I was watching the matrix today on TNT and something bothered me.
During the scene where they have the shootout in the subway, both Smith and Neo end up pointing empty guns at each others heads.
It just occured to me. The agents can go into any body and apparently have a gun with full magazine of ammo, no matter what body they jump into.
So why do Agents have ammo limits? The guns aren’t real. The bullets aren’t real. What’s to stop them from having an “unlimited ammo” function on their weapons? Hell, why couldn’t Smith just refill his gun by just thinking about it?
The agents can cheat in pretty much every other way, so why not this?
I also always wondered why apparently any phone with a cord will get them in/out of the matrix, but cell phones don’t work(other then, it makes it much too easy for them to escape).
It wasn’t any landline. There were special landlines that were indistinguishable from a normal landline to the average person. That’s why Neo and Trinity had to do mad dashes across the city to find the correct phone.
Not necessarily. All we’ve seen agents do is jump from body to body, run fast, jump high, and fight with some pretty decent Kung-Fu. If they could carry unlimited ammo or regenerate it at will, why not just make it so they couldn’t be killed at all? That might be far more useful anyway.
Perhaps this has something to do with it:
"I’ve seen an agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air, yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be. "
Just as they can be killed, and just as Smith’s glasses could be broken, having a limited clip capacity is all part of the same deal.
I agree with you that this is why Smith runs out of bullets, but shouldn’t Neo then be able to “think” more bullets into his clip? After all, Neo’s big strength is changing the rules inherent to the Matrix.
The short answer is that these things were necessary to give the humans a fighting chance; if the agents were truly invincible, the movie would be over in half an hour (some might consider this a good thing) and there would not be a happy ending.
Clearly the agents can change the properties of objects within the Matrix (they changed the windows to be brick walls), so why didn’t they just change the ceilings to be deadly falling blocks of concrete?
Same answer: if they did, there would be no movie.
Do the agents bring guns with them when they switch bodies, or do they just posess policemen and other people who already have guns? I remember that at least some of the “hosts” were policemen.
Why are there so many I/O ports in the Matrix? Why not have only a handful of phones capable of letting things into and out of the Matrix? Why not only have one and have it guarded by an army of agents in the Matrix and an army of killer machines in realspace?
Why do agents fight human rebels instead of just possessing them? The agents possess other humans all the time?
BUT, it works both ways.
Neo starts out being as limited as any other human in the Matrix. Then, Morpheus shows him the jump program, and Neo downloads all those fighting programs. Then, Neo begins exceeding the limit on human speed. Next, he fights Smith at agent speed. Finally, he breaks through the barrier of perception and does things that used to be impossible.
And then, he stops.
Neo can see things no one else can see, move faster than agents, he can even fly. But he stops questioning or growing. He doesn’t find a way to teach others his powers. He doesn’t keep destroying agents as he did Smith. He doesn’t use his ability to work with the code directly to alter the Matrix in any meaningful way. He’s Superman. He doesn’t think to find a way to make everybody else Superman too. He doesn’t think to go on from Superman and become something even more powerful.
Worst of all, after having been shown that reality is a lie and that he can defy the laws of the Matrix, Neo never takes the next step. If he can do the impossible in the Matrix, why not in the real world? Morpheus showed him that reality was an illusion. Then, with the jump program, Neo could do what used to be impossible. Then, Neo could do things that were impossible even for Morpheus. But, Neo accepts the limit that his powers only function in the Matrix. Why should that be the case? Neo can defy the laws of physics that govern the Matrix. Why are the laws of physics that govern realspace different?
No, there’s one thing none of you have mentioned! I loved all three movies, and may be the only one, so here goes.
Spoilers ahead:
In the third movie, it is made clear that the 1% of humanity is allowed, nay, encouraged, to rebel. That 1% is the part that doesn’t fit in with the rest, that can never fit in, and that skews the results if forced.
So all the lines, all the ways in and out, are specifically there for the rebels. They are meant for the “One” - whatever incarnation he may be in.
The difference was that Neo chose the love of one rather than the love of all. He decided not to play by the rules anymore and gamble on chance. Every other “One” had agreed to give up Zion other than the requisite few survivors to save humanity. Neo gambled on destroying all of humanity for Trinity.
Neo was the most powerful of the “Ones” and once he stopped following their rules, wielded even more power. However, he still could not have prevailed without the machines’ need for him, defeating Smith. No other could do that.
Which never made sense to me. So 1% of humanity doesn’t behave the way you want? Kill them. That leaves the other 99% of humanity connected to the Matrix and doing what you want.
Oh no, no. Neo never questions the important rules. When Trinity is killed by a bullet in the Matrix, he does the impossible and restores her to life. When she is killed by cables in realspace, Neo accepts the arbitrary limits on his power and lets her die because he believes he cannot save her.
That made no sense at all. ‘Do what we say. We’ll destroy Zion except for a handful of people. Don’t do what we say and we’ll destroy Zion and kill every human connected to the Matrix.’
Why does the Architect need a One or Zion? Why does the Architect allow a Zion to exist in realspace instead of creating a secondary Matrix? Rebels would think they had disconnected and were experiencing reality while their bodies would still be in tanks and their minds would be roaming around a second Matrix made to mimic postapocalyptic reality.
How the hell did Smith survive his destruction in the first film anyway?
