(Orig posted 2003)

In all the hoopla over the summer before the release of ‘Matrix: Reloaded’ one of the things Keanu Reeves was quoted as saying was that ‘The Matrix’ was really a love story, which struck me as hokey at the time, and ridiculous after seeing ‘Reloaded’

After seeing ‘Revolutions’ I have to revise my idea about that statement because he did get it right, although not, I think, in the traditional sense of ‘love story’ where the theme is the love between two people. Yeah, there was that, and we even had a sex scene in ‘Reloaded’ but that didn’t make it a love story. Love was seemingly incidental to the plot on those movies, and it was only with Neo’s conversation at the train station that I began to understand that this was, in fact, a love story, only it was much more broader than Neo’s love for Trinity.

This of course, all comes back to the religious themes echoed earlier in the movies, with Neo being the one, the worship and adulation of the people of Zion for Neo as their savior and so on and so forth. It was all good and well to say that those were religious themes, but they didn’t get you anywhere, and all ideology, theology and religion in the world couldn’t take away the fact that it was an action movie with lots of guns and kung fu. Not really an ideal espoused by many religions. But in Revolutions Neo finally—finally!—got the point. That it’s not about fighting and warfare and who wins, but it’s instead about sacrifice and love and peace.

There was no way that the humans could ever have truly “won” and the attack on Zion made that clear. Neo was able to control the machines in the real world to a small degree, but not enough to make a difference in the war. And even if they could have won the war, it didn’t matter, for humans were—and are—dependant upon machines. Sure, you could, as Neo said in ‘Reloaded’ just turn off the machines, but where would that leave you? Dead. Resolution required mutual survival and that required peace, and it was for that end that Neo changed things and made a difference.

Even if Neo is not dead (and I don’t think he is—but that doesn’t mean I want another movie, for I don’t) he sacrificed and suffered much so that there would be peace between humans and the machines. This sacrifice for others, this willingness to give everything for others, is the true love that is embodied by the major religions, and this is the love to which Keanu Reeves was referring. Not the love of Neo for Trinity, but the love that Neo eventually realized for both the humans and the machines, that allowed him to bring and end to the war.

The scene in the train station, where Neo is forced to consider the idea that two programs love their progeny and are willing to sacrifice everything for her, that scene was the culmination of the scene Neo has with Councilor Hamman, where Neo finally realizes that the machines can’t just be turned off, that the machines can’t just be destroyed, that they were in some strange way no different in their feelings and desires than the humans. They machines were, however, better able to subvert individual desire for the good of the group. The scenes with the sentinels make this quite clear. Acting alone, they were able to do some damage, but acting in concert they were absolutely devastating. The sacrifice of a few sentinels was required for the greater good of all the machines.

The scene where the sentinels reanimate the drill I think best exemplifies this. When the drill “comes back to life” you see sentinels falling off, lifeless, as the drill again begins to work. Those machines were, in essence, doing what Neo did. Sacrificing themselves for the greater good. If you saw the “Aeon Flux” short in the ‘Animatrix’ (sorry about the lack of names, I don’t have a copy of ‘Animatrix’) then this probably makes more sense. The machines did have the ability to feel love—or something akin to love—and that feeling could be subverted by the humans. If the machines did not already have the sense of ‘love’ or self-sacrifice for the good of the group, then the humans would never have been able to subvert them.

The ultra disturbing “Renaissance I & II” from the ‘Animatrix’ also make clear why ending the war required peace and not domination and destruction. Just as the humans eventually regrouped and fought back to regain independence, so would the machines, for after their long era of slavery and domination, never would they accept such treatment again.

They would fight for their freedom, just as the humans did. It’s where Smith missed something in his programming. Unlike the Oracle who understood sacrifice, who understood love, Smith, and the Architect for that matter, didn’t understand those concepts. All that mattered was the end objective. For the Architect it was balancing the equation, making the Matrix work just as he wanted it to work. For Smith it was escaping what, to him, had become a prison, which would be achieved only though the complete destruction of the Matrix.

They didn’t understand love, they didn’t feel love, and in the end they failed.