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[acidviper]

I just watched the trilogy again and am still confused why the machines would choose a highly inefficient method to get energy and which would ultimately spell their doom. They also would not have to make up a Matrix.

1. Was it because there was nothing else living?

If humans were the only living organism due to no sun and bad air, why not cut off arms and legs of "batteries to" decrease pod size and limit heat loss. Except for the Zion people.

2. They follow the 3 Robot Laws?

They are not harming humans, just using them as batteries, but killing humans if they were disruptive.

3. Some sort of predecessor as fuel ego trip, like how we use dinosaurs for car fuel.

Keeping them around for no apparent reason.

4. Wind, nuclear, and geothermal were still available.

Slower to gather these resources, but you would not need any squidys if there were no humans.

 

[karasu]

Because it's a movie, and there would be no kung fu magic if they used cows as energy sources. All logical explanations are bullshit.

 

[Lord Error]

Becaue it's a stupid movie premise, that's why. I personally couldn't get over it, and it kinda runied the first movie a bit for me.

You can say that machines don't hate people. They want them preserved, perhaps because they realize we are their God in some way. If there was a God, would you kill him for treating you poorly, knowing he created you and everything you ever known and loved? Tough question.

So that's some kind of poetic reasoning for keeping humans alive. However, they portray machines as a way too much ruthless, logical and calculated. They probably wouldn't do such thing for 'higher, poetic reasons'. They are most likely just using people as batteries, which of course makes no sense, but probably makes uneducated people go 'aaaaah'. However, they could have used good old nuclear power plants, and get more energy than they could ever extract from humans.

Wachowskis could have easily fixed this premise, and made it more impressive in fact, have they said machines are using people's minds for some purpose (basically, an organic supercomputer, which due to unexplored capacities of human brain does certain tasks better than machines' electronic computers).

 

[daegan]

Well, there are three sides to all the stuff in the Matrix - the humans, the machines, and the programs.

I don't have much to go on from the films, but the humans and the programs both understand emotions - albeit in different ways. The machines do not feel any emotion and are likely studying both the programs that have sprung up in the "wild" and the humans to try to understand this.

Not every program is comfortable with their emotion or with the idea of it - see Agent Smith in the first movie.

 

[Koshiro]

They thought it was good for a laugh.

 

[DaveH]

2. They follow the 3 Robot Laws?

They are not harming humans, just using them as batteries, but killing humans if they were disruptive.

As Agent Smith says in the first one... it's a "Zoo". And like real zoos, some of the caretakers enjoy it and learn from it and others are disgruntled and see it just as their day-job.

 

[Blackace]

well they were at war...

 

[Kabuki Waq]

its just an action movie that took it self too seriously.


try not to read too much into the matrix movies.

 

[dskillzhtown]

First of all, it is a movie. And you need to watch the Animatrix. It will shed more light on your questions. Blackace is right, they were at war and the machines did some experiments and found humans to be the best energy source and I am sure it didn't hurt that they could not only defeat the humans, but they could use them to survive.

 

[Blackace]

First of all, it is a movie. And you need to watch the Animatrix. It will shed more light on your questions. Blackace is right, they were at war and the machines did some experiments and found humans to be the best energy source and I am sure it didn't hurt that they could not only defeat the humans, but they could use them to survive.

see if they used cows then there would still be those damn humans! two birds with one stone! not only were the robots poorly designed but the were also efficient

 

[jonhuz]

your all wrong they used humans as energy because the sky was torched, ala no sunlight for yo bitches! (the source of the machines energy)

 

[Blackace]

your all wrong they used humans as energy because the sky was torched, ala no sunlight for yo bitches! (the source of the machines energy)

unmmm but... Cows are living creatures too... right? read my post and take the purple pill my friend..

 

[UltimateMarioMan]

Matrix Questions: Why did the machines use humans for energy?

Because half way through ripping off Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell they relised they needed a story! (J/k)

 

[maharg]

your all wrong they used humans as energy because the sky was torched, ala no sunlight for yo bitches! (the source of the machines energy)

Because the sun is the only viable source of energy!

