The Matrix Breakdown - May Movie Club Week 1

And a sneak peek at next week's movie, "Her".

Click here to watch this breakdown on TikTok

Welcome to Kaden’s Movie Club where we watch a movie each week and discuss it like a book club. This week we’re talking about The Matrix.

This month’s theme is artificial intelligence, so we’re looking at it through that lens, but feel free to discuss any of your thoughts and ideas.

A Bleak Future

The Matrix portrays a future in which AI grew intelligent enough to overtake humanity and now rules the world. Humans primarily function as a power source for the machines, essentially used as batteries.

But the big twist is that most humans don’t know this. Most humans continue living lives just like you and I do every day, but the world they know is actually a simulation designed by the machines to keep humans pacified. That simulation is called the Matrix.

And I want to note — the simulation is said to imitate the “peak” of human civilization, which here is the late 90s. Sorry to later generations, but apparently flip phones and AOL is as good as it gets.

In all seriousness, it’s incredible that the Wachowskis thought of this idea when they did because The Matrix was portraying a new kind of AI.

A New Kind of AI

If you look at something like The Terminator, the portrayal of AI is primarily physical. The T-800 is android, a robotic skeleton that often poses as a human. And Intelligent robots have a long history in media as the default representation of AI and advanced technology. But in The Matrix, AI is largely a metaphysical presence. Yes, they have drones that go around and attack human ships, but the Agents are the primary representation of the AI, and they are essentially programs within a program. None of it is truly tangible.

Make no mistake, I’m a Terminator fan. However, the portrayal of AI in The Matrix strikes a more frightening chord for me because it more closely resembles what we’re dealing with now. The internet is not tangible, AI chatbots and systems are not physical entities. As a society, we’ve reached the point where large swaths of people genuinely struggle to tell the difference between something created by AI and reality. And it only took us a little over 20 years from the time the Wachowskis created a story based on that idea.

False Realities

As part of his interrogation, Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the original version of the Matrix was perfect — a utopia in which everyone was happy. But it failed miserably because humans rejected the programming. Smith gives two possible explanations: The AI didn’t know what defined a perfect human reality OR humans define their reality through misery and suffering. Agent Smith believes the latter.

So, do you think Agent Smith’s theory is correct? If humans were offered a utopian world, would they be able to accept it as reality? Or is there something embedded in us that expects bad things to be part of reality? Personally, I think Smith is correct.

Most of us are already living in some kind of false reality. Thanks to algorithms, which for the overarching discussion we can consider a form of AI, our views of the outside world are catered to the exact things that we want to see. Any platform you might use observes every move you make and quickly learns how to keep your attention. As a result, these platforms offer an unrealistic view of the world as they omit the things you scroll past and aggressively present the things that engage you — positively or negatively.

In other words, our AI has created a false reality for us.

But to Agent Smith’s point, you’d assume if everyone’s feeds are catered to what they want to see, then it would be filled with happy things, right? Wrong. We constantly engage with things that make us feel fear, anger and sadness. They’re often just as prevalent in our catered realities as the things that make us feel optimism, hope and joy. I’m not sure if I can explain why, but I think Smith is right and humans have some inherent need to see both bad and good, and the AI is acts on that instinct.

Belief

Some of the humans who have escaped the Matrix, such as Morpheus, believe in a prophecy — a figure known as “The One” is destined to defeat the machines and save humanity. Morpheus believes Neo is The One, but in a world run by machines, where does a prophecy even come from?

The Oracle is mysterious but is said to be very old, having been with the resistance “from the beginning.” She’s the one that gave the prophecy about the One. It also appears to be a rite of passage for new recruits to meet the Oracle and learn about their future. Morpheus tells Neo not to think of her predictions in terms of “right or wrong.” She’s a guide that can show you the path.

