/lit/ - Literature

>>12371773
this scene, for example, is legit terrifying, and if it were my film i would have played up the surrealism of all of this for much, much longer. but i also would have allowed Smith a lot more screen time for him to realize that he is in fact a program with the illusion of sentience - which is a philosophical idea you could chew on for days. neither Smith nor Neo are really 'human,' and their mutual explorations of why this is so and their relations to existence, the Matrix, the machines et al would have made for a pretty incredibly re-watchable film that could have touched on no end of fascinating questions theorists like Baudrillard et al spent their whole careers with.

and of course all of this is there to shield people from the true horror of what lies beyond, which is that wasteland bepopulate with spider-walking harvesters: but where did these come from? the machine singularity which speaks to Neo in part three receives very little screen time, and the architect and the Oracle deliver their own cryptic lines to the Chosen One, who is basically a victim of prophecies he cannot change. but this is this is part of the appeal of being a Chosen One, which is that you get to be a cosmic dupe fortunately gifted the power to act beyond good and evil. totalitarian leaders of all stripes get to do this also, with equally disastrous results for the polis.

Smith in the end causes enormous havoc and devastation to the Matrix as well, crumbling it all into himself...but this is a ham-fisted way of tying up plot threads that in fact should have been untied and then some. the absolute horror associated with awakening to a world in which the rules of reality are entirely plastic is precisely the conditions of life in the real world today. Smith's agony over what it might mean to potentially be human - meaning, the uncertainty about whether you are a computer simulation or not, about the actual meaning of mortality, the genuine fear of being inescapably bound up with the lives of the sweaty and deluded masses...i could go on and on. it was a missed opportunity, but it remains enduringly rewatchable because all of those questions are in fact genuine questions of philosophy itself in the 21C.