I love the Matrix. I don't care that the Wachowski brothers are trannies and haven't made a single good movie except the first Matrix. The first Matrix is a masterpiece.
But there was this narrative that started getting thrown around in the early 2010s popularized by sites like Cracked where "was it really necessary to kill those innocent guards who were just doing their job in the building lobby".
Yes, for many reasons established by the movie.
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Time is of the essence. Every second matters. Morpheus could break at any moment and the fate of humanity is at stake (reveals the location of Zion and all humans are killed off). This is not a time where you can waste valuable seconds trying for a more humane approach. Just like in wartime, when drastic measures are called for, sometimes unfortunate side effects happen with bystanders.
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They can't teleport in and out wherever they want. They have specific ins and outs, that are specific telephone booths around the city. They can't just teleport in to the top of the building. They found the closest portal into the Matrix to the building where Morpheus is being held and proceeded.
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Those weren't just security guards, they were the first line of defense of a small military wielding heavy armory guarding the agents and by extension Morpheus. The security guard immediately radios "send backup" to these military combatants. Meaning at the very least, these human guards, though they know nothing about the Matrix, knew there was a higher risk of threat that day as no normal building has guys right around the corner with M16's, Spaz shotguns, etc. The guards were innocent as far as knowing what the actual threat was, but they had to have known that there was an increased chance of threat and were probably fed some lie about a high level political figure who has threats on his life. So they knew it was a risky day on the job, they just didn't know the true nature of the reality.
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All the guns that Neo and Trinity spawn in weren't for those security guards. They were for the military force that they knew inevitably the agents would have as a barrier between them and Morpheus. Humans who have no idea about the reality of the Matrix were always going to die in this scenario, whether they be security guards or soldiers. You don't have the time nor the means to have a pacifist way towards getting to Morpheus.
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The soldiers were just as innocent as the security guards. No one feels bad about the soldiers dying, but they were just as unaware of the Matrix as the security guards. The security guards were just the less trained initial defense, that needed to be dealt with quickly, hopefully before they could radio for backup, which Neo and Trinity failed to do. Neo actually tried to kill the guy before he radio'd for back up but he dove out of the way and was just able to before Trinity killed him. So the security guards were actually more competent than you'd expect.
So yeah, it's this narrative of "they needlessly murdered these innocent security guards". Well if the standard for getting Morpheus was "no innocent people die" then they couldn't kill the soldiers either. In the Matrix if someone stands in your way, whether they be a normal cop who's just trying to do their job, or a military person, you kill them if you have to. In the lobby scene, these security guards were threats in terms of the preciously little time they had to get to Morpheus and mount the rescue.
The reason I rant about it is that little narrative spin on that scene has penetrated the zeitgeist where even non-online normies spout it, because inevitably they've watched it with someone who is a redditor type or an online type who's pointed it out and the normie goes "huh, yeah that is cruel" and then it gets repeated.
Except it ignores everything about the scene and the situation and why it was inevitable. It's also why Trinity said it was suicide and everyone was ready to pull Morpheus' plug because they knew wherever Morpheus was going to be kept, it would be guarded like Fort Knox. So zero innocent human, non aware of the Matrix deaths, was never an option when the decision to rescue Morpheus was made.
It’s a common left thing to be like, we can’t solve the problem because the illegals kids will be hurt so just do nothing, we can’t deport because there’ll be a period where food prices go up, we can’t lets the fake economy collapse because it’ll be terrible for a while. This is just another form of that type of mind set. Like the clerks scene where they talk about how blowing up the Death Star killed “innocent contractors”.
What's funny is they'd flip that right over. Take the White House ballroom project. If someone blew that up or whatever, they'd justify it as those contractors totally chose to work for Orange Hitler and they deserve the consequences.
Both of you hit the nail on the head
They were fine with Charlie Kirk being shot to death in front of his own children. They'd do it to any of us. One is a tragedy, one million is a statistic, etc.
Don't forget that an actual contractor then approaches them and says "I wouldn't have taken a job like that, knowing the risks". Especially since the first DS blowing up a central planet as an example to those who oppose the Empire, amd it's subsequent, unlikely, destruction, would have been common knowledge.
This is actually one of the small acts of virtue we can, and should, all engage in; don't work for scum bags. Do what you have to do, but do everything you can to work for good people and avoid helping those taking advantage of you.
Another example is transing kids. No other dysmorphia is catered to. Got anorexia, no one says yeah you are a fat pig starve yourself.
But gender dysmorphia it's well less harm is inflicted if we acknowledge the dysmorphia.
Predictably, Leftists have soured alot on people who have Anorexia Nevrosa over the past decade, because it's a disease paired with high impulse control and thinness ( duh ).
Patients are disproportionately Whites and East-Asians ( honorary Whites ), and least commonly found among blacks.
There is so much there to draw hostility from lefties.
Umm, yes. They were zogbots. /thread
Yep, the real uncomfortable truth; the "system" is made of people who allow themselves to be used in it's service, even though they could be converted to your cause given the right circumstances. If you can't stomach taking those people out, you'll never defeat the system.
Turner Diaries (briefly) grapples with this.
Right, look at every zogbot cop that wouldn't hesitate to fuck you up if ordered to do so.
These aren't "good people just doing their jobs".
Never said they were; "allowing themselves to be used" means you are responsible for whatever evil use you're put to.
I know, I'm agreeing with you.. lol
There's an entire scene explicitly stating that civvies in the Matrix are brainwashed zogbots who will die to protect the system and thus must be overcome. Ain't complicated, no subtext.
honestly, I actually would agree with the thesis that the guards and the military should not have been killed because they were innocent, if it were not point number 1: time is of the essence. without the limited time, there's no reason they shouldn't have come up with a way to reduce the loss of life.
A lot of people lock in on the "if you are not one of us, you are one of them" lesson that Morpheus gives earlier in the movie. The real lesson was to teach you how dangerous the average person is in the matrix, either because they cling to their current lives or because they can be possessed by an agent at any time. however, a lot of people interpret it as "these people do not see the truth like we do, therefore their lives are expendable". This misinterpretation wholly justifies the lobby scene, but it also completely removes the gravity of what is going on.
The guards and the soldiers should be seen as tragic enemies, not disposable henchmen. the action sequences even spare shots of the guards and soldiers dying agonizingly and humanizing them, if briefly. I believe the directors did this because they wanted to convey that what Trinity and Neo were doing was not purely a good thing, but rather involved many necessary evils to save humanity.
Morally, it's similar to a zombie movie. Who is to say that zombies aren't just living an alternative life that is totally valid?
We are. Real living people. We get to say.
genocidal mindset
You're right, zombies deserve to live…
reread my original post, you're exhibiting classic "they aren't enlightened like us, so their lives are expendable" behavior
Oh no, I understood you perfectly. I’m saying you’re stupid.
insults from a nigger mean nothing
I mean even back then lunchroom debates after first viewing I was like:
Okay they didn't need Morpheus as bait for Neo, they needed Morpheus to get to Zion (defense code? iirc)
We seen how the machines can remove doors and windows during the safehouse scene.
So why not just put him in a building made of 20 feet thick concrete, magic the door away, put it under a bank*, with a vault sitting on top of them?
Because there wouldn't be a movie or a set piece action scene, that's why.
So the security guards has to die.
*under the bank because when Matrix 1 came out we didn't know there were other locations, and just assumed the city was the entire world so I can't say, put him in NORAD or something crazy.
That's a fair point, though to be fair, the Agents are limited in a lot of ways just like the humans are. Morpheus says "they're part of this system, which means they're always limited by this system, whereas the One won't be". It's possible just like the humans have tons of limitations, the agents also have a lot of limitations that are just natural limitations of the Matrix program. Like just how the humans can't teleport anywhere, the agents might be logistically restrained. They need humans to take over, and also remember this, the agents weren't that worried, because Cypher was supposed to kill everyone on board of the Nebechennezer ship. That's why the agent comes and tells agent Smith "the human failed" which is what made Agent Smith get really intense because they knew they were going to unplug Morpheus any moment.
The fact that they came to rescue Morpheus surprised the agents. The military was there as protection, but they never actually expected any resistance. If things had gone according to plan, Cypher would have killed everyone who was on the ship physically, then unplugged each person one by one who was in the Matrix, which he almost managed to do, so no resistance was expected. It was Cypher getting killed that scared the Agents because they figured they'd do the logical thing and unplug Morpheus. The fact that they were mounting a rescue was actually a relief to the agents because it meant they had more time for the truth serum to work.
