So all the previous Ones had dreams about Trinity jumping out of a building? I think the Oracle knows because that’s what her program is designed to do: delve into the human mind.
Am I the only one that didn’t understand it as Neo was supposed to reboot the Matrix? I understand it as he was supposed to go to the source to patch the error so it could keep running without needing a reboot. Rebooting the Matrix would kill everyone, no?
I’m with you here. The “Zion as an extension of the Matrix” seems played and cheap. Besides, if the Zion Matrix is designed so well that no one has ever “rejected” the programming, why would there be a need for the real Matrix?
A few thoughts of my own.
[list=1]
[li]When the Architect is speaking to Neo he says that only 99% of people accept the Matrix. I remember thinking that that would mean that an awful lot of people don’t accept it. (Although he could have just been generalizing and meaning that nearly all people do accept it.)[/li]
[li]When I was watching the Revolutions trailer after the credits the Oracle was speaking and saying something like “You our our only hope” or some such as a voiceover in the scene where Neo fights Smith. I almost got the impression that she was speaking to Agent Smith about defeating Neo to save the Matrix. Also this would imply that she will be in Revolutions although she was never physically shown in the trailer.[/li]
[li]There was some question earlier in this thread as to whether George W. Bush was on the screens in the Architect’s room. I’m almost certain he was. He appeared on the screens just as the Architect was saying something about all the evil mankind was capable of. I laughed out loud at what appeared to be a swipe at George W.[/li]
[li]Also somone asked why didn’t the Agent just morph into the body of the truckdriver that Morpheus and the Keymaker was on and then jackknife the truck. IMHO, this is because the agents are stuck in the body of the person until that person is killed. Then they can move into the body of a new person.[/li]
[li]Does anyone else think that it is odd that at the end Neo is in a coma, and so is Bane (the guy Smith took over)? I would think this would imply that Smith and Neo are very closely tied to one another now.[/li]
[li]In the beginning Morpheus asks for someone to stay behind in the Matrix in case the Oracle tries to contact them. What happened to the Captain that volunteered to stay behind?[/li]
[li]Also has it been revealed anywhere else what exactly happened to Tank? He looked like he was alive and kicking at the end of the first movie. [/li][/list=1]
I wonder how they chose the look for the architect. Hasn’t the notion of supreme being as an older man in a natty three piece Colonel Sandersesque white suit been a little overdone in movies at this point.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by mongrel_8 *
A few thoughts of my own.
[list=1]
[li]When the Architect is speaking to Neo he says that only 99% of people accept the Matrix. I remember thinking that that would mean that an awful lot of people don’t accept it. (Although he could have just been generalizing and meaning that nearly all people do accept it.)[/li][/quote]
He says(I believe) 99.9%, which changes the numbers a bit.
[quote]
[li]There was some question earlier in this thread as to whether George W. Bush was on the screens in the Architect’s room. I’m almost certain he was. He appeared on the screens just as the Architect was saying something about all the evil mankind was capable of. I laughed out loud at what appeared to be a swipe at George W. [/li][/quote]
Someone else said they saw George H.W. Bush, which would make more sense since GWB wasn’t President in 1999/2000. The Brothers have said(through Joel Silver) that this movie take place 6 months after the first. I actually find it kind of lame. GWB is no Hitler. It’s a lame joke that won’t age well.
Marcus Chong asked for way too much money. He assumed they couldn’t make the movie without him. They wrote him out.
Then, he started leaving harrassing mesages on the W. Brothers answering machines and was showing up on set and at movie meetings uninvited. They had to take out a restraining order on him.
I don’t have the cite for this, but I read about it nearly 2 years ago, when they started filming. The movie was originaly going to take place about 24 hours after the first, but they made it six months so enough time would pass for Tank to get killed(besides, it makes more sense to have that much time pass anyway).
I have to admit I was a bit surprised (click on document collection link at that website) that his character was only offered
$ 150,000 in the second movie (he was paid 75K in the first). Seems kind of pocket changey for a mid level character with some significant screen presence. Is this relatively small salary in a film with a huge potential sequel normal for second tier players. Do only the stars get any semblance of “the big bucks”.
