus implying that they were counting on disposing of him all along. Because Smith orders the others to continue as planned, it's kind of obvious they never really intended on giving Cypher what he wanted.

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Petition to drop the phrase "hasn't aged well" from our collective lexicon. At best, it's a semantically null phrase. At worst, it's being deliberately obtuse towards media history as well as the creative process, a way for audiences to feel superior based on the fallacy of modernity. There have been tons of documentaries on the making of the first film, some of which are included as extras on the original DVD. I recommend you watch a few before you say stuff like this.

Admittedly, this one pisses me off a little because A.) yet again the "hasn't aged well" sentiment inevitably loops back around to overlooking the context and history in which the piece was made, and B.) fuck you, the crew worked incredibly hard on this shit.

"The most egregious offenders are scenes like the helicopter crash, where the building's windows warp unrealistically." - You can excuse people flying twenty feet through the air and dodging bullets, but draw the line at (flips through notes) glass exploding in a circle?

Imagine saying this about The Matrix of all films. The one movie that can handwave unrealistic elements through its premise alone. The film where the entire point is that unrealistic things are happening because you are not watching reality.

and then Neo was like "whoa.exe"

Secondly, the Wachowski sisters spent several months studying how glass explodes in order to achieve the ripple effect seen in the film. While CG was used to enhance the scene, the underlying framework rests on a foundation of practical effects. They made dummy rigs and ran through tons of tests to find the precise kind of glass that could accomplish what they envisioned.

The special effects director was pretty hard on himself during a watchthrough with Carrie-Anne Moss, actually. He thought some of the digital effects looked horrible, specifically Agent possessions, and said they could have done better. People saying stuff like this just makes me feel worse for him in retrospect.

Bullet-time looks unimpressive to you now because it's been parodied to death over the past twenty-five years. I fail to see how this is the film's fault.

Subjective perspective changes trying to pass themselves off as objective critique without taking any of a media's history or creative process into account are a part of the reason why I think "hasn't aged well" is a thought-terminating cliche and ultimately useless in discussions of this ilk. It doesn't effectively communicate anything of meaning. You might as well say "this film features moving pictures" or "this video game has controls" for all the information you're imparting.

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I will concede that Resurrections was a glaringly obvious cash grab and a huge waste of potential. The first half of the film nearly rivals the the first act of M1 in terms of its psychological intrigue, building a slowburn of anticipation… Only to completely shit the bed, devolving into a cynical montage of fanservice and half-baked ideas that amount to nothing more than a shrug. I'm not a Neo/Trinity fan in the slightest, so the "hook" they hoped would reel me in didn't work on me.

However, I think there is more substance to Reloaded and Revolutions than people commonly give them credit for. Perhaps not as entertaining stories, but certainly there's a lot of cud to chew on in terms of the philosophical elements they offer. And this is coming from someone who thinks Reloaded is easily the most boring film of the quadrilogy narrative-wise. The sequels build coherently upon concepts established in the original, if you pay attention.

Reloaded's "We cannot see past the choices we don't understand" is a natural extension of the first film's mantra, "Know thyself." The inability or unwillingness to "know thyself" proves Smith's undoing in Revolutions, since during his "me, me, me" phase he does not do any of the self-actualization or self-reflection that Neo undertakes on his path to achieving peace.

Smith's fatal flaw is his self-myopia. He purports to know how the world works, but he remains blind to himself. And it is because he does not understand himself that he cannot understand others, and thus cannot see his own destruction beyond the brief moment of victory he glimpses with the Oracle's vision. Smith is painfully aware of every single thing except his own inner workings, and that creates in him a void that can never be sated. His myopia explains why he cannot conceive of why Neo fights out of choice. He cannot understand any choice because he does not understand the value of free will.

The inability to see how his character evolves throughout the "forgettable" sequels is what led to galaxy brains on Reddit concluding "Smith is actually The One huehuehuehue" based on the flimsiest of evidence (and a lot of pulling shit from the deepest sanctums of anus, since, let's be real, nobody in this Chili's particularly paid attention to what M1 had to say about him either) and it's like. bruh

[sysig]

Silly goofy StanNarrator (Patreon)