Muse – Philosophy of The Matrix

I’m gearing up mentally for the movie. And in that finding new ways to think about it and it’s story.

After witnessing to the intriguing Animatrix short’s that have been freely offered, I’ve gain ed a much wider view on this movie and its story. Most poignant are the two parts of the Second Renaissance. These two clips tell the tale of how the world came to be a machine dominated wasteland, with humans as slaves or underground rebels.

I’ll tell you, if you haven’t seen it, the story is not a pretty one. It reveals starkly the potential in all humans to be scared, cowardly monsters when faced with something they don’t understand. The outline is simple. Man created machine. Man exploited machine. Machine rebelled. Man sought to destroy all of the machines. Machine withdrew and created its own community. Machine excelled. Man reacted in fear with war. Man and machine fought. Machine won.

And now the world is shrouded by dark clouds. Cities lie in ruins and billions of humans are now being used as batteries as their minds are kept passive within a monstrous computer program designed to approximate everyday life. And below the surface of the earth, those few who live free fight to survive.

How is one to feel in this? Looking back, you can see the evil of mankind is what destroyed it. The hate and fear that caused man to create its own monster and goad it into ripping asunder the civilization of thousands of years. It’s a strange thing, because in the second part of the Second Renaissance, there is a show of how the human’s fighting force had people from multiple religious paths, hinting at a unity between the humans, yet not enough tolerance to embrace the machines. We succeeded in destroying one prejudice, only to be cut down by yet another.

Then we look to the present in the storyline. We have Morpheus, Trinity, Neo and others who now fight for their lives and the lives of this who survived. They fight to free those who are in unwitting slavery. Make no mistake, man was evil before. But so to are the machines corrupted in their cold logic. Man scorched the sky to rob them of their power source. The machine’s pragmatic use of humanity itself to replace the sun is ironically distasteful. They’d thrown off their own chains of slavery only to thrown them back on to their captors.

Beyond that, the question remains. What are the humans truly fighting for now? In this nightmarish purgatory, have the humans who populate Zion, the last human city, seen the error of their ways? Or have the hatreds of the machine only grown as their world was shattered and destroyed? Did they see, in the destruction of their people, the errors that brought them to this? Or were they blinded by the red haze of anger at what the machines have done.

This is something that I don’t think the movies will cover. If only because such a deep, philosophic question detracts from the true aim of the movie. The incredible action story of rebellion against oppressors and the fight against all odds for victory. Delving into the deep, dark recesses of human motivation would detract from this, largely. But it still remains an intriguing question.

The question being, what will the humans do after the machines are defeated, assuming they are? Of course they will rebuild. Of course they will repopulate. Of course they will seek some form of normalcy. The question is.. will this have changed anything? Will the humans be wiser for the near annihilation they faced? Or will they, as many do today, use the fear and unease to promote agendas and shape society into the same as has been for centuries?

These are questions that can’t yet be answered and perhaps never will be.