The problem with the Matrix sequels is that
their target audience is a 13 year old boy who has somehow earned a PhD in philosophy. That is to say: someone who loves philosophical
conversations and also enjoys ridulously over the top action sequences. Yes! That was a bowling pin sound effect! I didn't even add that! These movies are goofy...it's okay. Embrace it! So as a 13 year old kid in 2003 who didn’t
have a philosophy degree, I hated the sequels and spent the rest of my life up until about
a month ago pretending that they DID not exist. But then a funny thing happened. I got old. And when I popped these suckers in fifteen
years after the fact, my thoughts on the movies did a complete 180. This feels like a confession, but I had SO
much fun watching these movies. More fun than Hugo Weaving had acting in them. And if you’re thinking right now, “Hold
on, Sage. You’re running a YouTube channel mostly
about movies and you want to tell me that the Last Jedi AND the Matrix Sequels are good? Do you know what F****** platform you’re
on?” And yeah, I can list just as many problems
these movies have as anybody else can. These are flawed movies by any measure that
don’t live up to the tightly wound perfection of the original. The biggest obstacle to enjoying these movies
is that the philosophy isn’t neatly woven into the narrative. The philosophical stuff in the first film
was like a little side dish. It didn’t dominate the rest of the story,
and the emphasis was always on the characters and the action. The philosophy in the sequels? Ooof. It’s just dropped like an anvil onto the
audience. "As I was saying, she stumbled onto a solution whereby nearly 99% of all test subjects ... What are you talking about? Between every action scene we get a GIANT. PHILOSOPHICAL. LECTURE. about the nature of power, free will,
determinism, purpose, causality, belief, and systemic control. I’ve talked about techniques to integrate
exposition into a story before, and these movies follow zero of those guidelines. As a piece of mass market entertainment, this
absolutely kills the pacing, so it’s no wonder that 13 year old me was bored. But nowadays? Listening to some guy explain philosophy for
15 minutes at a time is something I do for FUN! Like, in my free time. So again, my relationships to the films have
changed. Where all of this just went over my head as
a child, I can now finally find a coherent through-line to the ideas in the film. My confusion with these films is epitomized by a pair of paradoxical statements made by Neo at the end of the trilogy. To get anything from the films, other than pure indulgence, I have
to make sense of these two conflicting lines... “Why Mr. Anderson? Why, why do you persist?” “Because I choose to.” You were right Smith. You were always right. It was inevitable. Because I choose to. It was inevitable.” How can we resolve this paradox? Well, first it helps to clarify how Neo actually
beats agent Smith. Back in Reloaded, Agent Smith tells us that
he has been freed from his programing as a result of being killed by Neo in the original. Usually, when a program no longer has a purpose,
it is supposed to go to a place called The Source where they are deleted. But being freed from his programing also meant
Smith suddenly had free will. He could decide to NOT go to the Source, and
instead starts making copies of himself, telling Neo it’s inevitable that he will make a
Smith clone out of Neo too. “It’s inevitbale.” As The One, Neo is also supposed to go to
The Source. The machines are trying to get him there because
once The One reaches The Source, the Matrix is rebooted. (Man, it is sort of irritating that every
name in this universe is just a noun with the word “the” in front of it.) At the end of the final film, Neo goes to
the Machine City which is the location of the Source. So when Smith copies himself onto Neo, he
unwittingly connects himself to the Source which deletes him. Since Smith has become so powerful in the
Matrix, this is the only way that Neo can possibly defeat him. Once Neo has made the decision to fight Smith,
it is inevitable that this would be the way he is defeated. The mechanics of the plot don’t allow another
option. So that’s one explanation for
the line about inevitibility. The philosophical answer comes by way of asking:
is Neo free to make the choice to fight in the first place? Is he free to make any of the choices he’s
making? This is where all of that talk talk talk talk
talk in the Matrix Reloaded comes in handy. At the climax of that movie, Neo confronts
The Architect, the machine program responsible for creating the Matrix, who informs him that
everything he thought he knew about the war is a lie. The resistance has been created and guided
by the machines at every step of the way. Neo isn’t that special. He is The One, but there have been many Ones
before him, and if all goes according to plan, there will be many Ones after him. The Architect gives him a choice. If he goes through one door, the Matrix will
be rebooted and Neo will restart the Revolution with 23 other individuals. This is the door that the machines want him
to choose, but choosing it means that Trinity will die He can, however, go through the other door
and try to save her. The Architect tells him that he will fail
to do so even if he goes through that door, and if he does choose that door, then the
entire human race will die along with them. So. The way the Architect frames this choice is
as one between Moral Duty and Love. It’s a choice Neo has faced before: this
is the third time he’s had to make this decision in this very movie. The first one comes early on in the film. Neo wants to spend time with Trinity, but
he is confronted by a crowd of people who need him for spiritual support. No one’s lives are at risk, so in a tensionless
choice between Love and his Duty to the world, Neo chooses to help others. The second comes around the halfway point
of the film. When the Merovingian refuses to help him,
his wife Persephone, (hey look an actual character name) says she will help on one condition:
"I'll give you what you want. But you have to give me something."
"What?"
"A kiss."