That concept only becomes more peculiar when she tells Neo he is NOT the One. Especially because she told Morpheus he would find the one. And she told Trinity she would fall in love with the One. Well, Morpheus found Neo and Trinity loves Neo. And to top it off, Neo learns to do things like stop bullets in midair, which seems exactly like the kind of thing you’d do if you were the One.

Was the Oracle wrong? Or did she tell Neo what he needed to hear so that he would become the One? Just like the moment where she says “Don’t worry about the vase” and Neo subsequently breaks a vase only for the Oracle to ask, “Would you have broken the vase if I hadn’t said anything?”

We learn interesting information about the Oracle in the sequels, and that information helps tie things back to our theme of artificial intelligence, but I want to keep our discussion centered on the material that we’ve all seen. So, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the Oracle. Especially if you think she might play into the commentary on AI.

Ignorance Is Bliss

There is one member of Morpheus’ crew who is not happy living in the real world and that’s Cypher. So much so, he hatches a scheme in which he’ll betray Morpheus to the AI and in return, the AI will put him back in the Matrix, ensuring that he lives a happy life and never even remembers the truth. As Cypher puts it, “ignorance is bliss.”

On one hand, I think we can understand Cypher’s perspective. The real world isn’t a fun place to be. The earth is scorched, people are living underground, they dress in rags and eat slop, and they’re constantly risking their lives fighting a war that will be very difficult to win. Compared to all that, maybe the travails of an ordinary life, even if it’s not real, might not be so bad.

But Cypher’s plan to try and ignore reality for his own comfort, not only has disastrous results for himself, but for the people around him.

In the interrogation scene we discussed earlier, Agent Smith also says: “As soon as we started thinking for you, it became our civilization.” To come back to the idea of false realities we create for ourselves — it’s not difficult for humans to trick themselves into thinking their specific perspective of the world applies to everyone. Especially if they continually reinforce that perspective.

In a way, this is the same thought process that leads Cypher to declare, “ignorance is bliss” because if we’re only living in the truncated reality we’ve created, we’re not acknowledging the truth that other people might not be experiencing the world in the same way we are.

And obviously when the Wachowskis released this movie in 1999, the digital age was still in its infancy, not nearly what it is now. But I think they had their pulse on the idea that as technology advances, the true problem is going to be the way in which it distorts reality.

The Matrix is an epic story with martial arts, sunglasses, leather, and slow motion, but all to speak to the idea of not letting AI pull the wool over our eyes, even if it makes life seem easy. There will come a time when we’ll have to push back against that kind of thing to make sure we stay human.

Let’s continue this discussion in the comments! I would love to hear all your thoughts on The Matrix, but before we wrap up, I’d like to give a sneak peek at next week’s movie.

A Sneak Peek

Out of the four movies in our lineup this month, I think this one will most closely resemble where AI actually is for us right now.

Her tells the story of a man who develops a relationship with the AI on his personal devices. The AI is personified by a female voice and is called Samantha. Basically the setup is: What if someone started to think of Siri as a real person?

It was released in 2013 which was only three years after Siri was first released on iPhone. If you remember the early days of Siri, its capabilities were pretty limited to simple commands. They still kind of are, but if you’ve seen what AI chatbots are capable of now and merge that with the idea of Siri then you get Samantha, or Her.

Writer/director Spike Jonze actually was inspired in the early 2000s by an article that about a new technology: AI chatbots. He tried talking to a chatbot and was interested for the first 20 seconds, until it became obvious it was very much a machine, limited on its ability to reason and conversate.

But the more the chatbot interacted with people, the more it learned to talk like a person. Jonze then imagined a near future where the chatbot would be indistinguishable from how real person — at least in how it communicates. I don’t know that our chatbots are indistinguishable from humans just yet, but we’re inching closer and closer every single day.

Here are some questions to keep in mind while watching Her:

Is Theodore’s relationship with Samantha genuine? Or is it self-delusion?

Does Samantha ever feel “real” to you? How do you define real?

Do you think this story is a warning about AI or a suggestion about how AI could benefit people?