I was disappointed because the two next films didn’t do what was promised at the end of the first one:
That was a great set-up for a really interesting film. That is the film I wanted to see, a world in which we all discover there are people with God-like powers and that the entire world we know is a lie. Would we want to know? Would we all prefer to be like Cypher? Is ignorance bliss?
Instead, we got two films about the “real” humans in Zion, and all the rest of us just kept being turned into clones of Agent Smith.
I enjoyed the sequels except for a few disappointments:
They made one sequel and split it into two movies. It’s the same thing they did with PotC and I didn’t like the either. There’s a huge disjoint between the first one and the sequels. It would have been better to compress the War for Zion storyline into the third movie, and have the second be about Neo’s promise to change the Matrix. How would Zion react to him breaking down the rules of the world. Maybe this would be a good point to introduce the Merovingian and the old “Agents” (who I liked) as the only things powerful enough to stop him, but a little to chaotic for the Machines to control.
They made the Agents weaker/everyone else stronger. The first movie set up a very good point “you see an Agent, you run.” Neo was really the only one who ever went up against one on his own, and almost died in the process. At the start of Reloaded when Neo easily handled the new agents, it made perfect sense because it showed how powerful he was. But Morpheus and Trinity did way too well against them, especially the semi scene.
Yeah, but the existence of Neo/The One was supposed to be inspiring all kinds of crazy-ass stuff, massive numbers of farm stock taking red pills left and right, and even some high-school nerd busting loose pill-free, so being all superconfident and smug that he found The One, Morpheus had enough of an ego-bump to take on an Agent.
Easy answer: haters are memetic. Seriously. The number of genuine lovers or haters of the Matrix sequels is fairly low. The rest have subscribed to whatever opinion is popular (currently favors the haters).
I’ll admit that the sequels went in a little bit different direction than I was expected. But unlike most people, surprise does not equal hatred for me.
If, by “different direction”, you mean “unorthodox yet intelligent and thought-provoking storytelling” then I could get behind such a film easily. Instead, what I saw was a film that indulged all the worst instincts of the filmmakers at the expense of a satisfying cinema experience.
Fashionable trashing can be a factor, but honestly, I hated it as soon as I walked out of the cinema. I tried to like it. I couldn’t.
No, it is not. Nothing about the humans as batteries idea is logically consistent.
[ul]
[li]Humans don’t generate energy.[/li][li]They’ve got fusion, which makes an alternative energy source unnecessary.[/li][li]The argument they make for why humans are good energy sources (the BTUs of heat generated) is actually the reason why humans are bad energy sources (because they convert comparatively useful chemical energy into waste heat). It’s like deciding to go to whichever doctor has the most corpses stacked by the dumpster.[/li][/ul]
If one really wanted to, it could be fanwanked that the “real world” in the movie doesn’t abide by the same physics as those in the Matrix itself, thereby making a perpetual motion machine plausible.
The Wachowski’s came up with a script and treatment for a full trilogy that would have begun with matrix 1 and ended with Neo becoming the One. They went to the studios and said, “We need $X to do it.” The studios came back and said, “We can only give you$X/10, take it or leave it.” So, the Wachowski’s trimmed their three scripts into one film that became The Matrix.
After the Matrix became a mega-hit, the studios came back and said, “We’ll give you $X^10, give us 2 more sequels.” So, the Wachowski’s took all the crap that wasn’t good enough to be in the first film, and strung it together to make 2 more films.
This was by far the most plausible and interesting way to interpret the first two movies taken together. Much of what the Architect said pointed to this as well.
Then the third movie just dropped this ball completely, in exchange for a plotless mess.
It is a problem. You have to feed the bodies, and so getting more energy out than you spend maintaining the bodies turns out to be impossible.
The Animatrix DVD offers something of a fanwank about this–
[spoiler]it turns out that even though the machines didn’t actually get anything out of this arrangement, they were looking for a kind of an excuse not to just kill all the humans and this is what they came up with. (The humans had almost exterminated them, so they needed to neutralize the humans. But they didn’t want to simply commit genocide. And they also needed to be able to justify the whole operation in cost/benefit terms, since, I guess, that’s what machines do in the Matrix universe.)
