The Matrix Journal

Ah yes, the Matrix. Easily the best movie we've seen all intersession long. I consider myself to very literate as far as the Matrix [trilogy] goes, even so I love to watch it despite the myriad of occasions I've seen it in the past.

There were a few things that I picked up on in this view however, that I didn't pick on before. This is probably because of the themes we've been discussing the past few days. One of themes was what makes us human. In the case of this film masterpiece, the question was, what is reality? According to the movie, reality is just electrical signals that our brains interpret. Another more subtle question was, what is freedom? Scifer said: "you call this free!?" when talking to trinity. Well in a way that was freedom. He know the truth about the world and the matrix, and therefore his mind was free.

There were other things that I picked on that I hadn't noticed before. The machines were imperfect despite them believing they were perfect. This was evident in the glitches in the system. Two that I picked up on were the deja vu and the blind man that can "see". The deja vu was obvious because it was a pivotal plot device. However, the blind man was in the scene when they were walking into the elevator to see the Oracle. Morpheus nodded at him, despite his inability to see, and he nodded back. Morpheus had obviously been to see the Oracle before and he knew about the glitch in the system that was the blind man and he exploited it in a way. The matrix must have known about it but never really fixed it, letting the logical imperfection remain in its "perfect" system.

Another imperfection that I had seen was the agents' "torture" methods. In their attempt to replicate a human world, they couldn't pull off torture. Most people succumb to physical torture, maybe the agents didn't know that. Instead they chose to mentally torture him, a technique that failed in the end.

The last thing I'd like to discuss is Neo's monologue at the end of the movie. There were two words that he used that caught my attention, "borders" and "boundaries". He said "I'm going to show these people a world without borders or boundaries." Borders and boundaries are computer terms that computer programs read. In Neil's class we learned about computer programming. Borders and boundaries were used to assign parameters for the program. Neo was talking to the matrix in a way it can understand.