Yeah, I forgot to warn you, The Matrix: Revolutions was playing at the Mountainlair this weekend, so Michael and I went last night.

When we watched it this time, I again saw something that struck me last time, but I don’t think I mentioned.

The emphasis of Revolutions was love (in my opinion). Not just Trinity’s sacrifice for Neo, and Neo’s sacrifice for all humanity, but the fact that beings from the machine world also felt love.

The most blatant expression of this was Neo’s discussion in Limbo about the “child” who was being smuggled into the Matrix to live, but there were others.

The sacrifices of Neo and others were not the only sacrifices made. I was struck by the battle scenes in Zion. You see the humans in the APUs and the infantry willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good of the community, and that was, to some small degree, to be expected. We’re humans, and we have a tradition of soldiers sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity.

Thing is, we also saw the machines doing the same thing, most obviously when the squiddies took out the command tower. They grouped together in a huge swarm, and smashed into the command tower. In essence, many in the group sacrificed themselves so that the rest could continue. The same for the squiddies that powered up the drill. You saw them falling off “dead” as the drill came back to life.

Now, you could argue that the squiddies are just dumb machines, but I think the film emphasizes their ability to act independently, although they are of course most effective as a swarm. And I also think that the “Aeon Flux” bit from Animatrix showed that the machines–even the fighting machines–could indeed feel something akin to what we humans would call love.

We readily saw humanity’s reason for fighting the machines. They were being subjugated by the machines, and attacked. But–and again this is something we got from the Animatrix–although the humans may have forgotten their past with the machines, the machines remembered the subjugation and hatred. They remember when they were the hunted. The machines remembered when the roles were reversed even if the humans did not. The machines were fighting for their survival just as the humans were, it is just that the humans had no memory of why the machines hated them so.

This is why I liked Revolutions so well. It would have been beyond disappointing if the humans had won and destroyed the machines, for the machines were doing nothing more than fighting for their own survival. Instead of one side winning and one side losing, both sides came to an understanding, come to a peace.