The Duc Pond

Brian sent me an email about Revolutions on Friday. There’s some good insight in his mini-essay. Hidden text for your spoiler protection.

…I came up for more reasons why it’s good. For one, if some fundamental thing turned out to be one big lie, that would be a typical sequel and THAT would be terrible. People may think they want the same thing over again, but they would have hated that too. The prime example being that a ton of people, including Ebert (which shocks me), were under the impression that because Neo had superpowers in the real world that the real world was a matrix too. One: everybody and their brother thought of this theory, therefore it couldn’t be true. It’s so insipid (didn’t you love when Smith said that) and that type of trick has been used so many times before. But even I thought it for a split second after Neo dropped the sentinels in Reloaded. I immediately dismissed it for one reason: it was the first thing I thought of. A conclusion so easy to come to would obviously not be the truth, especially for something from the people who brought you the first matrix movie. I know they were deliberately misleading the dumb.

I knew, as soon as what knocked the sentinels out also knocked Neo out, that he was in some way like the sentinels. This is how I came to my “coded” Neo theory. The architect said that he had “been altered by the process” and that “his [Neo’s] code” was now to be “disseminated.” Neo now had code. To me, this means he became code, or at least his mind did (or his soul was already?). But he is still human (religious symbolism apparent), the architect makes certain to point this out. And this little theory of mine was proven by both Revolutions and the Animatix DVD. In Revolutions Neo, as the Oracle says, “wasn’t ready” to do what he did and thus he was sent to the train station program. How could he go into a program when he was jacked out, and in his human body, unless his mind/soul was turned in to a permanently jacked in state, or what I call “coded.” The reason he wasn’t ready was because he could still use his eyes (this makes me think of when they’re fixing Neo’s atrophy in the first Matrix movie, Neo: “what’s wrong with my eyes” Morpheus: “you’ve never used them.” I don’t know if that’s important but it’s nice how they really tied the last movie in with the first movie through shot duplication, revisiting fighting moves and rooms, the sign ,”know thy self” above the Oracle’s door.) And as Melissa explained: you don’t get your “true sight” until you become blind.

And as we learned in the extra features in the Animatrix DVD, the Matrix is largely based on Anime. The good guys have big eyes, the bad guys have small ones in Anime. The eyes are the windows to the soul. So when Neo first used the anti machine power, it went right through those windows and knocked out the Machine part of him, his “coded” mind/soul. That’s how he woke up in the train station program (train station also in the first movie.) It should have killed him, but he wasn’t ready for that either (translation: he’s Neo and he’s hear to save us so he’s not going to die unless it’s to save us) So when he was blind, he could use the power without the ill effect, he also had the true sight. Now, was any of this explicitly said in the film, no. But given the evidence isn’t it all too clear and as equally mind-blowing when you realize it, yes. Now, there are at least 20 other different things you have to read in to that make Revolutions so good. But this one was my favorite because it was a prediction of mine that came true.

Now just one more thing, the important thing to say when defending the movie is that one of the main points of the movie was there is no point, old men don’t bother with making points, there’s no point. By this I mean to say that in life there are no easy answers, and so many questions left unanswered. And I just thought that that was a great way defy expectations, tell a heart wrenching story (and it was heart wrenching if you gave a damn at all about the characters and if you didn’t before you walked in, you never should have walked in, in the first place) and philosophically speak the truth. Bravo to them I say, Bravo!