What exactly is the plot of The Matrix trilogy?

Trouble is, for all the implied conflict between free will and fate, the story only advances because there are “fate” characters helping the “free will” characters along, i.e. the Keymaster knows what he knows because he was meant to know.
For that matter, if the Keymaster is the, heh, key to completing the cycle, why are the Agents so determined to take him out? I can understand if the machines want to drag the process out, delay the inevitable failure, knowing that sooner or later a “One” is going to make it to the White Room, but why then the rush to destroy Zion? Why not let the One reach the White Room, and then destroy Zion? Any interruption in the process means the One doesn’t make it to the White Room, and then what? The Sentinels go into a holding pattern, hesitating before the massacre?

These movies don’t make no sense!

The One may get suspicious if the agents back off. The One must believe that he is doing what’s right for the Humans, not the machines.

Eh, that’s pretty flimsy. Further, Neo isn’t actually making conscious rational decisions - he’s being spurred by prophetic dreams, another über-convenient plot device.

It seems to me that the machines goal is to manuever Neo into the White Room, and stack the deck so that he chooses the “right” door. All other considerations are secondary (since they will be reset, after all). In the previous versions, the Oracle helped with this.

Sacrificing Agent AI’s (or anything other than the Architect or the Oracle) in this goal is not going to be an issue for the Architect.

Yeah, but again, why are the Agents so determined to take out the Keymaster, seeming to consider Trinity and Morpheus just nuisance obstacles along the way? If Neo had been a few seconds late, the Keymaster (and Morpheus) would’ve been “deleted” in what I will admit was a pretty awesome truck crash, and then Neo has no way to get the White Room.

In fact, the whole freeway sequence is pretty damn cool, kinda like the pod race in Phantom Menace - it has little to do with the larger plot and really just kills about 20 minutes of the movie, but as filler goes, it’s well-done.

There may be plans “B” and “C” to manuever Neo into the White Room that didn’t get implemented. The Architect probably has planned out each step carefully. With flow charts.

Well, with all those monitors, I hope he can run Visio in splitscreen.

:slight_smile:

The pen he uses to control the monitors. You think that was for his own benefit? It’s a prop for Neo’s benefit, to give a concept some kind of shape Neo would understand without needless discussion about it.

Do you think that’s air he’s breathing?

I haven’t seen the trilogy in a while, but my impression was as follows: The entire series is the victory of free will over determinism.

“The One” is not designed by the machines, but an unfortunate side effect. There will always be someone who not only rejects the Matrix, but actually learns enough about it that he can manipulate it. Zion et al are all contingency plans by the machines to deal with the existence of this One.

The problem is that Neo thwarted even this plan Rather than give up his life to help humanity or stay and fight and get killed, he actually took a third option and went to the Machine God. Now, ordinarily, this wouldn’t mean anything, as he’d just be killed there, but this time the program called Smith had glitched due to how Neo had taken him down. Neo then makes a deal with the God that he will help them destroy Smith if the machines will let people choose whether or not to be in the Matrix. And the Architect says that he will keep that promise, since he is not human. (Implying he is the machine god).

Furthermore, we see that the programs themselves are not as happy following the plan as they should be. It seems that they are developing some to choose for themselves. We see the programs sneaking their child into the matrix, we see the implication that the Oracle was not following orders, seeing as she had to hide out and change forms. And, of course, Smith is the culmination of the concept: rather than choose to die, he chooses to take over.

As the Architect says, the problem is choice.

EDIT: Seems I’m not alone in this interpretation. And some have taken it a lot further. The thing I think a lot of people don’t realize is that everything is NOT going according to the plan, even though the Architect strives so hard to pretend like it is.

Runs into the problem that there are more people than food source. Otherwise you get an exponential decline.

Well you’d want a summer home too if you lived in the Matrix.

It’s the smell.

Liquid Soylent Green

Just because Morpheus says that he’s seen dead human bodies liquified and fed to the living doesn’t mean that dead human bodies are their only sustenance. Rather, it means the machines are (at least in this instance, and leaving aside that “coppertop” nonsense) ruthlessly efficient in not leaving a resource untapped and untouched by the horror the use of that resource can inspire.

The machines probably have light bulbs, soil and water, after all…