Quote Originally Posted by Ramza00 View Post
the sequels did not miss the point with the philosophical nazel gaving

you are supposed to hate the Merovingian and the Architect , the philosophy they spout was not liberatory but another layer of control / ideology critique justifying their place in a broken system.
You were supposed to hate Agent Smith too, but his "Humans are viruses" speech was still compelling and iconic instead of tiresome.

Again, the point of the first movie was that the philosophy was interesting enough to elevate an otherwise functional story. The problem with the Merovingian isn't that he's a bad guy with an incorrect philosophy, it's that his purpose in the story is a contrivance in order to give him a chance to monologue to us. Story wise, he's just a plot coupon vendor.

It's a deeply structural problem with Reloaded. The plot all boils down to "Get a key and go to a building so that Neo can go into a room and have the Architect lecture him". There's very little going on character-wise with Neo, Trinity, or Morpheus. They fulfilled their arcs in the first movie, and now they're just there to follow the plot around. The first movie's philosophy felt organic because characters like The Oracle were helping push Neo's character development forward. The Merovingian's doesn't because he isn't.

If the Merovingian were a better-developed character in a better developed story, he could explain his philosophy in a few lines of dialog that were well integrated into character-centric conversations and they would have worked in the same way that they did in the first movie.