Derwood

Amazing. I sift through all of these posts and no one has asked the biggest question I have about the entire story:

The question I have isn't "What is the Matrix" or "How many layers of the Matrix are there". These are fascinating questions, posed beautifully by the film, and well worth the great discourse seen on this thread.

My question is "Why the Matrix?" In the first film, Morpheus tells Neo that it was designed by the machines to keep the human "batteries" in blissfull ignorance of what was happening in the real world. I (along with just about everyone) bought this idea in the first one, as there were no reasons given to make you belive otherwise.

But upon seeing Reloaded, I start to seriously question this theory. AI or not, these are machines....machines depicted as insects, which I think is an important thing. Insects survive because they are ultra-efficient and have clear cut roles in their "society" (workers, drones, guards, reproducers, etc.) By my thinking, the creation of The Matrix is entirely too complicated and inefficient an idea for these machines to use. Way too much work to design, perfect, and as the Architect says, refine over 6 iterations. The efficient thing to do would be to simply put all of the human batteries into a sort of comatose state - alive but unable to do anything physically. Don't plug them into any sort of computer program. Just let them sleep in their pods, alive but unconcious.

The next big question is why would machines covet power? Again, since we haven't actually experienced AI in real life, the brothers have some artistic license to decide how this works, but why would a machine want to take over the world? To what end? Great, the machines now have Earth and an endless supply of energy in these human batteries. So what? What is their goal? Unlike Terminator, where the explanation is that the AI got pissed off when the humans tried to shut it down, no reason is given as to why the machines went to war with the humans. All Morpheus tells us is that "all we know is that the machines attacked first, but it was us who scorched the sky." Seems like the humans are a little fuzzy on the facts.

A third question is about the agents. If the theory is that the anomaly humans who reject the Matrix assemble in Zion, why have agents at all? These agents are supposed to kill the renegade humans inside the Matrix, right? If Zion is this cache, why have agents at all? Especially if the predetermined outcome of each iteration of the Matrix is that the One will destroy Zion anyways?

Additionally, if agents are programs meant to kill renegades, why are there only 3 available at any one time? If the agent program was truly meant to kill Morpheus, Trinity, et al in the first film, why wouldn't they simply overwhelm them with 1000's of agents?

And why would the Architect program agents to have martial arts be the fighting method of choice?

This finally brings me to my theory about the whole thing. Some of you will probably hate this theory if its true, but here goes:

The Architect is actually a human being in the heretofore unseen "real world". He is a programmer who is obsessed with creating an artificial reality within a computer, one that creates and emulates human behavior exactly. He thought that his first iteration of this program was perfect, except that some of the humans that the program (or he) created in the computer were anomalies, and ultimately crashed the program. He has set up this scenario (the Matrix, the machines, the One, etc.) as his test sequence to see if his program is perfect yet. Each time the sequence ends (ie the One makes his choice), the Architect refines the program and starts the simulation over again. In this, the sixth iteration of the program, Neo makes a new choice, that of love over survival. This is a new choice, but perhaps one that truly has shown that the program is now perfect, as the Architect has successfully gotten his simulated humans to accurately feel love, an emotion he was unsuccessful at in the previous iterations. The Kung Fu, etc. is for his own amusement, and another test to see how his sims can learn, adapt, and progress.

Whew, that is the first time I've put my thoughts down in any sort of logical order. I'm eager to here responses.

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel