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Agent Smith is Bane, granted. Smith overtakes him with his black ooze and heads out into the "real" world. In the crossover with Neo that allowed Smith to break free of his program and go on this viral rampage of the matrix system and beyond, Neo also made a crossover to a human-based viral rampage of the computer system. Of course he can stop the squiddies in the "real" world. Smith almost took over Morpheus in the Matrix. Simple parity.
The "real" world is real. It isn't another level of the Matrix. If the brothers were trying to remake Dante's seven levels of hell we would already know and be prepared for constant reevaluation. It's much more powerful of the computers to actually control the belief systems of the counter-culture in the "real" world anyway. Kind of like Phish shows.
Merovignion. Brilliant. He is a program specifically designed to protect the key maker and attract all renegade programs to this task. Serves two purposes. Focuses and controls renegade programs. Makes it harder and harder to get the keymaker so that it is totally insured that only "The One" can access the source.
CGI. By releasing The Matrix: Reloaded on the same day as the video game, Enter the Matrix, the brothers state rather obviously that the two are inseperable. If you watch the moments when the movie becomes cartoonish and video-gamish, it is when the reality of the matrix breaks down to a video-game reality. If you were Neo, it would almost be a joke, not "reality", but some silly game of buttons and programmed expectations. In a video game, the other characters you encounter are all programs that have one specific purpose, like the oracle, keymaker, or Merovignion. In real life, people have entire histories, biologies, emotional chaos, sexuality, psychological, chemical, and sociological depth behind their actions. Its hard to sort out motivation and reason. In a video game, you have a single purpose and everyone else relates to this purpose singly. Its the same bullshit that corporate captialism hands the individual in terms of climbing ladders of success. Even the choice to rebel against the system has been appropriated as a device of the system itself.
Baraka. Check the architect scene. Specifically when he starts talking about the destruction of every living human within/out of the matrix. The screens in the background show many scenes, most of which come from the movie Baraka. Watch it. It makes the same argument the Matrix makes, but in a completely different way.
cornel west. Not just an influence. Like Joseph Campbell to George Lucas, this influential thinker, writer, philosopher, and academic has had a lot to do with the brothers' development of their ideas. not only should you read his shit (it's damn good) but watch his scene in the movie where he appears on the counsel.
I have so much more to talk about that I'll just have to put it off to later. My main point is this;
You cannot judge Reloaded as a single movie. It isn't created as such. The Matrix is a developing universe of the internet, cinema, gaming, anime, myth, story, legend, and such. If you don't examine its larger statements and believe in the basic questions involved, you won't find any answers, but the deeper you delve, the more levels it offers to understanding. It deserves the same accodlades as Tokien's universe. Not the new cinematic recreations, but the original depth of creation.
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