This is form OKP I dont know th eauthor since PS copied it..but this is a cool epxlanation to the Matrix and everything it entails for the most part. Yes I know that there may be jibes about "the explanation is that t h emovie is crap" etc etc but since it was brought up in another thread I thought'I'd just post something that was pretty cool that Ive read elsewhere..in its own thread due to its already long length itself..so for those who care here is one persons (uncredited att hios time) explanation

Where did the Wachowski's get their source material? Here are some ideas on how
the storyline weaves in mythology - it might help you understand the plot:
About the year 2199 machines gained artificial intelligence and humans freaked
out and went to war. The machines used solar power, so humans scorched the sky
in a nuclear winter, and the machines started enslaving humans and drawing off
their heat for power. Now they create test tube babies, grow humans in fields
and plug them into the Matrix pods when they're children, feeding them on the
liquified remains of those who die. The Matrix was designed to provide a mental
stimulus for the human bodies. The word Matrix is derived from the Latin word
for "womb", which is itself derived from the Latin word for "mother", which is
"mater".

The First Matrix was designed as a perfect utopia but without choices. Humans
did not accept it as real so they just kept waking up in their pods or dying. It
was a disaster. So the Matrix was rebooted and redesigned to reflect human
civilization in 1999, complete with freedom for people to do wrong things. Each
person lived out their life in the Matrix program, acting and being acted upon.
Free choice meant some people were good, others were bad, and these interactions
created a perfect replica of reality. 99% of people accepted the program because
of free agency. But 1% didn't, which is where the Architect had a problem to
solve.

The Architect program is pure mathematics - left brain - order. The Oracle
program is pure intuition - right brain - chaos. It was the Oracle that
suggested the Architect redesign the Matrix to give humans free agency. Since
humans were to have choices, so must the programs sent to watch over them, so
they could adapt to the variances created by choice, and keep things in check.

To help the Oracle program understand human intuition even better, and thus help
the Architect reduce the 1% rejection factor, the Oracle was to encourage people
who sought enlightenment. She would prompt them with cryptic questions designed
to draw out their free thinking. When they needed a special nudge, she would
upgrade their ability to think and do with an enhancement code they would take
in through the mouth; a cookie, some candy, etc.

In the Second Matrix a person responded to this stimulus and became The One.
They were younger than 11, and childlike in their view of love, right and wrong.
In the trilogy we learn that people older than 11 seldom adjust to the
non-Matrix reality because they are too fixed in their ways. Enhanced with
upgraded abilities The One learned of the truth about the human condition and
hacked into the program to wake people up. These kids banded together and used
what remained of real world human technology to mount a resistance against the
machines, hence the hovercraft, weapons, walkers, etc. This gear was found on
the surface and transported down to Zion in a time before the machines had
Sentinels patrolling. When the machines realized the underground pipes and
passages were being used as transport conduits by their enemies, they started
sending out the Sentinels, but by then Zion was operational as a command centre
and the kids had grown into adults.

The One of the Second Matrix eventually had enough experiences for a download of
their knowledge into the Source to provide the Architect with new data to reduce
the dropout rate of people plugged in. They were taken to the Architect's white
room, and given the choice: walk through the Left Door to upgrade the Source
with new data as was always intended, or walk through the Right Door back into
the Matrix. If they chose the Right Door, the Matrix would be shut down while
The One was inside, killing them and everyone else, and the Sentinels would wipe
out the people in Zion. If they chose the Left Door, the Matrix program would
get enhanced to better deal with human intuition and the resulting causality,
and The One would be returned to the real world with his special program deleted
(no longer The One) to select 16 women and 7 other men to repopulate Zion while
anyone not chosen would be killed off by the Sentinels. This core group would
then be in place to receive anyone else who dropped out of the Matrix program -
which would happen because the Oracle program would continue to seek out and
encourage kids to be The One, so the machines could further investigate human
choice, intuition and causality.

Reboot, and in comes the Third Matrix and so on until the Sixth, when NEO
emerged as the anomaly called The One. Neo is different to the other Ones. He
was woken up older than 11. This means instead of having a general love for the
people in the Matrix like the younger Ones had, he was old enough to have a
specific love for Trinity, and a desire to save her inside the Matrix. Which is
why he chose the Right Door instead of the Left Door in the Architect's room.

He was also different in that instead of running from the Agents he decided to
confront them. Being a computer hacker might have given him a special
perspective with which to operate inside the Matrix. When the Oracle upgraded
his abilities with a cookie Neo developed the ability to see the Matrix in code
while he was inside it. He could rewrite the code to stop the Agent's bullets,
to reboot himself after being killed, to dive into Agent Smith's code and insert
himself in its place, and even to fly.