Seriously, this was the most retarded sci-fi premise ever. Really hurt the first movie where they were taking it far too seriously as a motive. Would have been better to simply *drop it* altogether. I don't get this idea that a bad exposition is better than no exposition at all.

Never mind that a case can be made that they'd have nothing to feed us to make us 'produce energy' (haha) without the sun to allow for a food chain. Unless the machines managed to artificially reproduce all the building blocks like proteins and such, in which case wtf did they need us for.

Ugh. Thank god they practically dropped the whole idea in the sequels and made the 'reality' of their reasons more psychological than biological.

 

[Saurus]

Never mind that a case can be made that they'd have nothing to feed us to make us 'produce energy' (haha) without the sun to allow for a food chain.

Believe the movie said the dead where liquified and fed to the living.

 

[maharg]

It's not even worth pointing out how that's just as absurd as everything else. Human bodies can not be used as perpetual motion machines.

 

[Drozmight]

because, the machines, like all machines prefer to complicate things by doing the least logical thing.

wait.

Whom ever programmed these robots was an idiot.

 

[DopeyFish]

i can't believe none of you got it.

wow.


The machines did NOT want to kill off mankind but wanted to co-exist.

See how the machines were becoming more human? love? karma?

You remember seeing the animatrix where it was always the machines wanting peace and mankind wanting war?

The whole idea of the matrix is to teach mankind a lesson.

Smith was never really a virus... zion was brought back and destroyed over and over and over and over... and notice the war ends soon after neo comes to machines and asks for peace. and only peace.

Remember reloaded? Where all the previous "ones" were shown on the screens? Some of them were flipping out... some of them were laughing... but Neo was the last "one" to get it and make sense of it.

 

[soundwave05]

Because it's a thematic, not logical point ... the technology we create eventually goes beyond our control and finally controls us.

For that issue, I think you have to give the Wachowskis some dramatic liberty, because they're making a dramatic point, which is a common one in science fiction.

If you say the machines used Duracell batteries for power, well so .... what? That has no dramatic relevance to the audience.

 

[RiZ III]

Ahh but why not use humans for energy? .. ..

::walks away::

 

[Drozmight]

i can't believe none of you got it.

wow.


The machines did NOT want to kill off mankind but wanted to co-exist.

See how the machines were becoming more human? love? karma?

You remember seeing the animatrix where it was always the machines wanting peace and mankind wanting war?

The whole idea of the matrix is to teach mankind a lesson.

Smith was never really a virus... zion was brought back and destroyed over and over and over and over... and notice the war ends soon after neo comes to machines and asks for peace. and only peace.

Remember reloaded? Where all the previous "ones" were shown on the screens? Some of them were flipping out... some of them were laughing... but Neo was the last "one" to get it and make sense of it.

Huh? In the animatrix I saw the humans wanted peace but the robot blew up the UN.

Edit: ok nm, just watched it again... I still don't get why the robot went ape shit and blew himself up.

 

[maharg]

blah blah blah, rantings and ravings of a madman

I got all that, but it's all from the SEQUELS. We were given no such context in the first movie, and I think you're absolutely daft to think, at this point, that they had it all planned out and that anything in the first movie can be taken at anything but face value.

Like I said, they went a long way to fixing it in the sequels, mostly because of all the stuff you just ranted about.

It doesn't change the fact -- yes fact -- that the first movie would have been improved by a simple omission of the retarded notion that they use humans as an energy source. They didn't even have to replace it, they just had to drop it, and it would have been a huge improvement. There would have been nothing to fix, analytical-minded people like me wouldn't have been so annoyed, and the average person still wouldn't care.

It's easy to believe the robots wanted vengence and so are essentially torturing humans (the approach the original could have used), or even that they just wanted to find balance, and so were holding humanity until they could figure out how (the approach the sequels used). The transition between the two would have even been believable.

 

[DopeyFish]

Huh? In the animatrix I saw the humans wanted peace but the robot blew up the UN.

Humans started the war. The robots would come to the UN and offer an apple.

They blew up the UN in the end, yes. and the sake of signing was out of fear... but not desire for peace.

Thus the lesson for mankind began. You must have the desire to co-exist or else it won't work.

