The Matrix: Resurrections is really not very good although it is beautifully shot and makes San Francisco show well. Nevertheless, the idea of The Matrix — the world building aspect of the story — is intriguing. A few thoughts came to my mind after seeing Resurrections.
“Io” is the new “Zion.” It’s a refuge for surviving humans in the “real world” (what is reality?) where machines run everything. Io seems to be an improvement. Humans rediscovered some aesthetic pleasures:
“Io” is the new “Zion.” It’s a refuge for surviving humans in the “real world” (what is reality?) where machines run everything. Io seems to be an improvement. Humans rediscovered some aesthetic pleasures:
- An artificial sky makes a cavern feel closer to living above ground
- Humans are re-engineering real food, such as fruit, so they don’t have to keep eating gruel
- Still doesn’t seem to be much in the way of art, other than a statue of the late Morpheus
Humans are also making peace with machines. Whereas Zion had no thinking machines, Io coexists with some forms of benign artificial intelligence. Are the humans just setting themselves up for destruction again? Maybe a subject for a future sequel…
Democracy is not an institution that has survived and humans in Io seemingly have no issue with martial law. It reminds me of Dune in that humans in that universe live in a sort of feudal system where artificial intelligence has been banned.
Would I want to live in Io instead of in The Matrix? Probably not. The fact that it might even be a close call makes me skeptical about the broad appeal of the metaverse here. However, if humans become more comfortable with interacting in artificial worlds, I wonder how this will change future viewers’ perception of the films.
I’m starting to think the machines are actually a benevolent force, or at least a benign one. If you start from he premise that it is better to have been alive than to have not been alive, the machines are generating an enormous amount of human welfare. They are creating hundreds of millions or likely billions of humans and allowing them to live mostly decent lives. Only when they die in The Matrix are they liquidated.
Presumably, the machines are smart enough to get energy from something besides humans, but they don’t! They invested in really complicated infrastructure to harvest humans, at great opportunity cost vs building hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants or something.
The surviving humans have no idea if The Matrix is a faithful representation of the old world, but the audience knows that it is faithful. Thus, the machines are creating a world for humans that is no worse than the one we inhabit, and most of us lead decent and fulfilling lives. At least, most humans would prefer to live than die.
I can’t think of another situation in human history where enslaved losers of a war and their progeny had it so good.