But that’s just the point–if it were bending the rules enough not to harm him or cause any pain (or even pressure), they wouldn’t be able to physically grab it and destroy it.
I don’t follow – why not? They’ve got their Magical X-Ray Tracking and Vacuum-Suck Gun to pull it out through his belly button. God knows how it’s supposed to operate, but I guarantee you you can’t use a vac-u-suck to pull out biomechanical parasites through your navel in THIS non-Matrix world.
At which point, it’s very clearly a solid object. So, solid enough to be captured, thrown on the street, crushed, what have you, but not solid enough to cause damage or discomfort.
Or are you positing that the extraction device was also a make-solid device? Which somehow made it solid enough to come out covered in blood, but not solid enough to tear through his skin?
You’re fighting a losing battle, here. The correct answer is, “Because it fucking looks cool, that’s why.”
Not a losing battle – the physics in The Matrix can be whatever they need it to be within its own consistency. You’re the one who keeps insisting that it has to be exactly like ours, despite the fact that characters in the film are constantly violating “real” physics. Or maybe you can explain how Neo can fly, otherwise.
But, ultimately, your last line is entirely correct – “Because it Looks Cool.” It’s one of the Great Commandments of Hollywood.
Except it’s not. You think that’s air you’re breathing? Nothing in the Matrix World was real, and as such there were no physical objects. The pod-humans were made to think that such exist because the proper parts of their brains were stimulated by the pod-probes to make their reality seem real, but it was all just a “dream”. Neither the tracking device nor the tracking-device-sucker-gun were solid objects in the sense of being actual, physical objects in the really real world.
As such, both the device and the suck-gun operated however the programmers of the Matrix permitted them to operate, within the confines of the rules established by whatever programs controlled that sort of thing. The Agents could obviously bend the rules to some degree, and, as such, were faster, stronger, could take over the “bodies” of normal folk,…and make Magical Tracking Bugs that could “dig” into a person’s (illusory) belly without killing them. Morpheus’ crew, being from the “outside”, also knew how to circumvent these rules to a degree, and could thus likewise create Magic Sucker Guns to counter the Magic Tracking Squids.
I thought one of the novels said that the rebels put special hacking codes into droids? And an outdated model would look more inconspicous than a brand-new one.
It doesn’t need to be consistent with our world–just **internally **consistent. So, **either **it can be phased in such a way as to cause no internal damage or discomfort, **or **it can be solid enough to be covered in blood, contained, dumped on a road, etc. It cannot be both of these things at the same time.
The same way it can obviously be a biomechanical insectoid living thing (as it is when scampering around on Neo, and inside him, and in the Magic Vacu-Suck) and an inert piece of electronics (as it is when Agent Smith removes it from its pack, and when it’s lying on the road after being tossed out the car)?
There are many sci-fi blunders but the one that really had me chewing nails seems to have been lost on almost everyone I talk to about it.
Specifically it is in the movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
In the movie we learn that Skynet does not have a computer core that can be shut down. I.e. Skynet is not in one central place where someone can pull the plug. Instead, Skynet lives in cyberspace. That is, it is in every computer in the world thus it is near impossible to shut down as there is no single point of attack.
So what does Skynet do? It nukes the whole fucking world.
Yep, EM blasts galore mucking up electronics everywhere not to mention just flat out vaporizing most things. Don’t forget you power generation goes right out the window too. No more electricity for pretty much the whole world.
Just how “smart” will Skynet remain after it lobotomizes 99.9% of itself? Presumably there would still be some hardened military computers here and there with their own power sources but none of those would be sufficient to maintain Skynet’s “consciousness”. Imagine I scooped out 99.9% of your brain…how much of “you” would be evident after that? Answer…none at all. You’d be a vegetable at best. So too with Skynet.
I was hopping mad when I saw the utterly stupid ending. It literally undoes everything. Much better if Skynet was in some mondo cavern housing a mondo computer deep underground with its one fusion reactor powering it forever.
Actually, that part (not what you criticzed) made much more sense to me. In the 80s, with the first Terminator movie, people were still thinking in terms of big central computers - although the military invented ARPA net specifically against that problem of one bomb taking out the whole computer network, and since Skynet was military built…
But one of the dumber aspects of the whole Terminator franchise was for me that Sarah knows from Reese that John will be battling machines … so what does she teach him? Blowing stuff up! Okay, we see him using a PIN-cracking machine, but he’s not the advanced hacker nerd. Obviously, it would be uncool to have a group of hackers defeat Skynet by typing furiously on their keyboards, though it would make far more sense than blowing things up. (And it’s not that hackers per se are uncool - look at Sneakers. Okay, they had Robert Redford…)
So… are you **trying **to help us make the point that they’re inconsistent with this thing?