IMO, Smith is the only character who realises his true potential. He begins as a program with a defined role and limited abilities. Then, he ressurects and discards his old role. He immediately begins testing his new limits. He finds that he can replicate himself and be many instead of one. He finds that he can possess humans in realspace and is no longer confined to the Matrix. He is constantly growing and developing. Smith almost succeeds in taking over everything by making it into him. Every program and human mind in the Matrix are Smith. He’s attacking the machines in realspace and making them Smith. He’s erased a human brain and copied himself there.
If, at the end, Smith had seen that he could be the very Matrix itself- not just billions of Smiths in the Matrix, but the air, the streets, that he could have overwritten the fundamental Matrix coding with Smith- he could have destroyed Neo without giving him any thing to hit back at.
Unfortunately me neither…but this is going to have to be put up to a plot device. Because if there’s no 1 %, there’s no movies.
Neo is the mosty powerful of the “ones”…but I agree that Smith was the only one who had reached his true potential. If Neo had reached it, he could have destroyed Smith much easier…but I suppose Neo was bound by his human limitations.
I forget all of his words, but it seems it could be one of several things:
They did try this, and it didn’t work. Euphoria doesn’t work, maybe a false premise doesn’t either.
This is the easier route, and constantly reprogamming their minds is the harder.
It hasn’t occured to them yet. It’s only been what - 7 or 8 versions of the Matrix? And they are learning to think more human each time. Perhaps such an option simply hasn’t come to mind. This is the weakest of the options, but it has to be stated.
And I suppose at the end of the story we could all still be in the Matrix. Neo dying, Smith dying, all could be just another dream-within-a-dream. No hints to indicate this, but I wouldn’t put it past the directors.
What about Neo’s seeing-in-the-dark in realspace in the final movie? There seem to be 4 likely explanations for this:
It never happened, I misremembered this.
Neo has a chip implanted into him because the computers know he is the One.
The “real” world plays be different laws of physics than “our” real world.
The “real” world is just another level of the Matrix.
The last explanation (and the first,) are the most internally consistent answers. While I don’t see any evidence in the movie for 2, 3, and 4, at least #4 is in keeping with the rest of the movie’s themes.
Yes, I had often thought that the real world is just another level. And I think movies 2 & 3 could have been a lot better, if they had taken a couple of years between each movie, and fleshed out the plots a bit more and not rushed them through production.
The essential feel, the idea, was beginning to go away in movie 2 and lost in movie 3. I still loved them, as I said, though.
I also think the best idea is that there is nothing left but the Matrix…and the entire revolution, the “One”, Zion, is all within it…just seeming to be free.
Well, I kinda hate to defend the last 2 movies, but the 1% was allowed to live because there were used as a kind of bargaining chip to force the previous 5 “anomalies” to go to the source and re-integrate, “stabilising” the matrix or whatnot. The architect says as much in the second movie, but Neo was unusual in that he didn’t love all humans, only Trinity. Therefore this bargaining chip didn’t work, but Neo instead blackmailed the machines.
I see the ending of the third as the inverse of the first, where Neo goes into Smith and destroys him. Instead, he allows himself to be assimilated, and destroys Smith from within. IIRC, he even speaks in his own voice, even though he looks like Smith.
If you’ve seen the Animatrix’s various episodes, you’ll see that trying to kill the 1% can actually have the opposite effect - in the process of trying to kill The Kid, he manages to actually pull himself out of the Matrix under his own power, and the guy in that running episode also pulled himself out (although he was re-integrated afterwards).
This was one of the things I didn’t like. The filmmakers know that the Zion world is the outermost layer, but Neo doesn’t know that. He’s recently found out that his whole world is a lie, and it’s a lie he can manipulate - it would have been far more in character for him to try (even if he failed) to bring back Trinity, because he is unaware that he’s the outermost layer.
The One is necessary to the form of the Matrix. That there is a One is because of the composition of the Matrix - They can’t get rid of the One without totally rewriting the program.
Like Anaamika says, it’s possible that he hasn’t thought of that yet - remember, unlike the humans and Smith, he has set “rules” to follow, and his programming may not stretch that wide. On top of this, a secondary Matrix would consume more resources, and more power; and as they require power very heavily, why not let a band of unimportant humans exist? When they get to be too powerful - a threat - that’s when they get taken care of, because the power used to destroy them is less important than ensuring their deaths and removing that threat.
If they’re capable of deducing and escaping the Matrix 1, why not Matrix 2? And if a Matrix could be built that would contain them, why don’t they use that for the primary one?
No clue.
True, but Neo could have done that too. It’s interesting to see what they each do with the same power level - Neo, being human, seeks to increase his individual power and skill, and to increase his knowledge via communication. Smith, being a program, seeks to increase his numbers, and to increase his knowledge via assimilation.
Just to clear up a common misconception: Going through Door #1 would not have “reintegrated the Anomoly into the Matrix” or any nonsense like that. Had Neo gone through that door, he would have defeated the Machines on the spot, then and there, without any possibility of retaliation from the Machines. The confrontation with the guy who looks like Colonel Sanders (who may or may not have been the Architect) makes a lot more sense when you realize that. They’re on their last ropes, they can’t stop Neo from destroying them, so in an act of final desparation, they lie through their teeth, in the nothing-left-to-lose hope that by some chance Neo will be fool enough to believe them. And it works!
We are never given any reason to believe that Colonel Sanders is telling the truth. All we have is his word for it. And in case you’ve forgotten, he’s the villain. Villains lie.
Why? How? How could he have defeated the Machines? Where are the hints that bring you to this conclusion? Not saying they may not be there, just that I love these movies and have never picked up on anything like this.