(Orig posted 2003)

I’ve been mostly silent on the “How will ‘The Matrix: Revolutions’ end” front, because to be honest I don’t want to know beforehand. I want to go into the movie and have everything be a big surprise, and not have to sit there and be disappointed that things didn’t work out the way I thought they would.

So this isn’t about how the trilogy will end per se, as much as it is about some of the ideas floating around that have been posted on Matrix Essays.

As far as the endings do go, I will be VERY angry if we get it “it was all a dream” ending. I also don’t like the matrix within a matrix ending, because it seems to easy, and I don’t think the ideas in the movie are that pat and simple.

As for the theories floating around, I still don’t like the “humans as batteries” explanation for the humans-in-goo plant. It simply violates basic laws of physics. (See: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics for an excellent explanation.) I think that there may be a different, unstated reason for why the machines need humans. In the ‘Animatrix’ in ‘The Renaissance Part I & II’ it seems that for the most part the machines are willing to take a lot of abuse from humans in an attempt to keep the peace, to continue to co-exist, and I wonder whether this is because they in some way need humans, not for energy but for intellectual stimulation?

My reasoning is this: humans are, as individuals, unpredictable. It would be impossible I think to pluck any one individual out from the multitudes and predict with any accuracy exactly what they will do, either in their present situation or in an unknown situation (the machines seems to have shown that they are not very good at predicting human behavior, else or heroes would not exist). I think this randomness, this chaos, is necessary to the machines in some way. Perhaps they get bored (al la Marvin the Paranoid Android) or perhaps they need the variability provided by the humans. It’s hard to say exactally what free will and variability add, and perhaps this is why the people of Zion have assumed the simpler explanation that humans are needed to power the Matrix when what they truly do is animate it.

For me, it boils down again to the idea of free will versus predestination. The machines for the most part do not have free will (Smith does, the Oracle and the Merovignian etc may) but humans do have free will. Free will is built into our very nature. Perhaps humans are needed not to power Zion, but to give the machines hope that one day they too will achieve free will, by learning from the humans. Of course it means that they’ll have to put up with all the problems that free will has caused for humanity, but I think that most people would feel that free will is better than the alternative of slavery, no matter how gilded the cage.