The Matrix - Energy Conservation

Posted by Rezwan on Jun 15, 2006 at 07:48 PM
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I know, everyone’s a critic, and who cares, Matrix was so much fun.  Yet I rant on:

As Morpheus says:

We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

OK, Dudes. First thing to swallow:  An incredibly advanced civilization that hasn’t figured out the fusion puzzle yet. 

Second thing to swallow:  You’re shutting off the sun because MACHINES are more dependent on solar energy than people?  Let’s accept that all fossil and nuclear fission fuels were used up by this time, and neither machine nor man ever figured out fusion.  The machines still have an advantage when you knock out the sun on earth.  They can just relocate to space and soak up some sun.  They don’t need the sun to hit the earth to survive.  We have a rover on mars!  There’s a machine that has gone out to take pictures of Saturn.  There are more useful minerals on asteroids than here on this planet.  On the other hand, Biological life, including humans, does depend on the sun hitting the earth.  If this was the human strategy in the fight against machines, it was a suicide strategy.  You can’t live in a cave and eat lichen! 

This whole premise is ridiculous [My friend says, “that’s what they want you to think” ].  I felt sure they would modify it in the next few movies, but they only re-iterated it.

But let’s roll with it.  After all, this energy backstory exists as the operating contrivance that gives the machine antagonists in the story no choice but to recycle human beings and use their brains as batteries.  A silly choice on their part.  Solar panels in space (above the scorch line) would probably be an easier way to get some electricity. 

In contrast, the human brain battery gizmo production is running on a downward spiral.  So much energy is wasted just maintaining the person, the energy out would be a lot less than the energy in.  And these people in the pods are being fed other people in a black goo.  Aside from energy loss, cannibalism leads to brain disease and early death.  Cows being fed ground up cow get mad cow disease, people eating human brains get something similar called kuri kuri. So we would expect that after a steady diet of black intravenous human goo, these pod people would eventually all go mad, and then their brains wouldn’t be very useful for energy.

This could have had interesting effects on “The Matrix”, as all the citizens would have strange and frightening hallucinations before they went out.

From the top:  “The Matrix” is designed to stimulate human thought for the purpose of producing electricity to feed the machines.  This energy component of the contrivance is unnecessary.  Why not just have the machines using people’s brain waves to run as a fuzzy logic system enhancing their computational abilities or some such.  Give ‘em extra lateral and metaphoric computational capacity. 

OK, almost done ranting.

The moral of the story is that if you’re looking to Hollywood for breathtaking visions of human possibility to guide us into the future and to help us solve problems, you’re looking in the wrong place. The function of movies is to tell a good story and generate drama. So filmmakers are more likely to come up with contrivances that create problems rather than explore practical solutions.