This thread is all over the place, just like the movie. And so, too, will be my post:
I wish I had a piece of that pie to share with the woman of my choice. And that shot of the digitized matrix between her thighs was veritable pornography and had me aching for more.
Persephone was super-hot, too. Not much has been said here about her name. The mythological Persephone was not merely wife of Hades, god of the underworld, but she was taken there against her will and, upon gaining her release, was doomed to return to the underworld annually (hence, winter). In the context of the movie, then, her husband Merovingen represents Hades and is the keeper of the dark forces, those beings that fight to get out and annihilate the world of light. But is the Matrix that world, or is Zion? Or is it a higher level, one in which the architect exists perhaps? Persephone, in turn, wants a kiss from Neo because he brings life, like Orpheus, into the world of the damned, and she wants a taste of it.
The role of the Architect was pretty interesting to me, too. He seems to be more than just some higher level program. Maybe he’s more like some version of the BIOS that controls the operations and steps that the entire computer (Matrix cum Zion) takes whenever it is re-booted (re-loaded). Or he’s a programmer in a real world who has constructed his own micro-cosm of the Matrix/Zion, and he’s available to directly ‘command’ or re-program members of his AI when they start to have problems. Neo’s coming to him then isn’t a choice, it’s just the conclusion of a series of steps written into a program, installed so that the architect can tweak his system and de-bug it.
In the first movie, Agent Smith gives a long speech in which he deduces that humans are not mammals but are ‘viruses’ because of the way they behave, multiplying and consuming all the available resources then moving on to infect/destroy something else. Great irony abounds, then, because in this movie Smith himself IS a virus, a rogue program gone native, who proceeds very quickly to multiply himself and to destroy everything around him, without any clear purpose or plan or reason for his actions. He trains his sights on destroying/infecting Neo because Neo is a higher level program and infecting him will cause the most damage. In infecting Bane, he basically is a virus that is working as a trojan horse, appearing as a trusted member of the Zion group, waiting for the right time to leap out from his cover and stab at the heart of the system.
I think I need to see it again. At this point, I have to say that I liked the first one lots better. It’s pretty hard to beat the scene in which Neo first wakes up in the pod, and also the bug they implant in his navel was pretty amazing. I didn’t seen anything in this movie that quite matched the first philosophically, either. But maybe it will grow on me. One additional challenge in evaluating ‘reloaded’ is that, basically, we’ve just seen the first half of the sequel, so there may be lots of threads and questions resolved and kind of pulled together for us in revolutions.