 

[soundwave05]

And yes, the idea of the Matrix is definitely to "teach" mankind a lesson, its a punishment for our arrogance.

You CAN'T DROP this out of the movie. It renders the whole idea of the Matrix as pointless from a storyteller's point of view.

The whole moment where Morpheus shows Neo what the Matrix is, is one of the most powerful moments in the first movie, because its meant to horrify you (last time I checked stories are told for human audiences, lol), and that's the whole point.

Yeah maybe afterwards you go home and say "well that doesn't make logical sense ... why wouldn't the machines just use cell phone batteries or something ...", but that's not the point really.

You have to suspend some disbelief, because clearly the writer's are making a point relevant to the story in structuring the plot that way.

 

[samus4ever]

2. They follow the 3 Robot Laws?

WTF? Thats from I, Robot. There was no 3 robot laws in The Matrix.

 

[maharg]

You CAN'T DROP this out of the movie. It renders the whole idea of the Matrix as pointless from a storyteller's point of view.

Considering the use of humans as batteries is absurd from the start (not just when I 'go home', but from the moment I heard it) they already rendered the whole idea of the matrix as pointless from MY point of view. Only when the sequels came out did the Matrix make any sort of sense (and please stop bringing things from the sequel into your justifications. Let's stick to the only one they'd written or even plotted out as of the release of the first movie )

All for one line that really has no bearing on the overall plot because a) it's stupid, b) it's wrong (sequels blew it out of the water), c) it doesn't add anything to the horror of what the machines are doing. If anything, doing it out of vengence would be MORE horrific. At the very least, just as. The way you talk it sounds like you think I'm suggesting removing the entire scene when I'm talking about removing maybe 2 lines tops. Try muting them and see if it actually makes a huge difference.

Frankly, this idea that this was some kind of masterful stroke of genius writing is almost as stupid as the idea of human batteries itself. And wtf is with the "omg they're using duracells or cell phone batteries instead!" thing. They're smart, they probably have high temperature tolerances. Use cold fusion or something. Or fuck, go out INTO SPACE and get your solar energy there. The things can fucking fly.

Seriously, if you think it added something, I don't get your way of thinking. All it added to me was a general sense of disgust that I would not have had if it hadn't been there.

 

[Jill Sandwich]

Because the machines ran on Windows ME

 

[temp]

Because it's a movie, and there would be no kung fu magic if they used cows as energy sources.

How soon we forget.

 

[soundwave05]

You can't drop it. You'd have to change the screenplay completely otherwise, but you can't "just not explain" what the Matrix is or why the machine's are the enemey of mankind (they enslave us ... so why have they enslaved us?). The story has no plausible antagonist and the whole idea of a "matrix" has no emotional meaning to "Joe Public" sitting in the audience.

The entire story doesn't work.


Yes, logically the machines would've just used a more efficent power source and killed humans off entirely -- but if you do that, you don't have much of a movie, do you?

And yes, that scene is also meant to revolt, I admit myself I found the image of a little baby with needles stuck into him/her and the whole idea of babies being "bred" like cattle to be unsettling ... and that's totally a thematic point.

Neo throws up in the scene right afterwards, because he's so repulsed and shocked by that.

So that stuff is all intentional. Every story requires some suspension of disbelief, even science fiction (see the Terminator).

As for their work on Reloaded/Revolutions ... lol, I'm not even going to try and defend that because those are just poor movies. To be honest, I felt like they told the story they wanted to tell in the first Matrix (Neo is the one, mankind must liberate itself from its arrogant vices, a higher state of conciousness is possible, we are not just a cog in an industrial machine, etc. etc. etc.), and they story in the 2nd and 3rd films felt entirely forced and manufactured.

 

[maharg]

Gee, thank you for teaching me The Way Of Sci-Fi. I didn't know I had been having incorrect expectations of self-consistency and plausibility all these years being a fan of the genre. The Wacko-skies will now be the Masters of The Genre in my eyes. Screw Asimov or Clark or Bester.