Well this other page from the document collection talking about " gross offers" etc tends to change some of the assumptions I made when seeing the salary letter offer. It’s fascinating to see Hugo Weaving and Marcus Chong salaries, lines and working pages laid out on a spreadsheet however.
Wow to all the comments on here. Not going to post too many theroies myself as I am going to see it for another 2 times (one with a movie making group and one with my “Japanese-mom”) just some observations and questons…
1.Got the game on the same day. There’s a scene where Niobe (Jada) walks by a homeless man while in the Matrix, and he says “72 hours…the LAST ZION only lasted 72 hours…” and mumbels some more garbled stuff. I’m still far from finshing it, so I figure theres more to come on that subject.
By the way, the game…great marketing tool (have to buy it to “learn more” on the plot) but not the greatest game int he world. Tries to Mix Driver,Max Payne and Syphon Filter and only gets a decent mix of all 3.Not a bad game, but not a great one…but a great marketing tool…must admit,fighting the agents is very cool in the game. Love the way they duck EVERY bullet I shoot, but if you “focus” the fight, they get the asses kicked.
2.Mongrel 8, once again speaking on the game, you have to save that captian (forgot his name, but he’s played by Roy Jones Jr.) I had to rescue him,and he got out of the matrix alive, but now I have to save 2 other memebers of his crew (Ice and Corrupt) but Ice keeps getting killed by SWAT team guys, so I havent passed it yet.
3. It’s funny how a lot of Religious groups (in my neck of the woods, mainly Christians and Scientologist) champed the Matrix and toted it around saying “we are doing the same thing.” I DON’T think the Christian groups will hail Matrix 2 as much,besides the sex and 7 minuet Zion orgy, this Matrix IMO is more of a social-political commentary than a religious one, and in fact shows how people try to use religion (the propecy,ect) to get to their own means. Not to say there isin’t religios message lacking as far as the Gnosis paralells and also Agent Smith & Neo may have the mormon “Jesus and Satan are spirtual brothers” thing going on…
4.Heres another can of worms, and one I’m somewhat afraid of to open up here (thoguh I did it on another message bord with favorable results.) Has anyone noticed that all of the Agents are of the Caucausian enthinicy, while Zion by far contrast seemed to be made up mostly of people of color, from the captains to even the head counil there (anyone catch Dr.Cornell West?). I’m not crying racisim on either side, however,there must be a particular reason why that is. When I posted this on another message board, they agreed with me, but none of us can figure out why (it might have something the do with the Architect-father Oracle-Mother thing,though that is far fetched…)
5.On a side one, was anyone else expecting Morpheus to yell out “CANNNNN YOUUUUU DIG ITTTTTTTT!!!” at the end of his speech?
I have now read the whole thread (it took an hour or so!).
I am satisfied with my intelligence. I may not know any of the answers, but at least I had the right questions! (kind of like when I watched Memento and came to the boards to see what everyone else thought!)
A few thoughts:
I tend to LEAN toward the Matrix within a Matrix theory. It IS supported by the most evidence. But I WILL offer an alternate theory on how he stopped the Sentinels. What if that big sentinel that is building smaller ones is the “real world” home of the main computer (the architect?). The individual sentinels are plugged into it and it is plugged into the Matrix. Now through Neo’s merging with the Smith in part one, he has access to the Matrix without plugging in. So, in essence, he accesses the Matrix, goes through the Matrix, through to the place where the Matrix connects to the “real world” Control center (the mainframe for lack of a better word) and shuts down the Sentinels.
Just an argument, but one I don’t know if I buy myself.
Smith- Why did he cut himself in the real world? What was the purpose. Why is he helping the machines in the Zion world? It seemed clear he was a free agent. It also adds credence to the Zion is Real theory that he had the physical appearance of the assimilated rebel. It bolsters the mind overwrite. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he be Smith? How could he now take on a disguise? I would argue that the programming of the second matrix was different and that he couldn’t do in Zion what he could do in L.A. But one could make a case that the appearance of the rebel with Smith in control supports the notion that Smith JUST took over the body. But is the guy in a coma because Smith is linked to Neo or because Smith was in the Matrix?