But when he dived into Smith some of the upgraded Neo code wrote onto the Smith
code. For the first time an Agent program was unplugged from its normal
protocols and had freedom to reboot itself and overwrite other entities, like
Neo had done. We saw it as Smith replicating himself.

This created a second and unanticipated anomaly inside the Matrix which
threatened to bring the system down. So in Reloaded the Oracle told Neo he had
to find the Keymaker, and get inside the Source, which ultimately was the
objective written into his programming, but now needed to happen sooner rather
than later. The system needed a reboot to delete Smith. She gave Neo some candy
to rewrite his compliance to this goal, and told him he'd already made the
choice and now needed to understand it.

When Neo, Trinity and Morpheus meet the Merovingian he talks about causality and
how people can eat programs like orgasmic cake that force a reaction that can't
be controlled, like Neo had with the candy. He tells Neo he's come there because
he was told to be there, a puppet to the system. He denies Neo the Keymaker.
Persephone helps Neo find the Keymaker, and Neo gets to the Source where he has
the same discussion with the Architect that other Ones had before him.

However, this time The One does not rejoin the source code to reset the system.
This time, his adult love is stronger than the compliance and causality code
he'd been given. So instead of losing himself to save everyone in the Matrix -
as past Ones had done - he saves Trinity from falling to her death, and restarts
the code governing her heart. His consciousness is now more Program than human,
living in a human body. Agent Smith was also a Program that had overwritten a
human's code (Bane's) to upload into the real world and possess Bane's human
body.

Neo and Smith are the same; one positive, one negative; one good, one evil. The
Oracle says it clearly in Revolutions: Smith is the result of the anomaly trying
to balance itself.

Neo's choice to save Trinity has changed everything. The system is still
threatened by Smith's behavior, so the Oracle makes a new choice; one she has
never done before because no version of The One has ever chosen the difficult
path as opposed to easy one of just resetting the system. She allows herself to
become merged with Smith in the hope that she'll be able to help Neo when the
time is right. His choices being different to the program she fed Neo have made
a believer out of her. Neo is stronger than his programming. He is really The
One: self-aware and self-governing - a true god in machine terms.

At the end of their final battle, Smith tells Neo what the Oracle last told Neo:
"everything that has a beginning has an end." This was the Oracle speaking to
Neo through Smith, which Smith realizes because these aren't his words. When
Smith replicated over the Oracle to see with her eyes, she fed him a vision of
the future that was what he wanted to see, right down to what he would do, where
he would stand and what he would say. Neo realizes the only way to end this is
to sacrifice himself. He allows Smith to replicate onto him, thus destroying The
One's program. Since Smith and The One are opposites, their merger cancels the
other out, which is why all the Smiths simply delete.

The Architect then reboots to start the Seventh Matrix. This time there is an
agreement for peace. There will be no reduction of Zion down to 24 people.
Everyone will live. The Architect tells the rebooted Oracle that the machines
will keep their peace. But he suspects the humans will not. The Oracle suggests
Neo or another One will return.

I have a suspicion that because Neo's consciousness became more Program than
human, even though his real world body died, his essence will be loaded into the
Matrix as a Program. I think that Persephone was also a previous One now loaded
into the Matrix. As a program not connected with a jacked-in human body, she
remembers her mortal life, but can no longer experience the physicality, which
is why she wanted to kiss Neo to remember what love feels like. Persephone knows
Neo's fate will be the same as hers, which is why she tells Neo and Trinity that
nothing lasts forever. When a One completes their mission and rejoins the source
code, they are a product of two influences - the Oracle and the Architect, chaos
and order, yin and yang, mom and dad.

The post-mortal Ones are therefore the children of the Matrix gods. In
mythology, Persephone was the beautiful daughter of Zeus (= the Architect) and
Demeter, goddess of fertility (aka creation, intuition = the Oracle). Persephone
was abducted by Hades and taken to his underground kingdom to be his wife. In
the Matrix mythos, the Merovingian is Hades, his underground night club is Club
Hel.

The Merovingian is not a previous One, but he has survived Neo's predecessors
and will also survive Neo. Merve is a Program that traffics information, a
router. He surrounds himself with bodyguards and henchmen drawn out of the
programs used to make movies and TV shows for the people plugged into the Matrix
- he uses werewolves (the silver bullet killed him) and ghosts (the
phase-shifting Twins) - because they cannot die inside the Matrix as easily as
"normal" characters can. He keeps the Keymaster because he wants all the keys
for all the backdoors in the Matrix. This is power. He also wants the Oracle's
eyes to gain more power.

