Yeah, that’s the part of the movie that really annoys me. It’s not just stupid, it’s pointlessly stupid and insulting to the audience’s intelligence.
You could put any number of more reasonable machine motivations into the movie for zero extra cost. You don’t need any more screen time, no more SFX, just change the dialog from ‘humans are batteries’ to ‘humans are a distributed creative network’ and you’re done.
The rest of the movie was cool though. I’ll probably have to go rewatch it now.
The humans as battery thing has never bothered me. Maybe there’s something “special” about the energy that humans generate. Maybe it’s imbued with some unknown quality that makes it ideal for powering robots. I dunno. It’s just not important to me, and I’m easily bothered by stuff like this.
I loved The Matrix and I still do. Hate the sequals, but I love the first movie. It’s one of the few films that takes me back to the world of the late 90s. Perhaps that makes the movie feel “dated”, but I love this aspect of it. It makes me remember that hey, there actually used to be a time when a cell phone was just a PHONE. And not everyone had one.
But more than that, I loved the movie because of all the black people in it. Although Morpheus played sidekick to Neo, they were matched in terms of badassness and cool lines. You didn’t even have to watch the sequels to know that Zion was populated by a whole heap of black and brown people. And the theme of the movie–that the System is rigged but that it can be resisted and eventually abolished–resonates with many black people. My mother still talks about how we live in the Matrix. Only we call it capitalism (or whatever cause of the day she’s rallying against :)).
I remember thinking that in the near future, we’d all be dressing like “The Matrix”. The very first long coat I ever bought myself looked like something straight from the movie, and I’d entertain myself by dodging slow-moving bullets while wearing it.
The idea of “Banks of Humans as part of a Computer” has been around for quitye a while, much longer than the Matrix. In fact, the imagery in The Matrix called to mind the cover of the very first issue of the 1960s comic book series Magnus, Robot Fighter. Have a look:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8pd5ID9Te18ACBCJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTIybTlrYWxjBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANmMGEyOTc5MzQ2NjY3MjMyZDUxOGMwZmZjNDdlMmE4NgRncG9zAzQEaXQDYmluZw--?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3DMagnus%2BRobot%2BFighter%2B1%26fr%3Dyfp-t-901%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D4&w=300&h=420&imgurl=upload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2F2%2F25%2FMagnus_Robot_Fighter_4000AD_no1.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFile%3AMagnus_Robot_Fighter_4000AD_no1.jpg&size=75.7KB&name=File%3A<b>Magnus+Robot+Fighter+<%2Fb>4000AD+no1.jpg&p=Magnus+Robot+Fighter+1&oid=f0a2979346667232d518c0ffc47e2a86&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-901&tt=File%3A<b>Magnus+Robot+Fighter+<%2Fb>4000AD+no1.jpg&b=0&ni=21&no=4&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=125sotpv5&sigb=13ka0t4p7&sigi=12anm3p48&sigt=11f915tms&sign=11f915tms&.crumb=LoyaLnil50Y&fr=yfp-t-901
Interesting similarities – Magnus was fighting back – at least in the first issue – against machines that had usurped people, literally hating them, as Agent Smith does (the lead Evil Robot was even called “H-8” = “HATE”, as the robot itself points out), and they’ve put banks of people into tubular containers to harness their combined brainpower. Magnus was abstracted from the rest of humanity and traine4d by a “Good” robot, A-1 (I kid you not), just as Neo has The Oracle. , and was taught martial arts to fight them with.
I wonder if the Wachovskys used to read Magnus as kids.
I think this is one of those cases where a little knowledge ruins what is otherwise a perfectly normal plot point. There is nothing, on the surface, terrible about humans as batteries. It’s only if you know the science behind it that you have a problem with it. Those that don’t, don’t care, and those that do can still rationalize it as just part of the story.
And honestly, it’s such a small part of the story I never understood why people got so worked up about it. The robots have enslaved humans in glass tubes because… That’s all that matters.
As you say, the robots enslaved the humans and glass tubes, can’t/won’t just kill them all and the exact reason why doesn’t change the story. Picking an obviously physically-impossible (to the thermodynamically-literate) reason over almost anything else is a completely unnecessary blow to my suspension of disbelief. And I find it hard to believe that no-one involved in such an effects-heavy movie didn’t have the science background to say ‘wait a second…’.
It’s like a tiny piece of gravel was deliberately included in otherwise amazingly comfortable shoes. I still really like the movie, but there’s always that little annoying bit that doesn’t have to be there.
Numerous people from the production have stated over and over again (because fans won’t let this go) that in the original cut of the movie, humans were being kept under glass as processing power for the machine city. Executives with Warner Bros. are the ones who forced them to throw in the battery scene.
If you believe them, that is.
