neurological dryer lint

ok, revolutions. well it clearly didn't answer a lot of the questions everyone wanted answered, at least not obviously. like reloaded, there's a lot of group discussion necessary to determine what exactly happened. cheesy dialogue - almost star wars cheesy - through a lot of it. no real surprises. excellent effects, good fight scenes, i laughed more in this one than i did in reloaded... as a standalone movie, it's good. as a finale to this trilogy, it's satisfactory.

slashdot's thread on it is quite humorous. i really agree with one post i saw - spoilers inline - check it here.

ok my comments, spoilers, etc. highlight to read.


here's what i think the answers to the big questions are:
- neo affected the machines in the 'real world' because, as the architect said in reloaded, neo becoming the one has 'altered his consciousness'. airgo (heh) he can 'see' and 'feel' and affect the machines because he's the one, and that rewrote his brain to be able to do things like that, to be 'connected' to the machines. no, it's not from his encounter with smith, or he'd have been able to do that before the source. anyway. i can't even remember the oracle's explanation. it confirmed my suspicions. but he went comatose because his brain got transferred to the train station... because... why again? the whole train thing was totally useless to me.
- in the end - it was all about choice. clearly programs do not have the ability to comprehend that idea. so that's how neo beat smith. a good summary of why i think it worked is in the slashdot thread above. suffice it to say that neo realized he couldn't beat smith to death, and so he chose to sacrifice himself, and because of that, the machines could destroy him. i liked that played out in smith's 'why do you keep fighting?' speech - it, as well as the merovingian, the architect, etc. they all showed brilliantly how programs cannot choose for themselves. even the oracle, who knows everything that will happen, cannot see past choices that aren't clear, that aren't mathematical, that 'we don't understand'.
- as to why the other smiths died - i don't get that. was it cause the other billion smiths are connected to main-smith? maybe there's a 'primary smith' - for a while it was in the first one, it's the same one that came up to the door in the beginning of reloaded and gave the men his earpiece, it's the same one that talked to neo in the burly brawl... and when the oracle was taken over, he became the primary one... and when neo was taken over, he became the primary one... and so when you blow up the primary smith all the rest die? still lost there.
- the oracle was clearly talking through smith at the end, which is why smith was like 'wait, why did i say that?' and telling neo what to do. took me a bit to get that one. kinda cool.
- neo's not dead. but how do the humans get out of the matrix when they wanna be freed now? is that still possible? what happens now, basically? do zion residents start getting back into the matrix and freeing the machine's batteries? won't that kill the machines? are only 1% of the people still going to leave? basically the people in the matrix had become irrelevant by the beginning of this movie, which i didn't like. it's all about saving zion. which is important, but that's a HUGE 'what now?' to leave open. probably my biggest beef with the whole flick.


so anyway, it's worth seeing. and like everyone else is saying, at least we have return of the king to look forward to. we KNOW that won't disappoint. my expectations are higher for that movie than anything else i've ever thought about - and they're all gonna get met.