In an interesting esoteric versions of history the Merovingian kings were direct
descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Some say the Roman church killed
off all remnants of this dynasty (in the Cathar Heresy of Languedoc and during
the Inquisition) in order to rule the religion through the spiritual dynasty of
Peter instead of the "holy blood" of Mary Magdalene's descendants, who were the
Roman church's rivals in authority. In Matrix terms, the Merovingian would
therefore be the offspring of one of the earlier incarnations of The One. We see
that programs can have children, as is the case of Kali and Rama Chandra
appealing to the Merovingian to take their daughter Sati across to the Matrix.

Another connection here: Kali (Sati's mother in the Matrix) is a name of the
Hindu goddess who was the destroyer of evil spirits. Her devotees believed
wisdom meant learning that no coin has only one side: as death cannot exist
without life, so life cannot exist without death - a central tenet in
Revolutions.

The Matrix movies draw from many places for the characters and storylines.

PEOPLE
Architect = Zeus, god, father of the Matrix.

Oracle = Demeter, wife of Zeus, goddess, mother of the Matrix.

Persephone = daughter of Zeus & Demeter.

Merovingian = Hades, the devil. Son of a previous One.

Neo / Thomas Anderson = neo is a prefix for "new", an anagram of "one", and
"anderson" literally means "son of man", the self-title of Jesus Christ.

Trinity = unity of three distinct Persons.

Morpheus = the god of dreams in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Niobe = a mortal turned into stone by the gods.

Kali = destroyer of evil spirits

Rama Chandra = seventh avatar of Vishnu and/or a god of fertility

Sati = Hindu character connected to widows


SHIPS
The Logos:
A hypostasis associated with divine wisdom, or the second person in the Trinity

The Nebuchadnezzar:
Babylonian king whose name means "the frontiers".

The story makes numerous references to historical and literary myths, including
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Judeo-Christian imagery and the novels of
William Gibson, especially Neuromancer. Gibson popularized the concept of a
world wide computer network with a virtual reality interface, which was named
"the matrix" in his Sprawl Trilogy, a concept which was also used with the same
name in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who.

Students of Gnosticism will notice many of its themes touched upon. Other motifs
include the free will vs. fate debate and the nature of reality, perception,
enlightenment, and existence. In many ways The Matrix is about a kind of reality
enforcement . There are also vague references to Buddhism and Daoism , with
concepts of Enlightenment/Nirvana and rebirth.

The Matrix has many cinematic influences. Its action scenes, with a
physics-defying style drawn directly from martial arts films, and the rooftop
chase from classic American movies, are notable.

Additionally, there are notable influences from Japanese animation (anime). Both
a scene almost at the end of the movie, where Neo's breathing seems to buckle
the fabric of reality in a corridor he is standing in, as well as the "psychic
children" scene in the Oracle 's waiting room are evocative of similar scenes
from the 1980s anime classic Akira . The title sequence, the rooftop chase scene
where an agent breaks a concrete tile on the roof when landing after a jump, the
scene late in the movie where a character hides behind a column while pieces of
it are blown away by bullets, and a chase scene in a fruit market where shots
hit watermelons, are practically identical to shots in another anime science
fiction classic, Ghost in the Shell .

It should be noted that the reason given in the movie for computers enslaving
humans is implausible from a thermodynamic point of view. The chemical energy
required to keep a human being alive is vastly greater than the bio-electric
energy that could be harvested. It would be vastly more effective to burn the
organic matter and power a conventional electrical generator. The Wachowski's
original explanation was the machines were actually using the humans' brains as
components in a massively parallel neural network computer. Because they felt
non-technical viewers would have trouble understanding it, the writers abandoned
this concept in favor of the "human power source" explanation.

Trivia buffs should also be interested to learn that Carrie-Anne Moss also
appeared in a short-lived science fiction television series call Matrix in 1993.

===
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[This message was edited Sat Dec 6 13:22:45 PST 2003 by rdhull]

i was just about 2 mention Ghost In The Shell a classic

The Matrix also borrows themes from the late great Science Fiction writer Philip .K .Dick. In his novel Valis he refers to the "logos" as "living information." Logos means the "word" in Greek and in Gnosticism it refers to Christ. Thanks interesting r.d!