Guards were White, Smith was White, Morpheus and the crew of the Zion are multiracial. Check out Wyatt Stagg's video on the matrix. Interesting insights.
I've seen it. While I don't dismiss his read, the thing about the Matrix and why it's good art is you can interpret it from many different lenses. As a Christian, I see a ton of Christian analogs. People are born enslaved (spiritually), blinded to the real world (Satan has a blindness on people that keeps them decieved), the world needs the Messiah to wake them up (the One and others preaching, where Morpheus would be a preacher), People cling desperately to their deception and that makes them dangerous (try preaching Christianity in Islamic countries and see what happens).
Then you have all the Biblical allusions. The ship is called the Nebechenezzer, the last city, the key most important place where the evil wants to destroy it and the savior wants to protect it is called Zion. Her name being Trinity = obvious Christian allusion.
If someone has a different framework, they view it a different way. That's what makes it good. Same thing with They Live. Commies watch they live and see John Carpenter's view which is "an attack on capitalism" and anti-Conservative. I watch They Live and I see a spiritual allegory whether it was intentional or not, about the principalities and powers that keep people deceived, the invisible war that only those with eyes to see can see. So I see again a Christian view, because he created something where you could have it up to interpretation.
They could have absolutely been going for an anti-white thing, but because the Matrix is so well written as an allegory you can interpret it anyway you want. It could just as easily be said that the reason for the white agents and guards is to create a visual "blankness" that leads to the disorienting feeling of not knowing who's an agent or not. All the white men have similar facial features and dark hair. It's not like they have white redheads, white blond people with blue eyes, white grey haired people. From the cops in the beginning, to the agents, to the military, they all have a "John Q generic look" which might be a way to evoke the feeling that anyone might be an agent.
While Wyatt Staggs analysis could be accurate, it would be more steel-manned and harder to reinterpret if the enemies were many different looking white people, as then the agenda would be obvious. But they all look like some variation of beat cop to FBI to military person, which is meant to disorient you visually as a possibility.
I'm glad you watched the vid and it's nice to see a well-versed response like that. I'm not too deep into the Christian lore so for me the metaphors and references are somewhat meaningless. It's good that you found different meaning in the movie through Christian lens but i think it's worthwhile to consider the intent of the author as well as the result of their labor. I've had it happen with songs by leftists whom i would probably despise naturally and yet the lyrics are on point for me. They never intended to write the lyrics for an audience of my beliefs and yet they feel strangely familiar, almost "on point". Now knowing that the authors aren't my people i can accurately guess what the song should be about but i can still enjoy it and i think this is an important mindset to have in this context. I like matrix too and it's quite an enjoyable and thought provoking movie but even though you can see the movie through the lens that make it good, i think it's important to keep in mind authors' intent and it's probably sinister.
If the matrix were made today, one of the agents would be a black woman, and she would be redeemed and then eventually crowned the hero.
Matrix:Resurrection is a Matrix made todayish.
NEO, DO NOT REDEEEM
Morpheus literally spells it out earlier in the film.
I do share the opinion with you that the original Matrix is absolutely a masterpiece. Maybe I just didn't care, because that never occurred to me. I never paid enough attention if they were innocent or not or just didn't care. What is wrong with just killing them because it looks badass?
I hesitate to call it a masterpiece because of the giant hole in the center of the plot: human bodies are not a legitimate power source. Even if you did allow certain thermodynamic liberties to excuse the human battery premise, then the obvious solution would be to lobitomise everyone - because you definitely don't need your batteries to have consciousness.
It would have been better to position the matrix as a neural network powered by human brains. Maybe it's cheaper (in terms of resources) to grow our neural architecture than to build it. Maybe the machines ran out of certain precious metals needed for processors. Maybe they just wanted to study human behavior in order to better understand themselves and the universe. So many better options than "human batteries".
They were going to go with the neural network thing, but axed it because they thought it would be too out there for normies to understand.
Could it be possible that humanity including Morpheus misunderstands what is happening?
Maybe they saw these human farms and drew the wrong conclusions. Maybe what's happening with humans from machines is more complex but they can't see the forest through the trees. Like if a medieval person came to 2026 and witnessed an airplane, they'd assume magic. Even the people most well versed in reading the matrix code don't begin to understand it.
