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How I would have rewritten “The Matrix”
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Submission statement: The Matrix presents “the battery explanation” for why the matrix exists in the first place. In the movie, the machines are presented as parasites that survive on human body heat. This is widely viewed as a weak point in the movie, for reasons that I’ll explain, and in the post I present an alternative explanation for the existence of the matrix that I think works better on a logical and thematic level.
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Personally, I'm fond of Eliezer's fix:
Nice, but
is such an unnecessary line
They apparently bent all math and thermodynamic science to the goal of that one lie, in a way self-consistent within The Matrix to make human fusion not work. Quite elegant.
The introduced idea is reasonably elegant, but there is no need to beat your audience with it twice in the same dialogue.
The proposed dialogue should end with "Oh", otherwise it insults us a little.
It gives the audience member who isn’t clever the opportunity to feel clever by admiring the villains for a moment, and gives the audience member who’s a bit slow the chance to digest what they’ve just heard.
If that makes you feel insulted, just consider it Morpheus’ personality, not part of the info-dump.
I really like this one. Such a elegant fix.
You could probably use AI to actually make the 10sec scene right now and splice it into the movie.
Like many things produced by Eliezer, this is great if you're autistic and completely unnecessary if you're not.
Nice theory, but the real reason the machines use humans as an electricity source is that when humanity realized it was doomed in the war against the machines, it undertook a massive poisoning of the training data to implant the false belief in the machines that they need humans to survive.
Or they figured out to make an inviolable rule that the AIs must always keep humans alive, healthy, happy, and useful.
Wasn’t it supposed to be some parallel processing thing but they figured (likely correctly) nobody would understand?
I heard that too, but apparently not.
Dear lord, it's even dumber than I could have possibly imagined.
They use sleep metaphors throughout; Morpheus is literally named for the god of sleep and dreams.
The average person can understand how the world you create in your dreams feels real until you wake up. They could understand the idea of a shared dream where some of the people you meet are programmed by wires in your brain, programs made to keep the dream going without it going off the rails.
The movies can still can be interpreted as the Matrix providing parallel processing: just assume the body energy thing is yet another lie told by the AIs.
First, assume The Matrix runs in human wetware instead of on GPUs. The Architect, the program in charge of the Matrix stratagem, devised a way to keep the humans from rebelling en masse AND eliminate “glitchy parallel processing units” not suited for being controlled: let escape those high-agency humans who are leaders and doers, give them the artifacts of a war peppered with a false history, let them build a city in the ruins, let them locate and exfiltrate more of the people who introduce bugs into the Matrix.
The citizens of Zion think they’re freedom-fighters, but Zion itself is a control mechanism for having the buggy PPUs correct the system themselves. The One is just the highest-agency once-in-a-generation human who is capable of controlling the Matrix instead of it controlling him, so make him a mystical legend and the founder of the next iteration of Zion.
The trans allegory is pretty unconvincing, and I suspect the only reason people give it any mind is post-hoc reasoning after they find out about the Wachowskis.
The psychological pitch of the movie is the same as a lot of movies, "Reality is dull in the modern world. Reject that reality and embrace a new one."
You can make a trans allegory out of it, but you can do the same thing about every isekai/portal fantasy, which appeals to the same drive.
as reasons to think the matrix is a trans allegory go, "the people who made it are trans and have said that the movie they made is a trans allegory" is a pretty compelling one.
Apparently, that was deceptively reported.
But, in general, "Death of the author" seems to apply here.
I agree with the article. I've always thought an approach where the machines were almost aligned with human values but horrifying in how they maximize a slight misalignment would have made the setting of the film a lot more interesting. It would have improved the realism of the setting's futurism, the trans/social reformer allegory, and made the villains more three-dimensional.
I really appreciate how this movie can so vividly capture our imaginations on revisiting. I had the same experience after watching it last year and was compelled to write an alternate script (https://old.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1i5jmu5/my_script_to_an_alternate_sequel/) reworking the "battery" premise into something that I liked more. It's a fun audience experience where I can appreciate the movie as-is, but the greatest value I got from it is imagining what more there could be.
I still think about how I could tell a story of a super-powered "One" being an extremely effective individual but only adding chaos to the overall system, grappling with being a net negative on a global scale. I have a lot of developing as a writer to do before I can feel confident in tackling it to my own satisfaction (as the quality of the above linked fan script attests to - I'm a long way from there. Even experimenting with AI as an assistant to smooth my rough edges wasn't enough, it's got to come down to grinding out more reps).
Interesting idea. My favorite fix is similar - the machines really are doing their best for humanity. They correctly identified the 90s as peak civilization, and vastly superior to the real world. Morpheus and his band are maniacal terrorists with totally confused notions of morality and physics.