Seriously, dude. A stupid explanation is not better than no explanation at all. There is a LOT that is left to mystery in the first movie, and this would have just been one more. Except that instead of the sequels looking like they had to repair a stupid blunder (which they did), they would have been explaining something left unexplained. For that matter, what business does Morpheus even have knowing the motives of the Machines.

My feeling of disgust was not with the idea of humans being used as batteries. My feeling of disgust was with anyone thinking they could pass that off as a plausible explanation.

And yeah, let's look at Terminator. Please. What was the Grand Motive for that machine uprising? Nothing more than simple revenge. Wow, what a degenerate movie that must have been for not coming up with something more 'clever' like that the machines wanted to use humans as the blades of their helicopters. Now THAT would have been awesome.

The idea of the dominated-becoming-the-dominators is practically ingrained in our consciousness. We don't need stupid excuses to accept the desire of the underdog to rule over and gloat to his former oppressors. Robots-taking-over-the-world stories are not even close to new, and they never needed something as stupid as the battery thing before. The Matrix didn't need it either.

 

[soundwave05]

If the machines want revenge though, why not just kill the humans?

That's what I'm saying, your "explaination" (becauase you cannot get away with just not having one -- if you don't one you have a story period) isn't any better.

There has to be a reason for the Matrix to exist, otherwise you have no movie.

The plot hole in the Terminator is the whole "John Conner's father" thing, which is Cameron probably winking at the whole "chicken-egg conudrum", but it makes absolutely no logical sense.

 

[maharg]

Uh, there's nothing wrong with Reese being Conner's father. There's not even a paradox inherent in that. It only becomes a problem when you throw the sequel in and supposedly the future can be averted. With the first one as it stood, the future was innevitable and no matter what they did would not change.

T2 invoked many paradoxes, and T3 made them worse. T1 was about as good a time travel story as you can get in terms of consistancy.

"There has to be a reason for the Matrix to exist, otherwise you have no movie."

By your very own words, the reason for the matrix existing given in the first movie was wrong anyways. Punishment would have been sufficient cause. Like putting someone in prison for life vs. giving them the death penalty. Which is worse? Probably the one that leaves you living 40 years without any contact with the outside world.

 

[soundwave05]

Uh, there's nothing wrong with Reese being Conner's father. There's not even a paradox inherent in that. It only becomes a problem when you throw the sequel in and supposedly the future can be averted. With the first one as it stood, the future was innevitable and no matter what they did would not change.

T2 invoked many paradoxes, and T3 made them worse. T1 was about as good a time travel story as you can get in terms of consistancy.

That is definitely a paradox, in fact its one of the most famous paradoxes in storytelling.

That doesn't automatically mean "oh my gawd! Horrible!!!!", screenwriters often wil take liberties like that to get across their thematic points.

When you're writing a screenplay, theme will almost always take precident over pure logic.

The Terminator is a more interesting, more human story if Kyle Reese is the father of John Connor, because now the movie is also a love story instead of just a generic action movie.

The plot is simply just a means to an end, some rules can be bent ... others can be (and usually are) broken.

 

[maharg]

Please explain the paradox to me. Without invoking T2 or T3. As of the end of T1, the Machine War is still coming, Conner will still be around to send his father (who is not in any other way related to Conner) back.

Only once the machine war is averted (T2), or delayed (T3), does Reese being Conner's father become a problem.

There are two types of time travel stories:
- Ones in which time is set and cannot be changed (no free will, essentially). In such stories, there is only a paradox if you break the cycle, which you can't do. (Terminator 1 is this sort of story).
- Ones in which the past can be changed. In such stories paradoxes come from changing things about the past that have an impact on whether or not the person doing the time travel will still do the time travel.

This is Sci-Fi 101. And you're trying to tell me about what to accept in sci-fi stories?

 

[soundwave05]

It's a paradox in a basic sense -- how can you be concieved before your father is?

John Connor is born before his father is.

That's not just a science fiction thing, its a paradox point that comes up in just about any screenwriting class.

My point is though you can't get caught up on stuff like this too much, because you have to understand, screenwriters are not reciting history.

A lot of their decisions are made purely based off emotional ideas. And the whole idea of the Matrix and what that is, is not just some little plot point that could have been cut out of the movie.