Scientifically you're right that it's a plot hole but an in universe explanation might be that the battery thing is what the unplugged people jumped to as an idea of what's happening and it just kept getting passed along, but what's actually happening is much too complex for the humans to figure out but makes sense in the machines super computer brains
The neural network application doesn't change anything about the plot, so it's not really a big deal
Wut
What would be different about the events of the movie if the machines were using humans as neural networks?
Your premise make alot more sense than the ''human batteries'' of the movie.
That's true too. If action movies always adhered to sensitivities they'd suck....which is why action movies suck now; and why every bad guy is now a Russian because "villains have to be people we hate them in real life, not just in a movie" and the action movies aren't testosterone fantasies anymore...they're liberal murder fantasies, which is why they leave such a bad taste in your mouth.
So the new Bond game came out which, of course, prompted me to go back and play 007.
The vast majority of people you kill in that game are "innocent".
The dam level is a chemical plant that the guards are defending from thieves/terrorists (realistically, it would be morally better to kill the scientists making the chemicals than killing the guards stopping them from falling into the wrong hands).
Severnaya 1 is just you checking out why they're excavating a new facility; you kill dozens of guards.
Silo is just a soviet satelite launch facility that happens to be launching the Goldeneye. Again, dozens.
Sevsrnaya 2 is killing Russian troops investigsting the same terrorists you're chasing in order to keep a lid on MI6's involvement.
Statue Park and the whole Russian sequence is basically just killing police officers.
The only levels in which you are explicitely killing bad guys are Frigate and when you actually storm Janis' base.
But, if you read the briefings, it's made clear that more people will die if you don't do these things (chemicals used in terror attacks on civilians traced back to the Facility, Goldeneye would be used against allied targets, etc).
So these things are usuallu justified, morally; though you could go a bit more in depth, would it help these stories to do so?
It's like that in a lot of older action games, especially espionage and military games like Syphon Filter, basically every 007 game up through Blood Stone, and various Call of Duty games before they went full-on pozz.
But back then the theme was the people who died getting in your way did so because you were trying to save more people from whatever catastrophe was about to befall the city, region, nation, world, etc.
Back in the day the concept of "the greater good" was an important aspect of heroism. Just as others pointed out, it was even common in action films, where plenty of innocent people were caught in the crossifre or part of an unfortunate side-effect of some antics by the hero to save the day.
In Golden Eye, Bond had no trouble wrecking the city with a tank, and he did the same thing in Everything or Nothing with that experimental tank. But if he hadn't, there would have been a much larger global catastrophe.
These days you can only get away with collateral damage if the people being harmed or the places being wrecked are associated with Russians, Conservatives, Whites, or a mixture of all three.
That's partly because the "greater good" line has been heavily co-opted by bad actors; see Israel.
That's another good point.
There might be a size limit on what you can spawn and where.
We never see them take in anything larger than a gun. The helicopter they use is one that already was there.
And the helicopter couldn't be just any helicopter, it had to have a minigun because you're dealing with agents. Those aren't on just any street corner or police station.
They essentially were spawning in to get to a helicopter, it's just spawning at a military base where a machine gun helicopter would be would probably be a further distance than the building where the military was already stationed.
That's their escape route; they had a better chance taking the guards by surprise than defending their own helicopter during the extraction.
The Woman in the Red Dress is literally a training program about how every ̶n̶o̶r̶m̶i̶e̶ person still plugged in is a potential agent. Even if the guards didn't have guns, they had to die to secure the operation zone.
How do we know those weren't actually some defense programs? Programs look like people. And the movie addresses this very thing, humans can be replaced by agents. Did these people miss the training sequence with the red dress lady?
Redditor types...
Someone posted a topic on PokeInvesting titled "How does it feel contributing to such a toxic culture?" Dude meanwhile posts exclusively on the meth sub.
Kill all Redditors
It's a wall of nice. We yell at the guy hired to take our call when really it's someone who we will never be able to contact. That guy doesn't deserve to be yelled at so we shouldn't yell, even thought we're being screwed over.
Nah, he took the job, he gets the flak.
I've quit jobs over the company being shitty to customers. I don't lie for money. I don't cover for incompetence.
If the phone tech is polite and competent, even though I have serious beef with his employers, he's dealt with politely. But if he tries to play the fuck-around games the company wants him to use on customers, he gets the find-out.
