I will explain what I think is going on below, if you have a correction feel free.
Basically it is a machine civil war, the Oracle(who was created to study and understand human psychology) has come to sympathize with humanity and hatches a plot to manipulate both man and machine into a situation where humanity is no longer slaves(should they not want to be) and machines are no longer senselessly slaughtering Zion over and over.
To do this she makes contact with Zion, and begins spouting religious mumbo jumbo and “prophecy”(actually just her accumulated wisdom on human behaviour) and manipulating Morpheus and Neo and Trinity.
Neo is THE ONE, which as the Architect explains is actually a machine creation, he must take part in resetting The Matrix somehow and to make sure he does so willingly he is offered the chance to select men and woman from inside the matrix to repopulate Zion. If he refuses to help no repopulation and humanity goes extinct.
The Oracle makes sure Morpheus finds Neo early, makes sure Neo falls in love with Trinity which will make him choose her and say fuck saving the world. This did not happen the 6 times before. She also leads either intentionally or unintentionally to Agent Smith becoming a virus threatening the matrix and all machines.
The Smith issue becomes so serious the machines plead with Neo to stop him, they are even willing to end this whole repeating bullshit if he just kills Smith. Neo does and as the Architect tells the Oracle at the very end he will keep his word as he isn’t human So people in the matrix are now given the choice of leaving for Zion or continue to live inside.
The machines have won the civil war. They raise humans for energy because the humans blacked out the source of solar energy.
To keep them docile, they run a computer simulation of life through their pods. This isn’t perfect so they program a One to lead the ultimate band of escapees to facilitate the machines needs (Zion falling, the cycle starting over).
According to the Architect this cycle is inevitable and unstoppable. We (the audience), through Neo’s eyes, think that because of Trinity’s love, Neo can change things.
At the end of the trilogy whether he has or has not, is not known. The movie portends to show he has but it could just be another level of control.
I’m curious about a plain language explanation, so I’m going to dumb things down some more:
So, at some point in time, our machines take over our lives. So much, in fact, that there’s a war between humans and machines. The machines win.
But, they need power to stay alive, so they use humans as ‘batteries’ to stay alive. However, they need to keep the humans docile, so they allow them to dream in a world created by the machines - the matrix.
However, some humans are able to see past the dream and understand the true reality. They manage to awaken and escape their lives as ‘batteries’ and live in the true dystopian future, hunted by the machines. They manage to hack into the matrix and find new recruits.
After that, I get confused. How are the architect and Oracle related? What’s Zion again? How do they know Neo is the ONE?
The Architect is the self professed father of the matrix, he designed the first perfect matrix that was a total disaster because people could not accept a utopian reality. So realizing humans define their lives through suffering the Oracle(the mother of the matrix) was created to study human psychology and existence, with her input the new improved more realistic matrix was created.
Zion is the human city in the real world populated by escapees from the matrix and their children, in reality Zion was created by the machines and populated initially from humans in the matrix. Eventually Zion reaches a point where they pose a threat and at this point the machines purge Zion, the events of the movie are the 6th time this has happened. Its implied the machines allow Zion to exist as a sort of “relief valve” for the few people who cannot accept the matrix.
The Architect knows Neo is the one because he had a hand in his creation I suppose, look at all those monitors behind the Architect when he confronts Neo. You can see the previous Neo’s reactions to the revelations.
Morpheus knows Neo is the one because the Oracle told him, as we find out she is a high level program so she has insider knowledge.
True but its difficult to understand still, for instance:
1.What is Neo exactly?! We find out he is NOT a mystical messiah, he is actually created by and part of the machines plans. How was Neo able to kill the Sentinels by thought in the real world at the end of the second film?! Does he have some kind of hardware in him the other humans don’t?
2.What is the point of Neo? The Architect says Neo needs to go to the source and insert some kind of code he has to restart the matrix? Why put this into a human? This seems like a lot of trouble for nothing.
3.What is driving the conflict in the films? It appears to be the Oracle talking to Morpheus and Neo throwing a wrench in the plans of the machines, remember the events of the film went smoothly 5 times previously.
Those aren’t “previous” events (Matrix iterations 1 thru 5).
The Architect calculates all of the possible reactions and replies by Neo under a given set of circumstances, and those possibilities are displayed in the monitors. (Some showed disdain, anger, confusion, etc., and probably different ways a verbal conversation can unfold.)
I don’t know how many variables the machine is dealing with.
When Neo eventually settles on a choice, notice that all the monitors clear, showing the current “path” Neo has selected. This is supposed to imply that machines (the Architect, specifically) can’t fully predict what humans will do and choose.
I imagine the Architech tries to “stack the deck”, and give certain desired (by the Architech) outcomes a greater chance of being selected by Neo, but ultimately, he/it realises that Humans are unpredictable (and logically speaking, quite insane ).
That was where the whole thing completely fell apart. Kinda like the old 80’s V mini-series that ends with a mixed alien-human kid having mystical powers. No matter how hard they try, Hollywood can’t keep their magic out of their science.
It is kind of an interesting revelation that the Matrix has been reset 6 times with Zion being destroyed and restarted each time. But the fatal flaw in that process is that there would have to be some legends that get passed down from the Humans that were chosen to restart it. They have no incentive to lie about what has happened, and even beyond that, there would be all manner of artifacts and records from pre-reset, no matter how hard the machines tried to clean up.
I would have been much happier with the reveal that Zion level reality was nothing more than an escape hatch level of the Matrix and then never showing what was beyond it. Are there actual Humans in tanks at some level? Are they all just computer programs? It would have been so much cooler and more… I dunno… If they had left it alone and not had the mystical powers crap.
Neo wasn’t the first “one”, even in that cycle. Morpheus described a predecessor that could bend the perceived reality of the Matrix and trained others to do the same, but had died. I suppose “the anomaly” was such that eventually more “ones” would start popping up as the system gradually slides out of control, until one of those ones does… whatever. If Neo had died before fulfilling the role of the One, maybe that nerdy kid (who “self-actualized” in one of the Animatrix shorts) or the spoon kid might have finished the job, although the whole thing is still pretty tenuous and ill-conceived and can only be forced along by characters like the Oracle and the Keymaster who know things because they are meant to know things and can be living plot devices to keep the story advancing.
Heck, I’m kinda curious why the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar has been reduced to just four - Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and Link. That’s less than the other ships and indeed less than half of what the ship had in the first movie. I get that there’s a high attrition rate, but supposedly people are being freed from the Matrix at an accelerating rate, so are they short of recruits?
Of course, the functions of Apoc, Mouse, Switch and Dozer were to get killed by Cypher just to rapidly boil the cast down to a handful of primaries - I guess Matrix Reloaded figured why waste the time?
Supposedly, we see the various AI rebelling against the program, too. Like the retired Ghost agents, and the couple with the child in the subway station Neo was trapped in.
Neo may have been seen by the system as a failsafe against any rebellion, bit errors from within from crashing the system permanently.
Her quote (roughly) was “but you already know what I’m going to say”, and that was after she was going through the motions of a doctor’s physical that were something like what Neo expected but not what she needed to do to actually analyze him. In short, he wasn’t the One because, as she said, he had the gift but he was waiting for something, his next life maybe.
In short, being the One wasn’t just about having the potential, but having the faith to use it. Neo didn’t have it, and didn’t really start to have it until he fought Smith in the subway station. And he didn’t totally have it until his next life, literally, after he rose from the dead in a dingy hallway and tore Smith to pieces.
So people in the matrix are now given the choice of leaving for Zion or continue to live inside.
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