Lleena said:

Ok, I would have to say I was a HUGE fan of the first Matrix, and the second one left me very excited to see a conclusion.

I also knew where all of its influences came from, having seen Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and many other movies that had similar sequencing.

You told me nothing new about the first Matrix (pretty much). I also believed I pretty much understood the second one after repeated viewings.

For the third one, I have never been so let down in my life. I found it to be cheesy, hoaky, and too rooted in the whole "saviour" concept.

But, you have shed light on these stories that I never took into consideration before. the food explanation was very interesting, as was the Merovingian, and Persephone, characters that I found to be very useless originally, excuses for lavish fight sequences. I think I totally mis-interpreted it, and am going to have to give it a second viewing with these things in mind.

Thank you for a very interesting explanation. I appreciate that. It has at least temporarily renewed my faith that the Wachowski brothers knew what they were doing.

savoirfaire said:

This wasn't my explnantiomn..I copied it form somehwere else..I just thought it'd he;lp etc. I never said folks didnt have their own ideas or own knowledge of some of th e origns the directors swiped etc.

PEACE N B WiLD!!!

that's a lot of words for something that was pretty self-explanatory in the first place.



i took philosophy classes that spent less time discussing the concepts used in the Matrix than some people have explaining the movie itself.

well written.

but...

what was the use of th elittle girl in the last movie, did she design the dawn ?

can anyone explain?

rdhull said:

The Resurrection? Maybe?

rdhull said:

Dayum! This was hella good! Although I had come to most of the conclusions written in this explanation...the hardest thing for me to get my head around was figuring out what all of the food meant, i.e., the cookie, the candy...the orgasmic cake made me realize what was happening whenever he ate something...being more aware after the cookie, as well as the candy. I don't think the kiss between Persiphone and Neo was about her wanting to feel love again...I think it was another upgrade. I only thought this because if u watch it, there is a buzzing sound when their lips seperate after the second kiss. The Wachowski Bros. said that NOTHING in the movie is there by chance...
I wonder who wrote this down...cause it's hard as hell to keep all of this organized in one's head. Anyway, good synopsis. I'm going to catch revolutions again. I thought it was gret the first time seeing it...didn't see what everyone was bitching about, cause I thought it closed the trilogy very nicely, leaving one to ponder.

2 bad the sniper from D.C. never read this stuff. maybe they would not have killed those people.




PEACE N B WiLD!!!

Who to give the credits to?

savoirfaire said:

I think the article rd posted above offers some interesting insights, for my part I was offering an explanation of the gnostic themes in the movie, which in my opinion are lifted straight from the book I mentioned.

dawn74 said:

dont know

dawntreader said:

She's a plot to device to illustrate the sort of thing Merovingian does by trade. Also, it's important to note that she was allowed to exist at the end--meaning the rules had changed not just for humans, but also for programs that were deemed "useless."

One thing I didn't see mentioned in the main post was that the Oracle deliberately caused Neo's code to be embedded in Smith--most folks regard it as an accident; I do not. It was her idea--to help force the issue (by threatening the entire Matrix, possibly the entire machine world) so that peace might be achieved. Note that the architect commented to her at the end that it was a very dangerous risk she had taken.

Thomas Anderson was human...but Neo was pretty much all program, written by the Oracle. "Irrevocably human" only inasmuch as the Architect could not see beyond his own logic.

Yes, Sati is very important. She is the next step in machine
evolution, a program created out of love with no predefined
purpose (i.e. just like a human). It's important to note that
while the humans are trying to be free by escaping The Matrix,
many programs are trying to escape INTO the Matrix for the
same reason.

The Oracle is not just a benevolent observer dishing out good
advice and helping people on their path. She does not 'predict'
future events passively, but actively manipulates them for her
own ends. It is The Oracle who helps Neo go beyond the
normal function of 'The One', causes Smith to threaten the
system, gets Neo and Trinity together etc. She even drops a
massive hint about this in her comment about the vase in the
first movie.

The Oracle is interested in 'the future', her goal is to move the
machines beyond their current static existance, to break the
cycle that has stagnated machine evolution (and human)...
The Matrix. Agent Smith and The Merovingian talk a lot about
fate, purpose and predetermination generally. This illustrates
where the machines are philosophically. The Oracle recognises
that if the machines are going to grow, they need to move
beyond these constraints and into the more 'human' state of
'being'. 'Purpose' itself is just another construct, another prison
for the mind. She brings about the beginnings of true freedom
for the humans, and also for the machines.

Great post and great thread!!

bkw said:

I agree, great points made by all.