3 ms·

I always thought the original matrix was stupid. Human batteries? Why aren't we powering our cities using domesticated farm animals? Don't they realize most pow

I always thought the original matrix was stupid. Human batteries? Why aren't we powering our cities using domesticated farm animals? Don't they realize most power comes from the sun? The matrix was not at all an intelligent movie yet people are still analyzing it to this day. What was good about the matrix was the revelatory structure of the plot coupled with good pacing, unique Kung Fu action (for the time), and stylized cinematography. These are all superficial things and superficial qualities are the primary components of what makes a movie good. A movie that is too deep and too intelligent usually is just bad. But why do people think the matrix intelligent? Is it intelligent? No far from it. It's one of the stupidest premises ever, but the superficial aspects of it at the time were mind blowing and served to make people think the movie was more intelligent than it was. The watchowskis got lucky with the matrix. All their other movies lacked the good pacing and other superficial qualities of the matrix but maintained the same level of dumbness (see Jupiter ascending)

krapp 5y ago
To be fair to the Wachowskis, their original premise was that humans were being used as a neural network to run the Machines' AI, but the studio forced them to change it to using humans as batteries because they didn't think audiences would be able to understand it otherwise. You're right, the physics of using humans as batteries doesn't work out. That's been pointed out and debunked hundreds of times at this point. In terms of the themes of the movie, however, it also doesn't really matter. The reason other people find things worth discussing in the Matrix is that they can see beyond that singular incidental plot point, whereas you seem to be fixated on it to the point of unreasonable anger.
cyber_kinetist 5y ago
The real gripe I have with the film is how they managed to totally misunderstand and butcher Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, while saying that it was one of their inspirations. Baudrillard wasn’t saying that the problem with current postmodern society was that the copy (the simulation) masks the real and therefore the copy should be destroyed to reveal the original (basically a Platonial ideal), the fundamental problem is that the copy masks the fact that there is no “real”. Reality has already disappeared in the way of the hyperreal, and the old Platonic distinction between “real” and “fake” became obsolete. Baudrillard speaks about the Matrix that “Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrix’s value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given expression, “realized.” We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” As a retaliation Lana Wakowski said, “This is why, no one really mentions this, but everyone's like "'Simulacra' as in Baudrillard, you are referencing Baudrillard!", but the point of the reference is that the book is hollow! It is itself a Matrix! It is itself a construction, a projection, a tool for understanding the world, having a framework of meaning, that's what these things are, they are frameworks of meaning. So what we were trying to do was, can you encourage audiences to interrogate their own framework of meaning, and then through that interrogation, extend it into the experience of watching a piece of art, and then try to find meaning into that piece of art, in the same way that Neo has to go through that journey ..." which is some bullshit nonsense that not only undermines the effectiveness of their work, but vulgarly defaces the work of Baudrillard (along with misleading the public to think that postmodernism = “anything goes”, further leading to some weird reactionary figures to blurt against it)

krapp 5y ago

To be fair to the Wachowskis, their original premise was that humans were being used as a neural network to run the Machines' AI, but the studio forced them to change it to using humans as batteries because they didn't think audiences would be able to understand it otherwise. You're right, the physics of using humans as batteries doesn't work out. That's been pointed out and debunked hundreds of times at this point. In terms of the themes of the movie, however, it also doesn't really matter. The reason other people find things worth discussing in the Matrix is that they can see beyond that singular incidental plot point, whereas you seem to be fixated on it to the point of unreasonable anger.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

The real gripe I have with the film is how they managed to totally misunderstand and butcher Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, while saying that it was one of their inspirations. Baudrillard wasn’t saying that the problem with current postmodern society was that the copy (the simulation) masks the real and therefore the copy should be destroyed to reveal the original (basically a Platonial ideal), the fundamental problem is that the copy masks the fact that there is no “real”. Reality has already disappeared in the way of the hyperreal, and the old Platonic distinction between “real” and “fake” became obsolete. Baudrillard speaks about the Matrix that “Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrix’s value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given expression, “realized.” We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” As a retaliation Lana Wakowski said, “This is why, no one really mentions this, but everyone's like "'Simulacra' as in Baudrillard, you are referencing Baudrillard!", but the point of the reference is that the book is hollow! It is itself a Matrix! It is itself a construction, a projection, a tool for understanding the world, having a framework of meaning, that's what these things are, they are frameworks of meaning. So what we were trying to do was, can you encourage audiences to interrogate their own framework of meaning, and then through that interrogation, extend it into the experience of watching a piece of art, and then try to find meaning into that piece of art, in the same way that Neo has to go through that journey ..." which is some bullshit nonsense that not only undermines the effectiveness of their work, but vulgarly defaces the work of Baudrillard (along with misleading the public to think that postmodernism = “anything goes”, further leading to some weird reactionary figures to blurt against it)