You take that out, and you have no story or at least a completely different one with a completely different meaning.

In Lord of the Rings, yeah its pretty friggin' absurd to send two little Hobbits into Mordor, even given the explaination in the book, but it makes for a helluva story.

 

[maharg]

Wtf? Maybe in some kind of theological sense that's a paradox, but if there's time travel, and biology functions as it always does, there is absolutely no paradox in being conceived before your father. You know how it works, right? The sperm join with the egg and produce an embryo. If the sperm come with the man, then so does the possibility of a baby.

What you're saying is absolutely ridiculous. I don't care if they teach you about rabid bunnies eating the Queen of England in scriptwriting class, it still makes no sense from a logic point of view. I'd be willing to bet that if they do teach it, they do so in a more logical way like by invoking the absurdity of time travel to begin with (irrelevant) or by invoking the sequels (relevant but broader scope). I think you just don't get it to begin with.

Anyways, none of this has anything to do with your doom and gloom. You're making absolutely no sense. Are you really saying that if the reason for the existence of the Matrix were what it actually was according to you and not what they said it was but really wasn't, the whole movie would have no point? You need to maybe actually think before you type next time.

I don't think you understand the difference between a story being self-consistant and being consistant-with-the-real-world. Sci-fi is generally, due to the analytical nature of most of its adherants, expected to be at least the former.

 

[etiolate]

Do cows putout more BTUs than humans?

 

[soundwave05]

I'm saying plot points in movies are not written to neccessarily always be coherent.

Theme and emotion ALWAYS will come first.

And if you can't see a paradox in a person being older than their father, lmao ("theological"?), I don't know what to tell you. Its the classic chicken coming before the egg idea.


Tha Matrix I always felt really stemmed from a core idea -- frustration. That's what I got from the first movie.

That people are frustrated at the "robotic" nature of life that they live -- working 9 to 5 in a cubicle -- that's Neo.

So the idea that reality is not reality and that a person like Neo is not just a normal person ... I think to me that's why the Matrix works as a movie and why it become so popular (on top of the spectacular special effects ... but lots of movies have great effects).

I think this is where it connects to regular people. The whole thing about the machines, well you gotta explain it one way or the other. Even you said "well maybe they just want revenge" ... fine, they want revenge, that's still an explaination.

But you just can't leave it blank, and the Wachowskis don't leave it blank, they give an explaination which is meant to work on an emotional level.

In the Terminator, you don't need to have Kyle Reese be John Connor's father -- it's completely unncessary, but Cameron does it because it raises the stakes of the story and adds a love element to it, which makes for a more interesting movie.

No one gives a shit if you have a nicely written, purely logic movie that has no emotional value to it.

Yes, the machine's could have used other types of power.

Yes, even if they had to use organic BTU power, they could have used cows for instance and just scrapped the idea of having to make a "Matrix".

But that has no emotional resonance whatsoever. The humans are who fucked everything up, so they have to be the ones who pay the price for what they've done in the storyline of the Matrix. You can't just take one element out like that and have the rest of the story move along just fine and dandy.

 

[maharg]

"And if you can't see a paradox in a person being older than their father, lmao ("theological"?), I don't know what to tell you. Its the classic chicken coming before the egg idea."

If you can't see how an acceptance of time travel implicitly makes this not a paradox, omglmaololwtfbbq, I don't know what to tell you.

You don't get the difference between accepting a self-consistant thing like Reese impregnating a woman in the time he exists after a time travel and accepting something that makes no sense in any way or with any explanation like the use of humans as batteries. Thus, I do not understand the way your mind works, because it is clearly illogical.

I'll take your admission that vengence (which is DEMONSTRATED by Smith and so needed no explicit exposition) would have been an acceptable alternative explanation as you giving in. That's that.

 

[Chipopo]

Neo throws up in the scene right afterwards, because he's so repulsed and shocked by that.

Neo's denial ("I wont believe it!" *spew*) has much more to do with him discovering that his entire existance has been a lie then the fact that he powered some machinary, don't you think?

 

[soundwave05]

Neo's denial ("I wont believe it!" *spew*) has much more to do with him discovering that his entire existance has been a lie then the fact that he powered some machinary, don't you think?