It was defintely Dubya (and I laughed about the “worst of society” thing despite the fact that I like Dubya). Also, the Vampires and Ghosts explained away thing- I didn’t care for it. We had those before 1999. Why explain them away. The Matrix is SUPPOSED to be a recreation of OUR world in 1999. Why explain away something that WE really have unless it is a clue? This may not come off entirely clear.
Ok. I believe the Merovingian is AI, but is there any proof that Persephone is? I don’t remember her bathroom speech well enough, but did she reveal then that she was a machine wishing to understand passion. I was DISTRACTED during her scenes!
I thought to myself during the film: if they ever make a Roy Jones, Jr. movie, THAT GUY would play him perfectly. I feel silly now.
Is it possible Neo is an AI? I tend to think not. I also think that he was not any of the previous “ones”. I think it is a new guy every time. I also reasoned that the screens behind him where deviations of the SAME conversation.
A question though: during the scenes from Neo’s life, I SWORE I saw footage of Devil’s Advocate. Did anyone else see that or did I imagine it?
Did the Architect remind anyone of “Mr. Pitt” from Seinfeld? It wasn’t him, but it looked like him a bit. I kept expecting him to breakout a snickers bar and eat it with a knife and fork!
While there were NEW agents in this film (I agree the old ones were recalled for deletion), didn’t one of the originals do the Powerade commercial?
Where do babies come from? Before you explain the Birds and the Bees ;), let me clarify. When someone new is born in the Matrix, who is controlling that? Is it AI or are they breeding humans in captivity? Further, if Zion isn’t the real world, were Dozer and Tank (SO glad they ran him off. He was a terrible actor!) real or AI?
I really think ANY question about “Why wouldn’t the Sentinells do this?” or “Why didn’t Agent Smith do THAT?” can easily be answered by the fact that computers do what they are programmed to do. Why then were they programmed that way? My theory is that it has something to do with the need for imperfection, rules and structure that doomed the original Matrix.
This Movie also has a real anti-establishment theme. Control is bad and freedom is good. (It could support an earlier poster’s theory that the bad guys are white men; especially when coupled with the Bush slam!)
I noticed the racial differences also, but I seem to recall the Council being all caucasian. No ideas on why that might be as far as the story goes, but I thought it cool that there wasn’t just the one “token black guy” like so many other movies.
Some random thoughts after seeing the movie and poring over this thread:
The scene with Neo and the Architect. I think it safe to assume that the varying images on the screens were Neo’s possible reactions, most evident by the unanimous agreeance when it came to Trinity–there was no other possible reaction (which the Architect even points out). If they represented the other “One’s”, why’d they all look like Neo?
The Architect states pretty clearly that the events leading up to and including his and Neo’s meeting was cyclical. Was he suggesting that it was the same characters that kept running through the same events over and over again, or that the events replayed repeatedly but the players changed?
I am fairly certain I remember correctly the number of people the Architect stated Neo would choose as 23. 16 females and 7 males. If the One is to be included, it would be a 2:1 ratio, otherwise it wouldn’t be as tidy.
The Architect contradicts Smith’s assertion in the first movie that they existed in the second Matrix. Smith tells Morpheus that the first Matrix was a utopia, but most people rejected it, so a second, imperfect, Matrix was created to be more easily accepted. The Architect states that the first two Matrices were failures/rejected. I believe that to support the theory that Xion (Zion?) is part of the second Matrix, though I’m not exactly sure how to support my claim just yet. Just a feeling I get.
If all of Neo’s predecessors chose the altruistic path and saved humanity by choosing the 23 people to restart civilization with, why is there no recorded history of this? What happened/happens to the “One of the Moment” when they choose that option? Could it be that the 23 people he saves restart in a completely new Matrix and that there is a Matrix for every version of the anomoly as the One?
How, with 23 (or 24) people, does society proceed and advance without becoming inbred and mutated? How, unless the selection of people is made based on practicality rather than personal loyalty, does 23 (or 24) continue society whose survival is based on machines most people don’t know how to operate never mind fix? Do they just start over a la Neanderthals?
