Yeah, sometimes I’m no fun.
Saw “The Matrix Reloaded” again last night. Like a lot of modern action movies, there’s parts of it I just can’t enjoy as much as the filmmakers intended me to.
In the Matrix trilogy, both the good guys and the bad go through a lot of bystanders. We do get a pious little speech from Morpheus in the first film discussing that some of the village may have to be burned down to save it, but I don’t think that improves the freedom fighters’ moral ground much. From the perspective of the ordinary, unknowing inhabitant of the Matrix, those from Zion would indeed seem like terrorists in a lot of their actions.
But the freeway scene is the bit that always gets me. True, most of the random destruction in that scene is caused by the “bad guys”, but it doesn’t make it much better for me. Live though one near-fatal car accident in real life, and one’s attention moves from the cool kung-fu move that Agent did off the hood of a car, to the poor driver who was just trying to get home from work and is now chunky salsa all over the road. Boom – the sequence is not fun for me anymore, and now I just want it over. 🙁
You know, the Machines seem disorganized and barely in control of their own creation in these movies. We saw in Mouse’s death how the Machines can hack the Matrix for their own use. Why not just make the small tweak [set ZION_VEHICLE_GAS to “0”] in that sequence? There’d be a lot less mass destruction, ghostly apparitions, and Agent possessions to explain away later.
Even better – don’t want to fight Morpheus and Trinity, who’ve gone through a lot of your Agents as it is? [set ZION_VEHICLE_FUEL_TYPE to “fighter aircraft fuel”] – as soon as a little of that hits the spark plugs, the KeyMaker and the Zion rebels won’t be a problem. Maybe the Machines just aren’t very creative on their own.
Tags: movies, philosophy, software
Actually, “fighter aircraft” these days use jet fuel; which is basicly kerosene. Back in the era of WWII piston-engined fighters, they used high-octane gasoline. Neither of which is likely to make a car blow up by just pouring it into the tank. I’d recommend nitroglycerine. Or just pulling all the Agents out and dropping a nuke on the site (it’s the only way to be sure…..).
But then again, these are the same Machines who design their combat robots to use *tentacles* as their primary weapon.
I got the feeling rewriting the universe was something rare, and which took time; supported by the repair efforts in animatrix. I think knowing where the team was for an extended time thanks to the mole allowed them to pull it off in the first movie.
Tentacles loaded with lasers…
I just got Animatrix last night, and haven’t watched any of it yet, so I’ll probably have more material to work from once I do. Though it would seem that you’d only need to know which specific occurence of NAME_BRAND_CAR to edit – once you’d identified that, little things like its current vector would be trivial. And the KeyMaker (plus Morpheus and Trinity) was in said car for some time.
I can’t really support that, of course, this is all extended conjecture. But a lot of things about the construction and maintenance of the Matrix just seem somehow inelegant to me.
Quite true, though the squids’ combat software seems to need some work. When I saw hundreds, if not thousands of squids pour into Zion’s Dock in Revolutions, it was amazing that the defenders weren’t overwhelmed in mere minutes.
There are possibilities, of course. Perhaps the squids’ software really wasn’t suited to the job because they were sentinels and hunters, not assault soldiers. Since the trilogy hints at some dissension in the Machine realm, maybe a pro-Zion group of the Machines was crippling the squids. We just have to guess 🙂
Thanks for the clarification – I was under the impression that modern jet fuel was super-volatile. Nitro should certainly do the trick 🙂
It’s one of those genetic algorithms… On quantum computers. I suspect even the machines dont understand it. I think the world has to be convinced to be changed..
Maybe if the little Indian girl was still on their side, she seemed to have some pretty solid control, or maybe she was just weather-centric.
Or she *was* the sun… I get the feeling she was just doing her function, not necessarily messing with things.
I won’t even buy Reloaded. I loved the first two, and the third one just seemed to go on and on to little effect. I’m glad to have seen it once, but I don’t need to see it again. For one thing, I hate watching characters I like dying slowly. For another, I totally agree with about empathizing too much with the “civilians” dying while the fight went on. And I haven’t even been through a life-threatening car accident.
Given the defensive capabilities of Zion as depicted in the movie, I can think of very few things *LESS* effective (in terms of results per resources expended) for the machines to have sent down that hole than squid-bots, particularly given the idiotic combat programs they seemed to be running. (Let’s see, they’re using high-ROF automatic weapons. Why don’t we *BUNCH UP*, that way we don’t have to worry about any of the bullets missing us!)
Those squid-things looked like they could operate underwater a lot better than the battlesuits. How about diverting a river into that hole and having the bots *swim* in?