It definitely had that "well, if you insist, here's a movie" quality overall. I confess I didn't feel dumber so much as two hours and twenty-eight minutes older when it was over. For the most part, it seemed like a movie specifically created to show how unnecessary it was. If corporate executives and movie producers were capable of shame (hahahahahahahahahahaha) it would have . . . you know what, no point in even finishing that thought. (sobs) Also, Neil Patrick Harris was so incredibly stunt cast that from the first millisecond I saw him in the first trailer I knew he was the new Architect. Excuse me, Analrapist. (Am I mixing my IPs there? Yes, I am.)
But the one thing it did that I keep thinking about is its almost throwaway concept of identity adopted in this movie. Neo and Trinity were dead. They're acknowledged as having been dead. The Machines then used super future technology to rebuild them cell by cell and were somehow so good at it they were able to make new Neo and new Trinity like me putting together a 3,000 piece LEGO Millennium Falcon (hard, but I got there eventually). But holy shit this is an utterly reductive concept of identity that's pretty damn depressing. The We're All Just Machines idea was always implied (with greater or lesser emphasis depending on your interpretation) in the earlier Matrix movies, but those earlier ones left room for a more nuanced concept of identity. Yes, our identity is tied to the aspects of what we are, whether we're a program or a human, to our code or our meat, as it were, but it's also something greater than that, an emergent property of complexity that results in more than the sum of the parts. By that conception, putting together cellular LEGOs of Neo and Trinity would, at best, result in clever but ultimately unconvincing forgeries. As movie viewers, arguably that's what we got, but in the film's universe what we got was a continuation of old Neo/Trinity, a coherent and unbroken line of identity. Who they were was just about clicking the pieces in place in a certain order. So much for emergence. We really are just machines.
Now that's actually a pretty interesting philosophical idea to explore. Not a new idea, to be sure, but in the context of the world we now live in, where we're all willingly being reprogrammed on a daily basis by the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, cable news, and Amazon, Wachowski had an opportunity to do something she simply glossed over, to my disappointment and ultimately, ugh, distress. I mean, if you can make a new Neo and Trinity out of whatever leftover parts they had at the end of Revolutions plus some junk lying around the Machine City, why stop at two? What if, like Smith in Revolutions, we had millions of Neos and Trinitys? Would they all be the same, as the LEGO model of identity implies, or would we see something different emerge in each of them? That, combined with some actual effort at the kind of visual set pieces we crapped ourselves over in the first movie, might have made for much more interesting movie, and possibly even one worth making.
That's a fascinating idea I hadn't thought of, the question of identity and the physical, mechanical nature of it. Related to the idea of digitizing our consciousness--if we upload ourselves, are we still us, or are we an algorithmic approximation of us? And does it matter?
As you note, the real problem is the almost contemptuous way they throw ideas like that away in the film. The Matrix is a rich concept with a lot of possibility, and this film *aggressively* avoids doing anything with it.
It definitely had that "well, if you insist, here's a movie" quality overall. I confess I didn't feel dumber so much as two hours and twenty-eight minutes older when it was over. For the most part, it seemed like a movie specifically created to show how unnecessary it was. If corporate executives and movie producers were capable of shame (hahahahahahahahahahaha) it would have . . . you know what, no point in even finishing that thought. (sobs) Also, Neil Patrick Harris was so incredibly stunt cast that from the first millisecond I saw him in the first trailer I knew he was the new Architect. Excuse me, Analrapist. (Am I mixing my IPs there? Yes, I am.)
But the one thing it did that I keep thinking about is its almost throwaway concept of identity adopted in this movie. Neo and Trinity were dead. They're acknowledged as having been dead. The Machines then used super future technology to rebuild them cell by cell and were somehow so good at it they were able to make new Neo and new Trinity like me putting together a 3,000 piece LEGO Millennium Falcon (hard, but I got there eventually). But holy shit this is an utterly reductive concept of identity that's pretty damn depressing. The We're All Just Machines idea was always implied (with greater or lesser emphasis depending on your interpretation) in the earlier Matrix movies, but those earlier ones left room for a more nuanced concept of identity. Yes, our identity is tied to the aspects of what we are, whether we're a program or a human, to our code or our meat, as it were, but it's also something greater than that, an emergent property of complexity that results in more than the sum of the parts. By that conception, putting together cellular LEGOs of Neo and Trinity would, at best, result in clever but ultimately unconvincing forgeries. As movie viewers, arguably that's what we got, but in the film's universe what we got was a continuation of old Neo/Trinity, a coherent and unbroken line of identity. Who they were was just about clicking the pieces in place in a certain order. So much for emergence. We really are just machines.
Now that's actually a pretty interesting philosophical idea to explore. Not a new idea, to be sure, but in the context of the world we now live in, where we're all willingly being reprogrammed on a daily basis by the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, cable news, and Amazon, Wachowski had an opportunity to do something she simply glossed over, to my disappointment and ultimately, ugh, distress. I mean, if you can make a new Neo and Trinity out of whatever leftover parts they had at the end of Revolutions plus some junk lying around the Machine City, why stop at two? What if, like Smith in Revolutions, we had millions of Neos and Trinitys? Would they all be the same, as the LEGO model of identity implies, or would we see something different emerge in each of them? That, combined with some actual effort at the kind of visual set pieces we crapped ourselves over in the first movie, might have made for much more interesting movie, and possibly even one worth making.
I'm rambling.
That's a fascinating idea I hadn't thought of, the question of identity and the physical, mechanical nature of it. Related to the idea of digitizing our consciousness--if we upload ourselves, are we still us, or are we an algorithmic approximation of us? And does it matter?
As you note, the real problem is the almost contemptuous way they throw ideas like that away in the film. The Matrix is a rich concept with a lot of possibility, and this film *aggressively* avoids doing anything with it.
Ramble on - this was a great thought!