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Sunday, April 30, 2006

"Mr Anderson, We miss you..."
by Agent Smith

Here's a dedication to my favourite movie trilogy of all, The Matrix Trilogy. My name was inspired by the main character in the movie, Neo.

Introduction
The series began with1999's The Matrix. The film, written and directed by the Wachowskis and produced by Joel Silver, was highly successful, earning $456 million worldwide. The movie's mainstream success led to the greenlighting of the next two films of what the Wachowskis maintain was conceived as a trilogy,The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. It was a number of years and several iterations of scripts before the final movies were approved. The two sequels were filmed simultaneously and released six months apart.
In acknowledgement of the Japanese anime that was a strong influence on the Matrix series, The Animatrix was produced. This is a collection of nine animated short films intended to further flesh out the concepts, history, characters and setting of the series. November 5 2003 saw both the conclusion to the film trilogy and an unprecedented event: the simultaneous worldwide release of a major motion picture, when The Matrix Revolutions hit cinema screens worldwide at exactly the same time.

Criticism of sequels
While the first movie was extremely successful, viewers continue to debate the quality of the sequels. Some fans and professional critics believe they exceed the quality and conceptual heights of the first film, while others found the later films disappointing.
Upon release, The Matrix Reloaded received mixed reviews. Some claimed that it had been "hyped beyond the point where it [could] possibly deliver". Fans responded that it was not possible to fully appreciate it without experiencing the entire series, including Revolutions, the Animatrix and the video game Enter the Matrix.
Several sequences in Reloaded were sources of particular contention. A rave scene in the human city of Zion was particulaly vilified, as were the various conversations between characters on the subjects of causality, purpose and the humans' dependence on machines; some felt these concepts were not as well-integrated into the screenplay as those of the original film, with entire scenes devoted to such discussions.
Many concepts and questions introduced in Reloaded incited strong speculation about how Revolutions would end the series. Heated discussions involving radical theories took place among fans. One particularly controversial moment was Neo's long-range destruction of a Sentinel towards the end of Reloaded, which appeared to contradict many of the rules laid down elsewhere in the series' continuity. Fans speculated that it would be explained through the revelation that Neo was at least partly machine, or through the possibility that the apparently "real" world was just another false reality or a "Matrix within a Matrix". When The Matrix Revolutions was finally released, a common complaint was that it did not give satisfying answers to these and other questions raised in Reloaded although it has been argued that the answers - whilst available in Revolutions - were simply not understood by a number of viewers.

Philosophy
Elements of philosophy, theology and ontology are heavily present in The Matrix. Students of Gnosticism will notice many of its themes touched upon. There are also many references to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, with concepts of enlightenment, nirvana and rebirth. Further references to Buddhism and Hinduism include the free will versus fate debate, the use of the Hindu mantras in the movie's soundtrack, perception, the concept of Maya, Karma and various ideas about the nature of existence. In many ways The Matrix is about a kind of reality enforcement, hyperreality or, some might say, an awareness that the material and physical world are an illusion.
Some Christian anarchists say the world we live in is a Matrix and the only way of escaping is through achieving enlightenment. They say notable escapees over the years have included Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth and Muhammad. They believe the movie has many similarities to the New Testament with Neo, Morpheus and Cypher playing the parts of Jesus, John the Baptist and Judas respectively. These Christian anarchists believe the main difference to The Matrix is that outside our world lies paradise rather than the dark world portrayed in the movie.
One of the major debates arising from the film is the philosophical question, is our world reality or is it merely an illusion which is billions of years old? This theory had also been developed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?
The Matrix follows all phases of the Campbellian monomyth arc with near-literal precision, including even minor details like the circular journey, the crucial battle happening underground, and even the three-headed immortal enemy (the three agents).
The character of the Oracle is strongly similar to that of the Oracle of ancient Greek legend. In particular, her warning to Neo that he is faced with a choice between saving his own life, or Morpheus' is very reminiscent of the warning that the Oracle gave to King Leonidas when setting out for the Battle of Thermopylae. In the Greek legend, she warns Leonidas that either his city will be left in ruins, or that a Spartan king must die, thus Leonidas is left with the choice of his own life or the survival of his city. It could be further argued that had Neo chosen to save his own life, Smith would have gained the access codes he needed from Morpheus and the city of Zion would have fallen. Thus, ultimately, Neo's choice was the same as that of Leonidas: his own life, or the fate of a city.
The ideas behind The Matrix have been explored in old philosophical texts on epistemology, such as Plato's allegory of the cave and Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In a well-known Solipsistic thought experiment, the subject is a brain in a vat of liquid; in the Matrix, Neo is a body in a vat. The idea of a choice whether or not to take the red pill and accept reality also resembles a famous thought experiment posed in the 1970s by American philosopher Rober Nozick.
Postmodern thought plays a tangible role in the movie. In an opening scene, Neo hides an illegal minidisk in a false copy of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, a work that describes modern life as a hyperreal experience of simulation based upon simulation. Interpretations of The Matrix often reference Baudrillard's philosophy to demonstrate that the movie is an allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society, especially of the developed countries. Nevertheless, Jean Baudrillard himself rejected the assimiliation of his work with the Matrix series and refused to work with the Wachowski.
The famous quote by Morpheus pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth is a direct copy of Charle Peirce statement.