Yup, definitely. A combination of the two.

The whole sequence about what the Matrix is definitely is meant to shock (the whole marketing campaign for the movie centered around this too, lol), Neo barfing at the end is just the slam dunk on a fastbreak.

Its all setup/payoff, there's a huge build up -- What is the Matrix ... what is the Matrix ... what is the Matrix ... now as the audience you could be saying "well, what is the Matrix and why the fuck should I care, this better be good" ... so you just can't say "well the machines want revenge" (which makes even less sense logically) or "well they use cows for power".

Yeah ... so they use ... cows for power.

So what?

If you reach a "so what?" point in your story, you're totally fucked, because it means you've struck out on the emotional level with your story.

The Matrix IMO is a terrific film, probably the best big budget Hollywood "action adventure" film of the last five or six years that I've seen, so also I'm willing to let certain plot points slide if the overall movie is well done and more importantly achieves some kind of plausible emotional apex (which is where the Matrix sequels utterly fail and why they are bad movies -- it has nothing to do with plot logic; plot logic never makes a good movie, you could cross out every logical problem in Reloaded/Revolutions and they still wouldn't be as good as the first Matrix).

 

[Kai Dracon]

Like some have said, humans-as-power was a thematic device to convey a certain mood and moral to the story. Just about every movie EVER, every story EVER, has this "McGuffin" - the thematic device that is arbitrarily defined by the storyteller to get a point across.

I think it might come down to simply this: you are either going to like the story's mcguffin or you will not. It might be nothing more than a matter of taste - which storytelling contrivance is your flavor? Chocolate or vanilla? And just because you don't like a particular mcguffin, doesn't mean it is a bad story or the writers are simply boobs.

Also, just to be pendatic (nyah nyah), The Matrix specified humans -together with- a form of nuclear fusion were the machines' power source. And in the sequels the machines revealed that if required they could have a limited existence on fusion power alone. In the Animatrix, it was made pretty clear that the machines did not inherently disregard humanity and consider it something worthless and merely to be replaced as the only option. They TRIED to reason with humanity. Therefore it is implied they see some value in coexisting with humanity. Therefore, if they were in charge, there is the distinct possibility that they would decide in the long run it could be wise to keep humans around. But what do you do with humans to keep their human nature - which keeps trying to destroy your kind - under control? Well, there is this virtual world you can stick them in, where they can't hurt you, but can live as human beings. And while they're there, you can use them as part of your power source...

 

[soundwave05]

Kaijima --

Yup you got it. It's definitely a "McGuffin".

The other thing is with science fiction you have to give things a more emotional meaning, because you're now talking about a world and a terminology which does not exist in the real world -- and thus is means jack shit to Joe Public who's watching the movie on a Friday.

The "matrix" means nothing if there isn't an emotional idea.

If you want a clear example of that, look at The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon gives little Anakin the "midichlorian" speech explaining the Force, which is all nuts n' blots exposition and probably makes more logical sense than the explaination Yoda gives in ESB (which is more of a spiritual/emotinal, but still vague response) ... but did anyone in the audience actually care about the Qui-Gon speech?

No.

It doesn't work.

It may make logical sense, but emotionally its a big "so what?". Yoda's explaination of the Force works because we understand it on a spiritual/emotional level.

And that's a huge problem with a lot of science fiction stories, sometimes they get so enamored about the terminology/universe. No one gives a crap about robots and virtual reality, that's never what a story can be about, there has to be a human meaning to those ideas that anyone can understand.

The Lord of the Rings is not about a Ring ... because who gives a shit about a ring? It's all about what the ring represents (power), and that's why that story works. We can understand that idea, even if logically LOTR is wonky at times, but most audiences/readers understand the idea, it's an age-old storytelling device.

 

[maharg]

"The other thing is with science fiction you have to give things a more emotional meaning"

If nothing else, could you please stop acting like you're some kind of expert on science-fiction? Your views on it are naive beyond belief.

 

[soundwave05]

"The other thing is with science fiction you have to give things a more emotional meaning"

If nothing else, could you please stop acting like you're some kind of expert on science-fiction? Your views on it are naive beyond belief.