It doesn’t have to make sense, it looks cool. 'Nough said, IMO. Trying to rationalize some of this shit is just pointless fanwanking.
Great movie, but the computery stuff still wasn’t that accurate. Better than Hackers, though.
It’s consistent in some level, but it’s pretty clear that the physical characteristics of the device (like many things in the Matrix World) change as needed.
I don’t really think we have an argument here, although you seem to think so for some reason.
I’m not arguing as much as I am trying to figure out why you’re trying to fanwank this into anything that remotely makes sense. What’s so hard about saying, “Yeah, it didn’t make sense, but it was aesthetically neat.”
I can deal with changing physical characteristics, that’s fine. But it can’t have simultaneous mutually exclusive ones, which is what it displayed.
To make things clearer – my objection was that Quercus said it was
My objection was that it 3wasn’t in the Real World – it was in the Matrix World, and doesn’t have to obey Real World physics (as its changing from dead electronic thing to active biomechanic insectoid thing pretty clearly shows) – it pretty obviously obeys Matrix World rules, whatever the hell they are. But you and Quercus seem to have this view that it must either be Real World physics or nothing – anything else is “fan wanking”. My point is that that’s obviously an absurd position nto take – they’ve already demonstrated that it doesn’t behave like the Real World. Lots of things in the Matrix don’t behave as in the Real World (although evidently for most people, most of the time, Real World rules do seem to apply). Furthermore, it isn’t “fanwanking” to say that Real World Physics doesn’t apply, since “fanwanking” is after-the-fact fan explanations made in a desperate bid to maintain plausibility and consistency. They demonstrated right up front that the rules of the Real World don’t apply. And it’s not JUST in pursuit of a Really Cool Shot – the entire film is based on the premise that those Rules can be bent, and that Morpheus thinks Neo is the one who can do it.
But it is a Really Cool Shot, and they were undoubtedly influenced by that in setting it up. My point is that it is in no way inconsistent with their premise. It helps set it up, in fact.
I’ve got to disagree.
First, as a leader he should know when to delegate. It’s a lot easier to get someone else to do your hacking for you than it is to get someone else to survive in a postapocalyptic wasteland for you. Leadership and survival are the most important skills he must possess because they cannot be passed off to someone else.
Second, the US military is likely to focus substantial effort towards protecting Skynet from hackers. After all, anyone that tries to blow it up has also given you an excuse to counterattack, while a hacking attempt can be done covertly, and offers plausible deniability.
Third, hacking is only a useful skill against Skynet until Judgement Day. Once that happens, any programming or commands are made by machines, for machines, so there’s no need for human input to still be possible. That means no keyboards.
What the heck was that?
Other than pretty funny, I mean.
How did you get that impression? **Quercus **posted that it was a problem because it was simultaneously Matrix World able to be inside him and not harm him and Real World able to be grabbed and broken. I posted **repeatedly **that the problem was that they wanted to have it both ways. Nowhere–in not one post–did either of us argue that it was straight-up a problem of “you can’t do that in the real world.” **All **of our objections have been about the writers wanting to have it both ways. I can’t help but feel that you’re either skimming past vast chunks of these posts or purposely misrepresenting the arguments presented in them.
That is one of the few remaining (and at this point nearly defunct, at least as far as the front page goes) examples of humor writing known as a Q&A website.
ETA: If you peruse the front page or archives, I suggest that you may wish to keep an eye on the ratings to decide what’s worth looking at. Ratings are displayed in the format 0.00/0, where the first number is the average score on a 1-5 scale, and the second number is the total votes cast.
Everything in the Matrix world is metaphorical, not “real”. “Really”, there are some lines of code running in the software interfacing Neo with the rest of the Matrix, and the folks from Zion who are rescuing him are deleting those lines of code. But since Neo doesn’t yet understand what’s going on, it looks to him like what they’re doing is pulling a gross biomechanical thing out of his gut. The biomechanical thing itself, and the machine that pulls it out, are both as real as the bending spoon.
It is not that there are **no **rules in the Matrix–it’s that if you **understand **the rules, you can see where they can be bent or broken. If there were no rules, you wouldn’t even **have **the Matrix–you’d have static.
There should be no way for the action seen to be a metaphor for them debugging Neo, expressed by the programming of the Matrix such that the bug comes out covered in blood/lymph/whatever and they can physically contain it in a jar and dump it out on the street.