I liked it OK, except for some of the acting and ham-fisted dialog.
The portentousness and the pseudo-philosophizing of Morpheus was cringe-inducing, and the martial arts fight between Morpheus and Neo was risible. Some of the effects were great, and the general premise was fine too, but i thought that Dark City was a far superior movie.
Trivia note: when it was made, i was living and working in Sydney as a waiter and bartender, and a guy i worked with was in the movie. He had a small speaking role very early in the movie. He led the group that came to Neo’s door, bought a disc from him, and them took him to the nightclub.
This. Loved the film. But this single shot was just incredibly evocative. It spoke of a scale that can’t just be grokked in a split-second.
I could watch it tonight, having not seen it in a few years, and enjoy it. In fact, I think I will. 
Eh, I could totally believe ‘stupid studio executive makes pointless change’. It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like that.
Is he your personal Jesus Christ? Maybe it’s because I was 17, but that guy cracked me up.
I got wind of The Matrix long before it came out but had no affinity for it. I was working as a script processor at WB, a job that had me typing in scripts – 10-page blocks s at a time but never the entire script – into the WB database during the graveyard shift. No matter which 10-page block I typed in, the screenplay made absolutely no sense to me and I figured it would become one more dumb action script spending eternity in Development Hell.
Then, a couple years later, the teaser aired during the Super Bowl. And in just that 15-second ad, I was blown away and just knew I would love it. Maybe it was Trinity’s PVC butt flying across the screen, I dunno.
I loved the The Matrix the first time I saw it, but ironically, I didn’t understand the whole thing. So I saw it again… and again. Four or five times in the theater… about 20 more times at home… and realized at some point this was now my all-time favorite movie (bumping Field of Dreams to #2). I love the philosophy, the visual effects were effing brilliant (and organic in the scope of the movie), the action scenes awesome and I was crazy for Trinity. There might be another movie I would rather watch right now, but I have no problem saying The Matrix is my all-time favorite movie… well, I get a little anxious in the company of people who think it’s silly and stupid. YMMV.
Carrie-Anne Moss was in our/my wife’s birthing classes and I bumped into her once at Whole Foods, so I got to know her a tiny bit but I never told her of my love for the movie. I didn’t want to be one of those people to her, although she struck me as very down-to-earth and likely wouldn’t have minded.
I love it. Action. Special effects. Thought-provoking. Even some philosophy thrown in (especially if you played the games). I even thought the sequels were ok (I know, I don’t have very high standards for movies).
The thing I don’t get is why Inception is so highly-regarded. It’s just The Matrix, with less special effects. Life is a dream. It’s a dream so you can do special things. I think it’s just The Matrix for people who were too young to watch it.
And so I did ! It was just fine. Not high art, not utter shit. For some SciFi purists who are rankled by this bit or that thread within the threads within, I have to respect that level of minutae that you operate in but I don’t agree with the debates. It’s The Matrix. Popcorn Kung Fu Wirework Science Fiction. It works on many levels, and for a film cooked up by a brother pair one of whom is absolutely bonkers, it’s not a bad effort.
I have to say, I had no idea people thought the original had lost any of its awesomeness until I read this thread(which I created).
I figured the Matrix is kind of like Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back. No matter what came after it, I thought it held up perfectly.
The Matrix is excellent.
I think that the two sequels have enough material for about 1 movie…or two if they focused on the right stuff. Drop the Zion war(and all those characters in it), which can really be a threat happening in the background and keep:
Neo searching for a permanent solution. Ya’ know, maybe he could take the whole crew from the first movie.
Smith coming into the real world. Wasted a neat idea. Drop the entire endless clone stuff.
The idea of Vampires and Werewolves being from the Matrix. Again, wasted entirely.
Somewhere in there may be two full sequels.
As said before, the sequels only had enough material for one decent film. My biggest gripe though, is slightly off-beat: the soundtrack. The first film’s techno soundtrack was totally organic to the action, in a way I’d never seen or heard before - it integrated the sound effects, dialogue, everything (especially in the building assault at the beginning of act three, when guns firing and shells dropping provide some percussion). It’s one of the things that makes the first film special (along with some of the most detailed visuals ever).
The sequels reverted to just music in the background - not bad music, but much more intrusive and separate compared to the first film.
I’ll just say I was rooting for Agent Smith.
“I’m going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson.” is one of my favorite all-time lines. Unfortunately (and in typical Hollywood fashion) when you say you like quarters, they buy a sack of them and beat you about the head and shoulders with it.
Right though!?!? Johnny wasn’t end-of-the-world bad, just not what it could have been. Worth a watch.
But I’d LOVE to see someone tackle Neuromancer. It seems like losers with no chance of actually producing a movie keep hogging the script!