Anyone else notice that after the explosion, the Ghosts were thrown way into the air but managed to “phase out,” suggesting that they survived the explosion (and we know they can ultra-regenerate while phased)? If so, would their reduction of their mass (for I know of no other way to explain their “phasing”) coupled with their upward momentum force them to continue, virtually frictionless, upward forever? I suppose it possible that they could phase back in when safely out of danger of the explosion, alowing gravity to pull them back toward Earth and phasing out again before hitting the ground, but honestly I’m more concerned with the physics of their ability.
Elsewhere on the cameo watch, did anyone catch Mrs. Fishburne, the lovely Gina Torres, playing Link’s sister-in-law? Best known (to me, anyway) as the big bad from this season’s Angel and the second-in-command of the Serenity from the late and lamented Firefly.
That’s easy. The Agents represent “Da Man”, the oppressor of pretty much everyone much to the chagrine of those of us who happen to be “Da Man,” but are ourselves oppressed.
Gotta say tho, never seen a lot of hunky men’s men than those agents. If I gotta be oppressed, might as well be by them.
Not so; I recall a black Council member with lines and close-ups.
As for why Smith/Bane cut himself, my take on that was that it was Smith investigating the sensations of being human. After all, since he can replicate himself endlessly, Bane’s body is just a tool to him, doesn’t much matter what he does to it as long as he gets done what he wants to get done.
As another side point, I dunno about anyone else but Link looked familiar the moment I saw him and I spent most of the movie trying to figure out where I’d seen him before. Turns out he’s Harold Perrineau (Jr.), who played Mercutio in the '96 version of Romeo and Juliet.
That’s my take exactly. He wanted to kill Neo at that point and then later he tried to get his captain to volunteer to go look for the Nebuchadnezzar.
I noticed also that the majority of Zion was non-Caucausian. This could be explained because most of the world is non-Caucausian. Also it could be explained that minorities are less likely to except the Matrix because it it is so white dominated (agents, architect, etc.)
Part of the Zion Council was minorities. One was a black guy who did a lot of speaking. He had what looked like a metal pipe on the necklace around his neck that reminded me of what a voice synthsizer looks like.
There were, we assume, 6 previous matrices. A theory that popped into my head: Zion was the second-most-recent matrix. ‘Beneath’ Zion (which is percieved as reality) is the third-most-recent Matrix, and so on. I don’t like this theory, but maybe it’s possible.
The special effects when the 2 trucks collided were really, really cool.
Anyone notice how many shots of doors/doorways there were in the movie? Every single scene of importance, I think, other than the meeting/service/orgy/thing that was intermingled w/ the sex scene had a lingering shot of a door. Symbollism, anyone?
My theory on where Tank went: he was ‘fine’ at the end, but we never saw him really recover. So maybe he was kind of in a state of shock at the end, and then died of an infection or something? I dunno. I liked him.
I spent last night busily reading the comics on the website. Go there, read them. I think some of them may have some sort of insight (but then again, maybe not.)
Remember how Neo got handed a spoon in Zion? Who says we’re gonna see it again? Just a total WAG, but I think it’s going to have some sort of symbollic role in the final movie.
Regarding the griminess of Zion: they need to spend a lot of time and energy on the rebellion - keeping their technology advancing, but they’ve got limited resources. Lotsa people in a closed environment with priorities outside of cleanliness = griminess. On a related note, Trinity’s bed was cool (curved on top, carved out of rock). I want one like that. Especially if it comes with a nekkid movie star.
In the first movie, when Morpheus offers the 2 pills to Neo, there’s a line about the red pill, along the lines of “And I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” My first thought when I saw that was ‘Hey, maybe there’s more than one layer to reality and/or the Matrix.’ Methinks I was right. Furthermore: in Alice in Wonderland, one of the first things Alice must do is go through a series of differently-sized doors. See point #3 above.
