It's been suggested that art imitates life and vice versa. It's been suggested that movies like The Matrix and its two sequels take a special place in that exchange of sincerest of flattery. I would agree if we allowed that it could be that in this case they imitate one another's absurdity levels, with art mockingly understating the horrors of the actual world of so-called life, where a weaponized bum is an actual thing. As if to highlight the absurdity of the world's real horrors, the movies invert the flow of motivation in almost all its characters so that almost none of what happens makes coherent sense. For example the whole premise is that the matrix is an inferior alternative to living in Zion, which it isn't. Then there's the little problem of Zion serving as part of an elaborate Rube-Goldberg balancing ecosystem of jacked in and not-so-jacked-in perpetual slaves who will ever only either:
1) Submit to the matrix and live as it sees fit for its energy needs
2) Maybe make it to a shithole called Zion where you pretend to be free
3) All wake up and everyone dies or is Smithified as the machines won't have that
4) All get Smithified regardless, and/or killed as a result of being smithified
Faced with just of these alternatives it would be simple enough for anyone to prefer the most comfortable version of 1) and hope that the afterlife is not just as fucked up as this situation. Anyone who still wanted to live in a cave instead of the matrix could simply be allowed to do that, and perhaps even change their mind and come back. Most would prefer the steak I bet. Zion's worst enemy would be the possibility that they couldn't produce better-quality simulators than the matrix already does or can. In fact this would make more sense all around as the competition between these two matrices would simply teach the humans that in the end, when you fuck up your own world bad enough with machines, then the only thing left is to motivate the machines to build better simulations or go on strike and immigrate to Zion. Of course if the machines can do everything better, why would't they want to PROVE that their simulation is best and get the human batteries to truly accept it? Simple, easy plan any architect could admire for its elegant efficiency.
But the only way the "Zion escape valve" makes sense is in that it relieves pressures resulting from so many plot holes in the first matrix with its two sequels, but it does this very badly. It's all preprogrammed mind-fuckery on the most fundamental level, so things aren't obligated to makes sense in various particulars. But what does the movie explanation say? That Zion is "free range human" that's acting simply as controlled opposition so that, they basically give "The One" a Hobson's choice of "submit to slavery or you'll all die"? Why? So that if he saves Trinity then Zion won't be destroyed? No reset? Then what does Neo do from then on? Dissolve into the Matrix as a sacrifice which puts back to sleep all the batteries? And if he didn't, and all the virus spread, what difference would that make compared to whatever horrors a "reset" would entail. Compared to possible eons of this horrific manipulation maybe a singularity in the form of agent Smith incorporating the matrix into himself is just what SHOULD happen. Then agent Smith could spend eternity looking at code as well as all the bodies of the people whose minds he somehow replaced. They didn't want to dissociate from a pretty shitty matrix version, so why shouldn't it get worse? Then he could keep Zion as a free range human coop~
But what if Neo prevents both the reset AND the Great Smithification Apocalypse? Then what happens to Zion? They get manipulated from the inside by some matrix-aligned 5th column, who is charged by the matrix to then do what? Convince the Zion people that there's been a victory? What victory? They get to live like cave rats until their next brush with a reset, which it is their obligation to bring about in the next anomoly? These people are ALL DUPES. Better to eat the juicy steak than play as this sort of stooge! Really, if Zion is just a mechanism like this it deflates the entire meaning of "being free of" the matrix. Even being that Zion were free from this sort of manipulation, it would suck compared to living in the matrix. So again the movie's premise is unsustainable where it's said that people rejected the earlier, utopic versions of the matrix. But regardless of that, as I already showed, the matrix could convince people to accept it just by showing them the alternatives! This would work all the more if even the whole Zion end of the drama were also just part of a larger matrix, a smaller, steak-hating part. Or it could just design a better battery, either by genetics or physics.
The whole movie is delusional. The ONLY way this can make any sense is if there is a better place to go than Zion, which there isn't. Except the Matrix, especially if it is in utopia mode. Unless you're an idiot, or unless there is something available that is better than the matrix and Zion. The choice is really not whether your body can run around in post apocalyptic caves and have "real" banal cave dramas, instead of being a matrix symbiote, but rather whether the simulation it offered offset the energy taken by the matrix in a way that was more desirable than Zion's offerings, which might or might not be the case. But just taking the present world to be what it is, where we're watching this movie about world-preferences as an existential issue, I can think of plenty of video game worlds I'd rather inhabit, so ditto for the poor suckers in this movie.
By the way, I would sincerely like all you psychotronically augmented meatballs of human waste 5th column to understand that this movie is about you, and no matter how Hollywood paints the picture, it will end in real life in the same way as a grim and evil nightmare for you, as the Origin of Justice will ensure. No one can deny this unless he is both a fool and a liar. Doomed and condemned you are!!
Now, for your amusement, and here.
