(Orig posted 2003)

Erin came over for dinner tonight, and after dinner we watched The Matrix: Reloaded, and I got to check out some things that had been nagging at my mind.

First, I think Neo did completely miss the point of his conversation with the Counselor Hamman in the engineering sector. Humans are dependent upon machines, and even though humans “control” the machines in Zion, they are still dependent upon them. There is a parallel between the human’s dependence upon the machines in Zion, and the machine’s dependence upon humans in the Matrix.

Now I still don’t buy the batteries explanation—violations of the laws of physics and all that—but that doesn’t mean that the machines do not need humans. I think they are necessary, but just not for the reasons stated by Morpheus in The Matrix. We’ll see.

But I think that Neo is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the machines and humans will have to coexist for either to survive.

I still really like the fight scene with the Merovignian’s henchmen, and Neo’s fight with Seraph. I think they were just beautiful. The freeway scene, however…ugh. I looked away on several occasions. Primarily when Trinity was weaving in and out of traffic on the motorcycle, and the fight scene on the back of the truck. (shudder) Too much too fast. Upsets my stomach even thinking about it. Which is really too bad, because I like watching Morpheus fight—but not against that moving background.

I’m still disappointed in the speech Morpheus gives in Zion. I don’t think it was good enough to inspire the reaction it got. (All through that scene we kept making jokes about sneaker sex. Can’t remember where I read it, but someone made a comment about Neo and Trinity looked like two sneakers mating.) He did do a good job giving the speech however.

We watched the scene with the Architect again. Still don’t know what he meant by the “Please” in response to Neo’s “The Oracle”. Could be anything. But what we did check, was that all of the scenes seem to be from inside the Matrix. We couldn’t find any scenes that occurred in Zion or any of the training that occurred in the construct. Now we didn’t look at every monitor closely, so we might have missed something, but it really looks like all the scenes on the monitor were of Neo in the Matrix, which is, I think, somewhat significant, and is hopefully a blow to that damned “Matrix within a Matrix” theory. After all, the Zion was a second Matrix, then there should have been scenes from outside the Matrix on the monitors, since many significant parts of Neo’s life occurred there.

I’m hoping it’s significant anyway.