When you’re up against someone who can do anything with a mere thought (and you can’t), your only remaining weapon is a “mind fuck”.
The Matrix films are a weird case of the original being great but the sequels being underwhelming and misconstrued in extreme fashion enough to harm the original’s reputation by consequence. (That’s a horrible sentence but I hope it gets my point across.)
I won’t go into defending them because they are highly misunderstood and it’s a tough sell. I will simply say that they are better philosophical tracts than they are paragons of cinematic/celluloid virtue.
Watch them again while listening to the Cornell West and Ken Wilber commentary on the Ultimate Matrix collection DVDs. They are a real eye-opener about certain of the trilogy’s thematic content.
So any thoughts on if Neo was using his abilities to their full potential or not?
I doubt this answer will be satisfying as I’m not entirely sure.
Part of the film’s arc is Neo understanding his abilties. There’s an evolution in his mental awareness of what he can and what he can’t do. Notice at the end of the second film suddenly he is able to shut down the sentinels outside of the Matrix and in the “real world.” Does this mean that Neo and the other previous incarnations of the One’s powers extend beyond the Matrix and into the real world? I believe so. If that’s the case, why doesn’t he just blow all the machines up during the third film much earlier than he does? Perhaps, it’s because it’s so physically taxing and would drain him. I’m using that example to say though that Neo never seems to be fully aware of what he can or can’t do. Why can the man with all of the watches shut him down from getting on the train? I don’t know.
If he indeed could teleport or other equally impossible tasks for Agents, was he aware that he could do them to the extent the end of the first film seems to indicate that he’s completely aware of what he can do? I don’t think so. After all, he’s not aware that he can bring people back from the dead until the end of the second film.
Also, the second and third films are much less about The Matrix and much more about Zion and The Machine City, so it’s almost a moot point. By the end of the third film, Neo has unified mind (The Matrix), body (Zion), and soul (The Machine City).
Ultimately, also, the answer to some of these questions is irrelevant and some of the fans are probably putting more thought into the film than the creators. After all, it was part of the Wachowskis’ mission statement to make an action film. I’m sure they would sacrifice certain things of internal logic for the sake of expediency or drama or action.
In my mind - and I formulated this at some point pondering where they were going with the “plot”, probably to allow myself tghe ability to stand the movies…
Neo is pushing their ability to monitor his abilities. Since the machines were reactive, they could not infer that he would possibly be omnipotent. Zion needed Neo fighting the machines from within the Matrix to be able to have a chance fighting them in the real world (for some reason…). If the machines found out Neo was omnipotent within the matrix, then they would have destroyed that version and built a new one - as long as he pushed the boundaries of the Matrix, he tricked them into reacting to his actions within it, and kept the from simply pressing reset.
Or something like that.
Oh G-d no!
Neo learns he has the ability to break the rules. At the end of the first film, it sounds like he has really embraced this. But in the next two films, he just accepts the rules.
He accepts that he has no power in realspace. Why? He’s already done the impossible in the Matrix, why not at least try to do the impossible in the real world?
He stops bullets with a thought in the first film, and destroys an agent from within. IIRC he never does either again.
For the same reason I don’t try to crash cars the same way I do in GTA IV. In the real world he is bound by the laws of physics. In the Matrix he is in a computer simulation. It isn’t his body jumping over buildings and shit. It’s his Matrix avatar.
His “power” is an ever increasing ability to circumvent the physical laws of the Matrix. He’s not a god. He isn’t omnipotent. Maybe eventually he would be. By the time we get to the finale, Smith has pretty much rebuilt the Matrix in his own image.
I mean if you want to be totally pedantic about it, there wouldn’t even be a movie. Why can’t Agents just materialize wherever they want? Why stop at building a brick wall over an exit? Why not just delete the entire building with Morpheus and his crew inside? Why have a locksmith with a bunch of secret hallways? Why get into a giant car chase when you can just drop a ton of rocks out of the sky?
The entire premise of The Matrix is that it is a structure with rules. Maybe it’s bandwith or processing limitations, but each program in the machine world is designed for a limited role.
As I was watching the third movie the other night, I decided that the battle between Neo and Smith was a battle of wills personified. They didn’t need to punch each other, but that was a tangible and satisfying way of expressing the struggle to overcome each other. The human portion of Neo wasn’t able to just be omnipotent, he had to use his power in familiar, if unnecessary, ways.
