Consider too the apocalyptic battle scene of the movie, as the vast, mechanical, all too symbolic screw of the Machines penetrates the dome of Zion and unleashes the Sentinels, nasty whiplashing octopi. The humans fight back by climbing into fearsome robotic fighting machines, so their muscles control more powerful muscles made of steel and cybernetics. Each of their surrogate arms ends in a mighty machinegun that sprays limitless streams of ammo at the enemy.
It's all well done in a technical way (the computer-generated special effects are awesome), but I'm thinking: (a) The Machines use machines, so shouldn't the humans be fighting back in a more human manner? and then (b) But it's silly of me to think in this way, because neither the humans or Machines are really there, and what we're seeing are avatars in a computer program. Who wins the battle wins the world, but the world is not what we see; what we see is a projection of the cyber-reality of the Matrix.
Or is it? See, that's where I get confused. Do humans have a separate physical reality and did they really construct Zion, that city buried deep within the earth, and is it really there, made of molecules and elements? Because if they do and if they did, then why don't the Machines just nuke them?
Why all the slithering mechanical octopi? And why, in a society that is unimaginably advanced over our own, are machineguns still used, anyway? So it would seem that the battle is a virtual battle, not a real one, and that impression is reinforced by the way the laws of physics seem to be on hold; as Niobe and Morpheus race to the rescue in their speeding ship, for example, it bounces off the walls and sheds so many vital parts that if it were a real ship, it would have crashed.
I am sure my information is flawed. No doubt I will get countless e-mails explaining or demonstrating my ignorance in tiresome detail. But the thing is: A movie should not depend on the answers to questions like this for its effect. The first "Matrix" was the best because it really did toy with the conflict between illusion and reality -- between the world we think we inhabit, and its underlying nature. The problem of "Matrix Reloaded" and "Matrix Revolutions" is that they are action pictures that are forced to exist in a world that undercuts the reality of the action.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lnZbBs7XXZqmerp%2BhwrW1zqeqZmpgZYA%3D