They're making a Matrix 5.

[Ramza00]

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.

I repeat, I just disagree

the point with the Merovingian is to set up Persephone. For all the talk of power with the Merovingian dry monologues is that he is impotent, for his own family does not love him and they are bored.

And Persephone says she will give Neo what he wants, but he must sacrifice his beautiful ideals he can not remain pure and achieve his goal. So Neo does a minor sacrifice, which sets up the larger sacrifice with Reloaded where Trinity dies but Neo brings her back. Which sets up Neo’s descent into the underworld where Trinity will risk all for Neo, which sets up Trinity dying on the trip to the machine city.

Neo has to sacrifice in order to win in the 3rd movie. He can not just better kung fu, or beat someone in a philosophical argument, or assimilate to win. He had to self-undermine to make the social work. Which is literally the opposite of smith, the architect, and the pompous french guy.

Neo has control for he has surrendered himself which is also the opposite of control.

What the original missed is that once the map becomes the territory, it's not possible to just "wake up" and exist outside of it. As a result, the set-up between the resistance and the system is naively black-and-white - there's a reason why the iconography of the original was appropriated by conspiracy nutjobs and other suspect types who miss other points of the movie.

Both the men and the machines did a death drive thing, the whole morpheus explaining mankind history how they struggle for control and blocked out the sky

and Morpheus is in a fancy chair and utters “the desert of the real line” well Morpheus is referencing Baudrillard Simulcra and Simulation (the book that neo keeps his drugs in at the start of the movie)

specifically this chapter, which literally starts with a map and territory reference (which is Descartes with his matrix metaphors, the evil demon, a+b+c=x+y+z standardized math grammar, and him creating cartesian coordinates with that being descartes name in latin instead of italian)

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes



If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l



Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains.

from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.

the rest is here, that is the first 3 paragraphs of the chapter
https://web.stanford.edu/class/histo...Simulacra.html

And Baudrillard with his emphasis of exchange value where everything becomes symbols handed back and forth

has a logic structure where the things that can not be exchanges will either doom a system or become organizing nodes the system has to integrate around. Literally death drive stuff (though Baudrillard goes through other reference points with his french theory)

Of course Baudrillard HATED the movie, the first one. Did not see movie two or three, and turned down consulting on the script the Wachowskis were trying to run by him with movie 2 and 3. Then Baudrillard died in 2007 which is 3 years after movie 3 and Baudrillard was 77.

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edit one last bit, what I just did was a slight of hand even if it is literally true. I expect 99% of people to not be able to clock Morpheus speech is a reference to a thing, to follow the white rabbit and easter eggs (plus other 80s and 90s hopeful hacker metaphors about cyberspace.)

this type of hope is willfully naïve (a utopic like dream, like morpheus) and Vahnavoi is correct that

the iconography of the original was appropriated by conspiracy nutjobs and other suspect types who miss other points of the movie.

the imagery in the movie for such people is the ear piece the agents use, and smith decides to not always wear in movie 1 and totally abandons between movie 1 and 2 (the inciting incident is he gives it as mail to the humans for neo)

but the conspiracy nut jobs do not care about that imagery and choose the red pill as their metaphor instead for they identify as the heroes of their own story