I enjoyed the whole trilogy, but it really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, however…
The real answer is that kung fu fighting looks cool. Look at what he had figured out how to do at the end of the first movie: Stop bullets, fly, and entire and disrupt sentient programs.
If he could never develop beyond where he was at that point, what else should he have been able to do? Take the bullet stopping. It implied that he could detect, isolate, and change the physics properties of their programs by setting their velocity to zero (which of course affected their kinetic energy and momentum as well) all in less time then the bullets took to travel down the hall way. That meant a) he should be able to turn any object into a deadly projectile at any time and b) could do so in micro seconds. This does not even consider what other physics properties he could potentially affect. The flying actually a similar “hack” of the Matrix world. Why couldn’t he throw other people or objects around with his mind? Because it looks less cool than choreographed kung fu.
True, and reminds me of the problem I’ve always had with Green Lantern. Even as a kid I thought “Wait. He’s got the ability to make ANYthing with his mind. And all he can think of to do is pick up the bad guy with BBQ tongs?”
Green BBQ tongs.
But, hey, as a kid I would’ve said “It’s OK. Neo’s cool, and so are tongs”.
I think you guys are overestimating his power to repeat what he’s already done. His greatest powers seem to manifest themselves when he is not thinking, but merely acting. And, when you do that, you often do things you can’t repeat.
Neo’s mind is powerful, but it’s not more powerful than the entire Matrix. Even if he does completely rewrite the rules, it seems to be local and non-permanent. And his power is limited by his emotional stamina (This is one of the reasons why Smith totally whooped him in every fight* until his powers were boosted by Deus at the end.)
Also, people need to stop taking the explanations in the first movie as gospel for the sequels. We already found out that Morpheus was wrong. His mythology was crap. There’s no reason to assume he was right about the One being completely unbound by the rules. In fact, in the second movie, I remember programs making fun of how Neo was not as powerful as he thinks. Remember, he still bleeds.
*Heck, after the first movie, did Neo ever actually win a fight?
How is kung-fu cooler than pushing people around with your mind? Any number of special effects could have looked better than endless punching.
Has anyone seen the movie Kung Fu Hustle? Might sound silly to say, but the fight effects in that were closer to what I was expecting in the Matrix sequels.
I look at him as a unique program within a matrix of programs. Unique, in that he could operate as an organic, reflexive, subroutine outside of the master running program. Maybe he was more like a virus in that respect. But still limited by the Program… His Godlieness was limited by the parameters of an equation within a program.
It’s not like ‘destroying’ an agent from within worked out so well the first time, considering what Smith became after that. I’d think doing that again would have been a bad idea.
Yeah, I was upset that they never bothered to put in some technobabble explanation of how Smith managed to come back.
In the second movie he claimed that some of Neo’s code rubbed off on him. And since Neo got resurrected, maybe some of that ability rubbed off on Smith.
They did, but they didn’t put together the pieces together. It’s when the Oracle talks about programs being deleted. They’re supposed to go back to the Source, but, instead a lot of them hide out in the Matrix. We’re told that Smith went rogue as a result of code he copied from Neo before he was destroyed. Putting these two bits of data together, we can surmise that when Agent Smith was destroyed by Neo, he should have reported to the Source to be permanently deleted. Instead, he used his newfound ability of Choice to essentially remove himself from the Recycle Bin and go back into the Matrix, this time, as his own boss.
I guess that could merely be fanwankery, but I know it was something I though right after seeing the film, and I didn’t consciously come up with it.
And in the third movie The Oracle tells Neo/us that Smith is Neo’s equivalent in the equation of The Matrix. If Neo comes back, so does Smith. If Neo dies, so does Smith (all of them).
Plus the Oracle made Smith like he is. Wierdly, Smith may be the one truly innocent character: everybody else does Bad Things at some point or another, whether hero or villain. Smith was made by the Oracle to be exactly what he was, and even though he tried to fight it, he was incapable of not fulfilling his mission. He was basically a Sacrificial Lamb (or sacrificial villain, but whatever), whose sole and required purpose was the put Neo in the situation to end the war.