Doesn’t quite work as an explanation–but it almost works. Maybe if I imagine factions and heiarchies and machines decieving each other, I could work something out along these lines.[/spoiler]
Anyway, I like to pretend that the first two movies plust Animatrix is all there is. These three works leave enough to the imagination for me to fill in a decent backstory. The third movie closes that possibility off.
One of the shorts in Animatrix implies, it seems to me, that maybe the humans in the Matrix movies are in fact machines, being taught by humans what it’s like to be a human living under machine oppression, so that they’ll stop trying to kill humans. Kind of silly—yet kind of not.
It’s been a long time since I read those or watched that, but I’m having a hard time seeing the significant parallels much less the plagiarism.
Just the bare idea that machines might gain consciousness and become a political force in their own right… that’s not plagiarism, it’s a trope that predated Asimov and which will surely be retold in future stories as well.
And even that’s not a very clear parallel. In the Matrix works, the machines are explicitly a political force. In the Asimov works, there are some moves in that direction sometimes, but ultimatly the machines are reduced to working behind the scenes, affecting history but not as a political force per se.
Anyway, the Matrix works have nothing about anything like the Three Laws, nothing centering on galactic or any other kinds of empire building, and no treatment of individual machines as full-fledged characters in their own right (that I recall). Meanwhile the Asimov works have nothing about virtual reality, a general war of man against machine, or the human implications of apparently supernatural powers (with the exception, perhaps, of The Mule). These are central themes of their respective works–for one to be some kind of rip-off of the other would require, I think, that at least some of these themes be shared between them.
It would be easy to forgive if it were merely silly. The problem is that it’s insulting – it’s obvious that the writers either didn’t know what they’re talking about or cyncially used the first handwave that came to mind because they assumed that the audience wouldn’t know any better. It only gets worse when you find out what really happened – the writers originally used a rationale that actually makes sense only to have it replaced with dumbed-down nonsense – and discover that the insult was deliberate.
Ok, thank you. I read every single post and I appreciate everyone’s input. One thing I do not agree on however is that the first movie was boring. Do people really think we don’t know what we like? I liked the first movie, genuinely, and I don’t forward parts of it. And yes, I do forward parts of the second and third movies.
But there were cool things. The KeyMaker. The Merovingian. The Indian couple with their little girl.
If any one thing annoyed me about the third movie it was the [further?] use of Neo as a Christ figure. Not that I mind Christ allegories, if well done, but this one felt more than a bit ham-fisted to me and you got the feeling of “been there, done that.”
The humans as batteries idea doesn’t remotely bother me. Who cares? I am willing to suspend my disbelief so high. I understand it bothers other people though, so I can see why those people would not like the movie.
Oh, and I have to add, I love POTC. But I think the Matrix sequels were actually marginally better than the POTC sequels. Even the Matrix did not attempt to make the sequels quite that complicated or crazy.
However, in the sequels they tried to make the philosophy look deeper and made it more convoluted and incomprehensible. At the same time, any semblance of plot disappears (The Matrix was about the sudden discovery of a primal world and the journey of the hero to his role within that. The sequels? Hell if I know).
The fact is that every movie has a thin plot. You’ve got two hours to tell a story - there’s no room for complexity. Movies tell simple stories: good movies tell them well and bad movies tell them poorly.
I agree: humans as batteries is bad science. But the Enterprise and the Millenium Falcon and Doc Brown’s DeLorean are all bad science too.
Movies aren’t about science, they’re about stories. And humans as batteries worked for the story. It gave the machines a reason to physically preserve humans while keeping them mentally enslaved. If the machines hadn’t needed humans as an energy source, there was no logical reason for the machines to have not eliminated the human race centuries earlier and then there wouldn’t have been any movie.
Besides people are missing the point. The Matrix wasn’t a science fiction movie. It was a fantasy movie dressed up in science fiction clothing. The Matrix was about wizards fighting magical battles against demons for human souls.