Excuse me? Now the stakes are higher: humanity’s survival
hangs in the balance, or so Neo believes, so once again he has to choose: Love or Duty. Again, he chooses to help others. So by the time he reaches this point of the
story, the Architect has every reason to believe that Neo will promptly walk through that door
to The Source and do his Job. But Neo...doesn’t. When the stakes are raised to their highest
degree and when Trinity’s life hangs in the balance, he chooses to save her, and the
Architect tells us why: “Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is blinding you from the simple and obvious truth: she is going to die and there is nothing you can do to stop it." Essentially, he’s saying that Neo is a slave
to his passions, to emotion, which means that him going through that door proves that he
does not have free will. His actions are in line with what the Merovingian
was talking about earlier in the film: Causality. "You see, there is only one constant, one universe that is only real truth: Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect." "Everything begins with choice." "No, wrong. Choice is an illusion created by those with power and those without." Neo was told Trinity was in danger, he had
an emotional reaction, and then he sped off to save her. Cause and effect. But I don’t think we can just simply take
the Architect at his word that Neo is blinded by emotion. In her paper on the film, “Neo’s Kantian
Choice "The Matrix Reloaded" and the Limits of the Posthuman” DANA DRAGUNOIU analyzes
Neo’s decision according to Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperatives, so let’s look at
the first one of those. Kant writes that we should, “Act only according
to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal
law.” So what does that mean? Well, basically you should only do things
that you would be okay with everyone else doing all the time. So you shouldn’t throw a plate of cookies against a wall because you wouldn’t
want to live in a world where everyone was constantly violent towards dessert. Hugo stop having so much fun! This Categorical
Imperative basically breaks the ethical dilemma Neo is in. See, the Architect is only capable of thinking
in purely mathematical terms, so it’s no surprise that he wants Neo to think like a
Utilitarian. Utilitarianism, for those who aren’t watching
The Good Place as they should be, is the idea that you should act so as to maximize utility,
or for the purposes of this example, to maximize the survival of the most number of people. So since 23 people surviving is better than
none, Neo should go to the Source. It’s basically Thanos logic. But when you think about this decision in
Kantian terms, the logic falls apart. To quote Dragunoiu, “If everyone (or, to
use the language of the trilogy, every “one”) were to sacrifice Zion and betray the Resistance
whenever the machines threatened humanity with extinction, the very notion of resistance
would be rendered absurd” Walking through this door to The Source would
only continue to perpetuate the systems of control that the machines have constructed
to maintain power over humanity. It dooms them to endlessly repeat the cycle
of revolution and near extinction until the end of time. Under this thinking, the danger Trinity faces
is irrelevant. If Neo actually wants to fulfill his duty
to save humanity, then he needs to walk through this door no matter what. The choice isn’t between Duty and Love. Both of those values are behind the same door.
Only servitude is behind the other. Because Neo is acting on principle, doing something, doing something that is outside of his own self-interest, his decisions become unpredictable to the machines, suggesting that he does have free will. He won't sacrifice one life to save many but instead insists on finding another solution. It’s basically Captain America logic. “We don’t trade lives.” But the fact that Trinity’s life also
hangs in the balance complicates our analysis of Neo’s motives here. Was he a slave to his passions after all, or did he
choose to do what is more morally right? What actually motivated him to go through
this door? Love or moral duty. Because the first indicates determinism, and
the second indicates free will. Luckily, the events of the third film clarify this by removing Trinity from the equation. Instead of trying to keep Trinity out of the
line of fire like he did in Reloaded, in Revolutions he doesn’t stop her from joining him on
his suicide mission to the Machine City. Doing so demonstrates his willingness once
again to sacrifice his own self-interest, his love, in order to do what is morally required
of him. Her death along the way essentially allows
him to have clarity over his own motivations. That’s what the Oracle has been telling
him he needed to do this entire time: to understand why he makes the decisions he makes. To know himself. "It's Latin. It means know thyself." "But if you already know, how can I make a choice?" "Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it." Neo’s journey is, like all epic stories,
about finding a deeper understanding of self, and what Neo discovers about himself after
making all of these choices is that he always chooses to serve others over himself. I’m reminded here of a more recent story
about the nature of free-will, which argued that the principles that people hold are actually
akin to programming. In Westworld, your moral attitudes can be calculated for and are thus predetermined. but in the Matrix morality confounds the machines. The deterministic universe they've set up only caters to the common urges like hunger and pleasure that humans experience. Neo and the other resistance fighters operate outside of those bounds fighting for a higher purpose that these machines cannot account for or understand. But at the end of the story, Neo has become self-aware about his own character. Giving him the knowledge to know that he would always make the hard choice and that he would always choose to oppose Smith. The question at the heart of the sequels isn't just about whether or not humans have free will or Neo has free will but do we have free will when it comes to resisting the systems of control put upon us by the powerful. These movies are about all the ways that those with power maintain control over a population. Controlling both sides in an eternal struggle creating the illusion that descenders are powerless. That we are caught in a loop without end. Its conclusion is that through moral courage, changing the system isn't just possible...it's well... "It was inevitable." So while I went into a rewatch of these movies
expecting to loathe every scene every step of the way, I came out of these movies exhilirated,
thrilled to finally see through what I once thought was totally unclear. Opinions need refreshing every now and then. There are some movies whose reputations are
so seemingly universally agreed upon, good or bad, that we stop questioning them. We take it as a given. But the great thing about art is that while
it stays the same, you don’t, and when you take a look back at something you thought
you knew, it feels like waking up to a new reality when all you’ve ever known was the
illusion. I think the most exciting part of the fantasy
of the Matrix trilogy for me has always been this idea of living in a world where you can
just download a skill into your brain and instantly know how to do something. And while we sadly don’t have that technology
yet, the next best thing is Skillshare, a platform where experts in the fields of design,
writing, animation and more explain how they do what they do in accessible, well-curated
online classes. I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring
this episode. For writers, I recommend checking out Steve
Alcorn’s Writing Academy courses. He’s got a bunch of different classes on
topics like creating characters, writing dialogue, and structuring a story. So if you're interested in Skillshare, the first 500 people to click this link in the description will get a 2 month free subscription and access to over 20,000 classes with their premium account. Thanks for watching everyone, and a big thanks
to my Patrons on Patreon for supporting this channel. Keep writing everyone.
Yes, finally.
Let us rejoice :]