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Movie Review: Further Takes on "The Matrix"

Posted April 2008

by Obi Akwani, MGV Editor

The Matrix
Matrix Reloaded
Matrix Revolutions

The Matrix Trilogy movies represent a metaphor on the worth and substance of human life. The premise of the movie is centered on an old philosophical perspective -- the pagan philosophy called Neo-Platonism.

In the movie, the state of man in nature is described in terms of an arrested consciousness. It is a state in which a new creation, the machine, has succeeded in becoming independent of its creator, man, and at the same time subjugating man and making his existence to have a single purpose -- that of serving the machine.

That, in a nutshell, is the beginning of the story in the Matrix. It is a new twist on an old philosophical adventure -- that of trying to unravel the nature of God and his relationship to man. In the Matrix, the machines have in essence taken over the role of God in nature. In the world created by these machines, all men have no consciousness except through the virtual world created by the machines. It is a consciousness mediated by the machines and controlled by them as well. The people who populate this virtual world are blissfully unaware of anything beyond the daily grind of their virtual existence.

In this movie there is no place for the benevolent omni-potent almighty God. Here God is reduced to a materialistic concept of power, insecure power at that, that must strive always to remain supreme over all other contenders. The greatest, and only other contender for this power is man. And so the machines strive at all times to completely subjugate man. The Matrix makes it possible for us to understand something more about the philosophy that instructs it -- perhaps just another interpretation of the Neo-Platonist principle; the purpose of human existence is to conquer everything and be god. We see this way of viewing existence given voice in a scene of the movie where the "train man" tells Neo, trapped in a way station, "Down here, I am god."

The Matrix is a complicated psychological story. At one level, it can be viewed as a world-view of man antagonistic to the idea of "God". By reducing the human struggle in existence to a struggle against inanimate constructs that have taken a life and consciousness of their own, it takes a very modern idea -- that of artificial intelligence which came into philosophical vogue with the advent of the computer in the 20th century -- and used it to portray God as, perhaps, another human construct, an idea under which our consciousness is held captive. At another level it suggests that man himself is the creator, having constructed the machines that now torment him. Thirdly, it tends to suggest that God is somehow an accretion of single units in a powerful harmony. We get this sense in the scene where Neo enters the machine headquarters and is confronted by the machine through a huge animated instant sculpture made up of crab-like little machines that looks suspiciously like a human face, speaking in one gravelly voice.

There are also supremacist undertones -- an ever-present suggestion throughout the movie, which remains unrelieved at the end -- that impress on the viewer the idea that the humans' struggle against the machines is doomed to failure. This is a movie that seems to toy with human hope; in that it strays from most epics that portray similar struggles, but end with the triumph of human hope. The Matrix story favors the machines.

But there is a glitch in the machine program for total control over man. Man's consciousness peaks out beyond that machine program; and so begins a battle of wits and brawn between man and machine.

It is apparently a greatly uneven match. Man is seemingly outclassed in technology by the machines. But what man lacks in material weaponry he more than makes up in spirit. There is no spiritual consciousness in the machines. In the machine world, there is an attempt to reduce everything to the logic of bits and bites, with apparent success. What cannot be described in this way is referred to as "anomaly".

Without giving it a name, there is a hint of the admittance of a power even greater than that of machine and man. The appearance of Neo, who in his virtual existence is named Thomas Anderson, is a fundamental anomaly in the program controlling the virtual machine world of human existence. The machines have tried to close that anomaly without success, and so must periodically contend with it. The climax of the movie comes at the latest of these contentions.

By adhering so faithfully to an interpretation of the classic Neo-Platonism idea of the trinity, where Neo, his paramour Trinity and the ubiquitous Smith become one in the rain soaked crater created in the titanic struggle between Neo and Smith, the movie tends to tip the balance in favor of paganism.

Ultimately, I find it to be a movie that is contemptuous of human intelligence. This contempt is inherent in the disappointing ending of the third installment of the Matrix Trilogy, Revolutions. In the end Neo allows himself to be reabsorbed into unconsciousness and the virtual reality of the machine world. There are only two explanations possible for this type of ending:
(1) It suggests a desperate effort to justify the dominance of the machines and discourage human hope. Unless this movie is more than a trilogy and there is another installment coming, it is a most despairing and flabbergasting conclusion. Neo's consent to being plugged back into the machine world where humans exist in a vegetable state physically just to serve as energy source for the machines, suggests that the current conclusion is not the end of the story; there may yet be another sequel coming.
(2) It also suggest a deficient consciousness comparable to, but not quite as complete as, that of the people populating the Matrix in their total tack of awareness into the virtual nature of their own existence.