One thing that keeps occurring to me as I read throush these threads: how much of these open issues were really planned out by the Brothers? What I mean is, are we seeking depth that they didn’t even think of? The assumption seems to be, that underneath it all there is some deep, self-consistent plot that will (hopefully) be revealed in “Revolutions”. But what if the Brothers are just throwing together an impressionist series of brushstrokes, as a vehicle for bunch of cool effects, without having a consistent whole in mind? Are we reading too much into it?
It all boils down to Chaos Theory. The Architect accepts that something will go wrong (because the Matrix has to be imperfect, we won’t accept perfection).
So like all good project managers, he takes it as a given that there will be a cascading failure and then works to shape the failure, rather than avoid it.
Therefore, the Oracle, the Merovingian and Persephone (and their whole jealousy sub-plot) , the KeyMaker, etc are all part of the plan to give the Morpheuses something to believe in and to manipulate the Neos through the path to the source and, ultimately , into rebooting the system.
Indeed, one of the black council members is a cameo by a very famous black philosopher and Harvard professor(though I can’t remember his name). He has an Afro and a huge gap in his teeth.
Yes, Smith cut himself(IMHO) because he was checking to see what had happened. He realizes it fully after being cut.
Okay, now let me answer a question asked by so many people I’ve met:
“Why didn’t Neo just fly away when the Smiths started fighting him?”
Three possible reasons:
He thought, at first, he could finish of Smith(s) permanently. There were only 8 at first. It built up quickly.
He needs space to take off into flight.
It makes for a great action sequence. I personally enjoyed this as much or more than the car chase. People keep harping on how fake certain CGI shots looked. I give a cheer to the brothers for having the guts to push the technology this far. I thought it looked great, sounded great, and was brilliant editing.
I don’t know about you all, but when I purchase the dvd, I am going to play the architect scene over and over and over again. There were just so many scenes flashing on the screens in the background (yes, “W” was one of the images).
The movie got a very cool nod from me for having Dr. Cornell West in it. For those who missed it: he was the black counselman with an afro, mustache and gap in is teeth. I heard him speak in person when I was in college. The man is brilliant.
Regarding the use of so may black actors: I read a review that stated that the biggest fan-base of this movie are teenagers. Teenagers feel that black people represent the “coolest” people of society and gave the movie more appeal. I’ll try to find the cite.
As for Zion being another level of the matrix, that would dissapoint me. It seems too cliché. There are some possible explanations as to how he could have disabled the sentinels without using the “still the matrix” explanation.
Consider the mechanism for Neo’s control over the matrix. For normal people the matrix sends information about their virtual surroundings to them, they process the information and act accordingly. The matrix intercepts these signals and translates it into new information to be processed and sent out again. The cycle continues.
Now for those who are unplugged, they are able to perform better than their physical limitations perhaps because they know it isn’t real or perhaps because of their limited connection with the matrix.
The biggest difference with Neo is that he can control things that aren’t part of him. He can stop bullets, fly, move things with his mind, ect. I interpret this to mean that not only can his thoughts and movements be interpreted by the matrix but he can give it information about itself to assimilate. Almost like he’s part of the code. This goes along with the Architect’s mention of “the procedure” (I think that’s the word he used)… where he says that despite it he’s still essentially human.
Now for the sentinels. Presumably they work under some sort of wireless network. If Neo could sense this network his altered brain could send them commands much like it does for the matrix. So he could have just told them to stop and die.
I suppose in any case, the real question is what caused Neo to gain this new ability? Either he realized that the real world was also a simulation or he sensed the wireless network. In any case, what sparked it?
One thing I really liked about this movie was the music. 90% of it seemed to be orchestration mixed with techno. It was very well done and gave a unique flavour to the movie.
In his review he touches on the use of so many African-American characters in the movie: “It has become commonplace for science fiction epics to feature one or two African-American stars, but we’ve come a long way since Billy Dee Williams in “Return of the Jedi.” The Wachowski brothers use so many African Americans, I suspect, not for their box-office appeal, because the Matrix is the star of the movie, and not because they are good actors (which they are), but because to the white teenagers who are the primary audience for this movie, African-Americans embody a cool, a cachet, an authenticy. Morpheus is the power center of the movie, and Neo’s role is essentially to study under him and absorb his mojo.”