I'm not a "science fiction" expert,

I don't even like most science fiction movies to be honest (I don't like Kubrick's 2001), but I understand some nuances of the genre, but really EVERY story (whether its Rocky, The Terminator, Pretty Woman, or Star Trek) takes logical liberties in favor of emotional ones.

You have to as a storyteller, and I understand what the Wachowskis were doing there. If you want to get to basic screenwriting level about it, yes its a "McGuffin" as Kaij pointed out.

Logically of course, if what happened if the Matrix were to make sense, the machines would never even bother with humans (and thus there would be no need for a Matrix to begin with), and if they wanted revenge they'd just kill us.

But you have either a really boring story if you do that or no story whatsoever.

 

[maharg]

Because sticking them in a horribly dull prison and fucking with them constantly by sowing the seeds of revolt and then shoving it down isn't punishment in any way. And no dominating society has ever done that in history before, so people wouldn't understand it at all (*cough* Saddam Houssein, South Africa, India *cough*). Seriously, THINK BEFORE YOU TYPE.

And the central reason why the Terminator comparison is not valid is because the premise allows it, while The Matrix' does no such thing. The matrix can exist without the battery retardedness (AND DOES, SINCE IT LATER TURNS OUT TO BE FALSE), but Terminator can not without time travel. With time travel, your father being born before you is absolutely possible. There is no comparison.

And don't even bring up Star Wars. Midichlorians get as much hate from me as breaking the logic of the films as they stand as the battery thing ever does.

Please actually address my points this time instead of posting the same garbage again.

 

[enjoy bell woods]

I was always curious how The Matrix would deal with human birth.

 

[soundwave05]

How would the Matrix work without the battery explaination?

The machines have enslaved us because they want revenge and in order to do so they have created life prisons for us via some kind of virtual reality?

That doesn't make any more sense (if the idea is revenge, why have humans living in a normal society ... why not torture them outright?).

If I wanted revenge on someone, I wouldn't put them in an open society.

The point of the midichlorian thing is to point out that EMOTION > LOGIC when telling a story, I'm sorry if you disagree, but no screenwriter in their right mind will back you on that.

You don't have to like the "McGuffin" device in the Matrix, but to say "well you can change it" ... I have to say I disagree. You can't change it, and its not an "accident" or some kind of screw up that the Wachowskis missed.

If you don't like it, you don't like it, but to change that is to start changing the theme of the story dramatically.

 

[acidviper]

The machines did NOT want to kill off mankind but wanted to co-exist.

Yes I have seen the Animatrix and I forgot about the episode that explains how humans were the most efficient energy sources. Thanks.

You can't have 2 dominant species. The stronger one will prevail, much like homo sapiens killed off all the cromagnons and mongoloids. We coexist fine now with machines, but machines that can think will find humans terribly inefficient and not be able to understand why we must kill each other or eat Big Mac's all day.

So it does trouble me that we are making AI a reality when we know that they will eventually usurp us as the dominant lifeform.

Because it's a movie, and there would be no kung fu magic if they used cows as energy sources. All logical explanations are bullshit.

In rev and reload the fight scenes were created first and the story built around the fights. But the whole battery concept and the way the machines gave mankind a chance to regain dominance just didn't mesh well with me when I saw it again. Why would the architecht create a system where there is a 50% chance that everything goes to shit.

 

[soundwave05]

The other thing I do like about the Matrix is -- the machines are *right*.

We are a fucked up species and we probably do deserve what we get in the Matrix, and the whole speech Agent Smith gives Morpheus is spot on.

That's one thing I really liked about the Matrix, the machines are not just the generic "bad guys", there's a plausibility and a point of view from their side of things which is interesting. Simple "revenge" is too human of an emotion to give to a machine. Its more about evolution. We were once the dominant species, but because we were arrogant, machines took over, and now the consequences of that to humanity is that we've become essentially a "product" (a machine as it were) to the machines themselves.

It's the ultimate humilation for the human race. We were once masters of civilization, now we're nothing more than a battery. We've become to machines what machines were once to us.

Logically it doesn't work without a hitch, but dramatically, its gold.