Communism
Some academics have argued that the Matrix series is consistent with a Marxist analysis of society. Professor Martin Danahay and then PhD candidate David Rieder co-wrote a chapter of the best-selling book The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real in which they argue that the movie gives a visual image of Marx’s ideas, particularly in the scene where Morpheus tells new recruit Neo that the computers have reduced him to nothing more than a battery.
Being slaves to the machine... "Humans in The Matrix must produce electricity to run the machines that enslave them, just as workers in Marx’s analysis must produce surplus value through their work," Danahay explained. "Also, the rebels in the movie liberate Morpheus from an office, and they rescue Neo from his white-collar job. The rebels are trying to get workers to wake up and realize they are being exploited, which is one of Marx’s aims, too.".
Danahy and Rider also argue that rebellion against the machines' domination is an analogy for the modern-day workplace with the evil agents dressed like corporate executives, and Neo escaping from his cubicle to escape them. When he ambushes the evil agents later in the movie, they are in an office high-rise complete with impersonal decor. (Source: Arlington Star-Telegram, June 10, 2003).
Similarly, the Maoist International Movement has adopted the Matrix as one of its favourite films asserting that they "could not have asked for more in a two and a half hour Hollywood movie" and views it as an exercise in dialectics in which a new mode of production is explored, the "battery mode of production".
The youth wing of the Russian Communist Party has also embraced the Matrix and its sequels with youth wing leader Oleg Bondarenko asserting there is "no difference" between Neo and Lenin as revolutionaries.
There are also elements of conspiracy theories. Similar to John Carpenter's They Live, the Matrix is presented as the 'System', which secretly controls everything and which, according to the theorists, will eventually consume everyone. In the Matrix, high positions in companies and organisations are held only by those who are part of the System (programs, like Smith or Ramakandra). The Agents are those who uphold the 'order' and keep the 'conspiracy' safe, like the Men in Black of pop culture.
Furthermore, the city of Zion is a communist city as it must be to allow the humans to survive. No form of money or commerce is ever seen, the public has access to food and facilities. The citizens share tasks and labor is volunteered as seen by Zee's shell making and no entity steals the labor of others. This is seen by some as primitive communism and by others as state level communism.

Science
Although sunlight could only dimly penetrate the atmosphere in the movie, it should be noted that the reason given in the movie for computers enslaving humans makes no sense from a thermodynamic(physical) point of view. The chemical energy required to keep a human being alive is vastly greater than the bio-electric or thermal energy that could be harvested; human beings, like all living beings, are not energy sources, but rather energy consumers. It would be vastly more effective to burn the organic matter to power a conventional electrical generator. Not even considering feeding the huge human capsulated civilization. Other power sources available could be used, such as geothermal energy or the heat generated by the dissipation of the tidal movements of the oceans and Earth's crust or any other not yet imagined sources.
Some people have pointed out the possibility that the laws of thermodynamics could work differently in real life than in the Matrix (to make it harder for people to suspect they are being used as a power source), or that the machines have technology not yet imaginable by humans, and thus the known laws of science are impossible to apply in this situation (Morpheus mentions that the human power source is "combined with a form of fusion"). Another possibility is that of the exploitation of latent electrokinetic abilities in human beings as demonstrated by Neo's destruction of a Sentinel in The Matrix Reloaded. On the other hand, Morpheus speaks of physical laws like gravity applying both to the real world and within its simulation, and the scenes we see within the real world are certainly consistent with physical laws as we know them. Entropy, however, can't be the machines' invention, because if it did not exist in their world, or if the direction of energy flow was sometimes concentrated instead of dissipated, the machines either could not exist, or would not require a constant source of energy to operate, mutually exclusive to the idea that humans blocked most sunlight from Earth to cut them off from their primary source of power.
Critical fans have speculated (see Krypto-revisionism) that the machines were actually using the humans' brains as components in a massively parallel neural network computer, and that the characters were simply mistaken about the purpose. A massively parallel neural network computer based on human brains might also be more energy-efficient to run than equivalent computer components, solving the thermodynamic paradox associated with the use of human bodies over conventional electrical generators. The characters' error would then be reflected in the "Zion Historical Archive" of "The Second Renaissance". In fact, this was very close to the original explanation. Because the writers felt that non-technical viewers would have trouble understanding this explanation, they abandoned it in favor of the "human power source" explanation. The neural-network explanation, however, is presented in the film's novelization and Neil Gaiman's short story "Goliath", featured on the Matrix website and in the first volume of The Matrix Comics.
It is also established later in the trilogy that the machines and humans are interdependent for reasons more philosophical than technological.

resources from wikipedia


Hung Up @ 9:47 pm

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