The Matrix - A false reputation.

[Iosue]

Also didn't the machines, as part of the pacification plan, kill almost everyone periodically?

Not in the Matrix. They destroy Zion, and then release a few people from the Matrix to start it up again for the next anomaly.

The choice of the One is: a) return to the Matrix so that it can be sustained. Zion is destroyed, but will be rebuilt. Humanity survives, in part enslaved to the Matrix, in part free in Zion. Machines maintain status quo. Or b) do not return to the Matrix. Zion is destroyed, and the entire Matrix fails, killing the humans still part of it. End of humanity, machines have to rebuild from a kind of nuclear winter.

 

[CAFRedblade]

Reading this thread over, it now dawns on me that the Mass Effect games have a very similar plot and philosophical viewpoint in the 50K year destruction cycle, and how the ending plays out in the third game... I wonder how much influence The Matrix Trilogy had on those games...

 

[jonesy]

Reading this thread over, it now dawns on me that the Mass Effect games have a very similar plot and philosophical viewpoint in the 50K year destruction cycle, and how the ending plays out in the third game... I wonder how much influence The Matrix Trilogy had on those games...

The Star Control series had that before Mass Effect and The Matrix and I'm pretty sure it didn't come up with the concept. I faintly recall reading an old scifi story or series about an interstellar entity or species that periodically wiped out everything.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

If we can take the statements Agent Smith was making as being, in fact, TRUE, then he did say that "entire crops were lost" in the first few/several attempts at the Matrix. The situation in the trilogy of "start-run-inevitable fatal crash-start again" was intially an indeterminate number of failures to even get that convoluted sequence to RUN - all because human brains refused to accept a "perfect world" which the machines were giving them in the matrix.

I don't think the machines were TRYING to kill everyone periodically, but if Smith isn't lying then that was nonetheless what was happening. It seems safe to assume that the number of survivors from original humanity is zero. I don't recall it being said where the VAST numbers of humans plugged into the matrix actually originally came from but I sort of assume they were being cloned or at least created in vitro by harvesting the necessary baby-making stuff from men and women plugged into the matrix. Nobody in the matrix was born by natural intercourse - they were all plugged in at some point as babies but the babies had to have been grown by the machines. Even if you assume that Smith doesn't LITERALLY mean THE ENTIRE CROP you have to assume that the odds of any original non-machine gestated human surviving repeated crop losses even before the repeated cycle of complete destruction of Zion is zero. Any original, truly organic human will have aged and died leaving only machine-gestated humans to be grown as a new crop.

That means that you are left with a philosphical question regarding the true "humanity" of any homo sapiens still living on the planet Earth and to very offensively borrow a phrase - kill all you want, we'll make more - does sort of come into play. It becomes easier to justify killing an innocent, albeit machine-created human, especially when the machines WILL kill those humans instantaneously by turning them into Agents simply to stop the free humans stomping around in the matrix.

 

[Wycen]

If machines are vulnerable to EMP in the movie, why are the invulnerable to nukes in the cartoons? Looking too deeply may just lead to madness. I just know that the Matrix movies are fun to watch and can be explained as a campaign of "reverse cyberpunk".

 

[frankthedm]

If machines are vulnerable to EMP in the movie, why are the invulnerable to nukes in the cartoons? Looking too deeply may just lead to madness.

Artistic licence.

 

[Umbran]

If machines are vulnerable to EMP in the movie, why are the invulnerable to nukes in the cartoons?

Haven't watched the cartoons. But, we can say simply this - not all "nukes" are alike, in terms of EMP effects upon electronics.

 

[Hussar]

yes, I've heard that argument. By the same logic, Luke Skywalker is a mass murderer, for how many people died when he blew up the Death Star.

I generally consider Neo and Luke to both be at war, and for many folks that implies a different moral and ethical standard. You only go to war when the need is very great, and the deaths of some who aren't the BBEG are acceptable when compared to the need.

If you don't think needs Luke and Neo were trying to meet justified a few extra casualties, then yes, they are Bad Guys.

A "few" extra casualties. Star Wars doesn't bother delving into this, but, come on. The rebels killed more people than probably existed on Alderaan when they blew both the Death Star and the second one that was nearly finished. We're talking billions of people here. That little detail always gets glossed over in the movies.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The Star Control series had that before Mass Effect and The Matrix and I'm pretty sure it didn't come up with the concept. I faintly recall reading an old scifi story or series about an interstellar entity or species that periodically wiped out everything.

The Assassins in the Heechee saga by Fred Pohl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee (late 70's, early 80's) probably fit the bill.

 

[tomBitonti]

The Assassins in the Heechee saga by Fred Pohl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee (late 70's, early 80's) probably fit the bill.

Yeah. Some other examples: McDivitt's Engines of God and the Inhibitors from Reynold's Revelation space.

Thx!

TomB