Matthew Walton’s Blog

Well, I’ve seen it, and I can say that it’s excellent. I kind of get why some people might not like it, but personally I think it’s great. Read on for stuff that includes spoilage and assumes you’ve seen the film (and that you don’t mind hearing stuff from the game, not that that’s particularly critical as the film may be understood without it).

In terms of the plot revealed in Reloaded, I very much liked the revelation that there are exiled programs living in the Matrix. I guess for them it’s just as real as the real world… but what’s really important about that is that the machines are fractured. They are, after all, sentient beings, not some mindless, emotionless machine with a single group mind (like, say, the Borg, which although sentient aren’t made up of millions of individual minds, and thus always act with a unified purpose). In the first film it seemed like the machines were all one in purpose (well, mostly… Smith showed a few hints that wasn’t the case while interrogating Morpheus).

Now we know that there are some who are total freelancers — machines like Smith, no longer an agent but something quite different, a whole lot scarier and a very good excuse to show off some fancy computer-generated fight scenes. Yeah, you can tell where the real stuff blends with the computer stuff, but wow the potential that technology has.

And it doesn’t spoil the viewing experience. Honest. At least, it doesn’t for me. It’s just pure fun

That Neo is the sixth One is also very interesting. There were hints of that in the game (‘Zion only lasted seventy-two hours last time’, Niobe was told by a mad bloke on the subway, I suspect he was another exiled program), but the film really blew that one around. Very good indeed.

So what of the third film? Zion’s been destroyed, and Morpheus doesn’t have a ship anymore. Only a few ships can have survived — but Neo seems to be able to affect the machines in the real world. I suspect we’ll see a bit more action inside the Matrix next time, but as has been hinted at in the press, there’ll be more real world. Which kind of makes sense, victories have to be won there too. How Neo’s going to stop the annihilation of the human race I do not know. But I shall enjoy finding out!

The only solution which springs to mind is one where humans and machines can live in cooperation. The Matrix will continue to exist. Either that, or lots of humans and lots of machines will die, and a small number of both will attempt to rebuild the planet, hopefully in at least temporary harmony. This time, things have got to be different, otherwise there’d be no point making a film about it. Would there?

Or are the Wachowskis actually mad enough to make a film where the entire human race is annihilated? We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?