The Second Rennaisance were my favorite 2 animatrix shorts so far (haven’t seen the DVD exclusive ones yet). I think they did a pretty good job of establishing the backstory of the films, which was something I was very curious about.
Unfortunately they seem to just gloss over some details. For example-
Why did the robot butler kill his master? Did it have something to do with the possibility of being replaced (by a more advanced model?)
How did things suddenly go from one robot on trail for murder to “kill EVERY robot?”
Robots seemed to have replaced nearly every labor/service position in the workforce- Wouldn’t it have been massively counterproductive to suddenly reject it?! I mean it seems they were fairly well-established; there would be great economic difficulty switching back to human labor.
4.If 01’s industries were driving human businesses out of business, why were humans supporting them? This really bugs me- humans get so pissed off at robots that they totally seperate themselves from them. Instead of just erasing/reprogramming their AI’s or something.
This may be coming from a purely misanthropic standpoint, but I think the humans got what they deserved. They put it on themselves, and instead of trying to work things out, just dug a deeper hole. Humans passed on to machines their knowlege, and emotions. But they did not pass on their weakness-pride. In reality, the Matrix movies are merely a continuation of the same war that was started in the 2nd Rennaisance. If anything, machines were giving humans a taste of their own medicine through their dominion over them.
They said the trial was about the right to destroy one’s property, so you’re probably on the right track.
I don’t think they specified this; it was just necessary for the plot, I think. It also fit with the Nazi overtones of the human nations.
Yeah, it probably would’ve been. But we already know the humans were seriously overreacting.
I don’t think they had any alternative to 01’s industry, considering how dependent humanity was on the machines. And by that time, I don’t think the machines, if they truly were intelligent, would have allowed themselves to be reprogrammed.
I agree, the humans were very much at fault, if the account is accurate (it’s part of Zion’s logs, though, so who knows how accurate it really is?) Perhaps the single most disturbing image in the story was the street killing of a defenseless robot “woman.”
One question, though: The machines were immune to the heat generated by an arsenal of nuclear weapons . . . WTF? And what about the EMPs generated by the blasts? We already know that the machines are vulnerable to EMP.
Well, by this time they did have an entire country to themselves. Since they were at war, it’s entirely possible that they noted this weakness of theirs and created defenses for it.
In the movies, we only ever see one or two of the robots going after a single ship at a time, and since the whole Zion thing is just a big ruse anyway, they might just be leading the humans on, letting them think they can win with their EMPs.
We are never told the outcome of the murder trial of the robot. Rather, IIRC, they give some line about it raising questions about robots, endowed with the very spark of human existence, should be treated like humans.
The governments of the world then are quick to order the destruction of the murderer robot and all of his kind – perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that there is now another entity on the planet that is basically equal to man.
The next scenes are mixes of riots of robots and robot supporting humans versus the cops, then later humans versus robots. So it seems like the decision to liquidate robots wasn’t very popular, but dissent was crushed along with the robots.
I think that it was probably pretty gradual. AI robots were ordered phased out or destroyed, replaced by human controlled or “dumber” machines. The remaining robots became refugees and ended up in 01.
What really struck me about the Second Rennaisance (and the whole Animatrix in general) was how sad it was. Particularly, how crap humans are. It goes right along with the feeling that I had after the first movie: humans are shit, they want to kill the robots. The robots want to stay alive, and only wish to be treated as equals. Unfortunately, the only way to keep humans around is to build something like the Matrix, which gets as close to a symbiotic relationship as possible, especially given the fact that the humans what to kill them all. I’m sure there are many more efficient and less troublesome forms of energy than serial arrays of humans. But the AIs cannot kill their masters, no matter how awful their masters treat them.
Yeah, if anything, machines were far more merciful than humans. What did the humans want? Destroy all robots. What the machines want? Coexist with the humans.
The more I think about it, the more benevolent the machines seem. If they were able to harness human beings for energy, whose to say they couldn’t have found other nonsolar sources (geothermal, anyone?) In all honesty they could have completely wiped us off the map but instead they chose to let us continue on. They gave us the perception that the whole horrible war never happened. And what do humans do? Fight them.
Compare the robots of the Matrix universe to those of the Terminator universe; I think a lot of people are more familiar with the concept of a robot race whose desire is to exterminate humanity utterly (Skynet).
There are still the arguments about Matrix re-loaded regarding an embedded Matrix theory. But if people are able to reject ‘reality’ and reveal it for what it is, they will be ‘waking up’ from the Matrix(es) at one point or another. Agent Smith had good reason to loathe our kind so much. After seeing Second Rennaisance, its as though Smith’s conciousness somehow existed during that time period, somehow was empathic to the grief and sorrow the machines endured, but unlike them, was capable of hating us in a way humans can hate their own kind.
I particularily enjoyed the haunted house and the detective story pieces. I did not think that either was abjectly sad. I understand your point and these two that I enjoyed the most were in the matrix so they did not deal with the state of man/machines affairs.
A slight easter egg but the robot V166er is meant to be a obscured form of “nigger”. The trial is a parralel of the black rights movement. Basically, the entire deal with the trial is that if Robots were deemed to be sentient beings, then what the owner did would be essentially murder and the robot would be acting in self-defense. If robots were to be classed as property, then the owner was morally okay and the robot was merely malfunctioning. Again, its trite philosophy, how do we know when a computer is intelligent and how do we deal with it. In this case, we seem to deal very badly with it.
All robots of his kind were ordered to be destroyed and machines and men who supported them rioted. The rioting escalated until the machines eventually spilt off. Humans continuted to buy machine good simply because they were better. The machines were capable of far greater innovation.
As I see it, 2nd Ren isnt meant to be treated as canon. Its stylistically exaggerated and larger than life. But its an artpiece and should be viewed as a cautionary tale.