You forgot the most important part which is that all the security guards are white and morpheus the magical negro is black so it's ok to kill them all to save him.
Eh, it was “set” in America in 1999. The odds of an entire police team being white were probably pretty decent lol
But you are broadly correct.
You forgot #6: Any and everyone is an Agent body, so long as it is animate. For some bizarre reason, The Matrix can't overwrite a corpse into an Agent, sure, whatever, but it CAN do so, and does so often, for living people. Smith isn't the only Agent. There's many.
Realistically, "The Matrix" should have been overwatching the whole thing, and the moment the two rolled up, took over a bunch of the guards and turned a simple firefight into a hilariously one-sided matchup of two idiots who didn't chose the smart option, versus 10 nigh-omnipotent-at-the-time hyper-humans. But BECAUSE The Matrix didn't do that, they have a chance, and part of that chance is removing any possible Agent hosts as fast as possible.
The only way this makes sense is "layered Matrix theory": Zion (subtle name) and the redpilled Earth is just as much in the Matrix as Generic Metropolis and the bluepilled Earth. So the illusion of choice to save or not save the person, pull them in or out of Layer 1 of the Matrix, ultimately is meaningless, the overlords still have you in The Matrix (layer 2) in the end.
I still remember seeing the second matrix in the theater and theorizing that neo was able to stop the sentinels with his mind because he had realized he was still in the matrix. I thought they were going to rugpull everything and reveal that trinity was a program. That woulda been fun.
That was the whole point of the woman-in-red scene. Anyone not unplugged is an agent waiting to happen.
Why does this occupy your head space?
What should annoy you about the matrix are the number of normies that think they took the red pill but are actually insufferable faggots that would die the minute you took them off the machine.
Nobody is innocent, that’s kind of the point. Everybody is an agent of the matrix, and Morpheus even makes the point that people are so hopelessly enslaved that they with fight for their prison, and are a part of the system. Whether they’re conscious of it or not is irrelevant.
Also how fucking boring would the movie be if every fight scene was a philosophical diatribe on the moral conundrum of killing innocents ? Bleh.
KotakuinAction2 is literally a pop culture focused forum where you can discuss, talk about news, and otherwise about things that fit more in culture or pop culture than politics, and be assured that reddit faggotry won't dominate (I would say won't be there, but everyone knows there's probably a few secret leftists at any given scored community). Talking about movies and analyzing them deeply is a thing that's been happening on the internet since it's creation. And before the internet it's what film snobs would do at hangouts.
IMDB used to have forums for each individual movie. It was an amazing time. They axed it because you'd go and see narrative breakers of people discussing the movie in ways the studios didn't like and they couldn't have that; the peasants pointing out things the leftist establishment critics wouldn't, so they got rid of the only reason to ever visit IMDB.
I suppose This is what we’re doing right now then.
You have such a good explanation why poo poo the question?
There's no telephone booths anywhere in real life. Therefore this cannot be the matrix.
So the whole plot collapses.
The movie came out in 1999. There were plenty of telephone booths. And I forgot that it's not just telephone booths, but it is always land line telephones, it just usually is telephone booths.
It's implied in Morpheus speech that the dawn of the 21st century was picked as the peak of human civilization for the Matrix simulation, so the theory is that time probably doesn't progress far past 1999 in the Matrix. It probably reaches a certain point and reboots in a loop without people realizing it happened as the real world is actually like 300-400 years in the future from 1999.
Pride flags spawn points
The first Matrix is nostalgic as fuck Fun fact I still have a unopened DVD of The Matrix
It's been so long. Was there ever any rule established that would have prevented Neo from spawning in with an arsenal of "phasers set to stun?" All the speed, agility, etc. were based on bending or breaking the rules of the Matrix. But when it comes to arms, they have to stick to familiar firearms?
Even sticking to real-world stuff, a shotgun with a drum mag full of those Taser rounds would be fucking hilarious in a movie.
You're thinking too deeply about it. It's 100% Rule of Cool and a shallow metaphor in the first place.
And replicating various GitS scenes.
Neo doesn't actually become The One until Smith kills him after the subway fight, that's why
I was thinking of the wall-running and flips, but I guess those are supposed to be within the realm of physical possibility, just in slow mo.