Some of my ideas:
First, after Neo dies and Deus ex Machina says “It is finished”, my first thought was “weren’t those Jesus’s last words?” I know it depends on which gospel you read, but doesn’t he say that in one of them?
I like how they actually addressed the fact that guns needed reloading (both on the ships and in those big walker things), but there’s no way the Kid, or any of the runners, would be able to push those carts around all of the debris that was on the dock.
I don’t see why Zion has to be “another Matrix”. In the long Reloaded thread, my logic was this: Smith sez part of Neo entered him and changed him, so he could be free. If part of Neo is in Smith, why can’t part of Smith be in Neo? The Agents could control the Sentinels (in the first movie, when they realize Cypher has failed, Smith orders “find them and destroy them” referencing them as the people aboard the ship). Thus, couldn’t Neo somehow activate a bit of the Agent programming to stop the sentinels? It works even better because Smith has entered a human, so there would be that connection back to the Matrix. I also recently read a theory that said this: from the footage in the Architect’s room, it appears that he (the Architect) has always known that Neo would be “the One.” Thus, when little baby Neo was first grown, the machines implanted some extra hardware (wireless modems, perhaps?) that would allow him to connect to the Matrix without being jacked in. Maybe they had a low bandwidth, which would explain why Neo could only get as far as the train station without being really jacked in. Perhaps the candy the Oracle gave him in Reloaded contained the software to activate the extra hardware.
Speaking of Bane, Neo was Mr. Densy McDense when he couldn’t realize Bane was possessed by Smith. Props to the actor for mimicing Weaving’s inflections so well. I saw Neo’s blinding as a way to separate him from his physical senses. Just as in the first Matrix, Neo is told to “free his mind” and see the Matrix as a programming contruct, Neo needed to lose his physical sight in order to be able to recognize the data he got from the machines. Would he have been able to guide them so well if his eyes were intact? This fits in with myths like that of Odin, who gave an eye to drink from the well of wisdom (Tiresias, mentioned upthread, was awarded his gift of prophecy after he was blinded. To make things short–he briefly lived life as a woman. Hera and Zeus were arguing over who got the most pleasure out of sex–men or women. Zeus said women, Hera said men. They asked Tiresias, because he’s the only one who would know. He sided with Zeus. Hera was pissed off, so she blinded him. But because he sided with him, Zeus gave him the gift of prophecy).
Speaking of the Oracle and food, I noticed this: in the first Matrix, she bakes cookies and gives him one (that she implies will induce forgetfulness. Or maybe he’s just dense)… In the second, she gives him a piece of candy. In the third, she’s mixing up cookie dough (with the intention to have them done before he arrives), but he gets there before she’s ready. She also offers him candy, and he refuses. Maybe this is what causes her to believe–she can see that Neo doesn’t need (or want) what assistance she can give him.
After watching the Animatrix (especially both parts of “The Second Renaissance” and the last one on the DVD) and the old man councillor’s speech in Reloaded, I thought Revolutions would really hammer home the idea that humans and machines needed each other. I guess the machines needed a human to defeat one of their programs, but it wasn’t what I expected.
I saw it last night, and after reading tons of crappy reviews, it was much better than I thought it would be. My big beef is that each movie seems to have a totally different tone than the other two. There doesn’t seem to be a big feeling that ties them all together.
:Pnd Archetect mentioned “the ones who wanted to be free” being let free, were they talking about Matrix’ed-humans, rogue programs like the Indian couple, or both?