Starglider wrote:I dimly recall rationalising this (when I first saw 'The Matrix') as a cleaning system; every so often the tubes would be flushed with water to remove slimey gunk accumulation, the crap getting washed out into that pool. The humans would have engaged the 'send body to recycling plant' program to get Neo into the tubes, then quickly switched it to the 'flush tubes with water' program to get him to come out into the wastewater pool.
Except that in a real factory, there is no reason to build waste-water drainage which can inadvertently dump such large objects, especially when you need those objects for other purposes. Even the enormous sewer systems of modern cities (which handle
vastly more fluid than any such periodic cleaning system would require) are designed so people can't accidentally fall in; something as simple as a grate prevents that. Once again, after working in plenty of factories which had to dump plenty of waste material on a daily basis, I never saw any factory where you would make a drainage system capable of handling such unnecessarily large solid objects.
Of course that wasn't a great rationalisation to start with and it was rendered unnecessary by the relevelation in the sequels that the machines were deliberately allowing (at least some) humans to escape.
Well, one is really left with the only two explanations being A) absolutely incomprehensible machine stupidity or B) deliberate permissiveness. But the Wachowski brothers oddly missed the appeal of their own movie, such as it was. The Matrix only worked as a dream; as a story which did not really hold up to literal scrutiny. It only worked as a dream-like allegory for the way in which we are all anesthetized in real-life by the media-generated information in which we surround ourselves. At the end of the first movie, I could totally imagine Neo suddenly waking up in his cubicle, and it wouldn't be out of character with the rest of the movie at all.
Once those Wachowski imbeciles thought that the story was profound in and of itself, they went right off the rails. The story simply doesn't hold up to further scrutiny, or any attempt to create a logical backstory. In fact, it only works as long as one is not sure whether
any of it is real, which is why so many people were hoping in vain that there would be some major twist at the end.
Lots of other interpretations were possible before they made those shitty-ass sequels.
True, but any sane interpetation requires that the machines are keeping the humans around due to some deep seated 'preserve some vestige of humanity' goal (or 'don't exterminate humanity' restriction), as there really is no practical use for thousands of humans in tubes that couldn't be met much better some other way.
Agreed. Excepting, of course, the interpretation that the entire thing is a simulation, or that the "real world" is a simulation within a simulation.
