SPOILERS. I think I may need to make a new category for this. After reading Kottke’s thoughts and following the subsequent discussion, I was amazed at the level of ignorance on what normally is an insightful forum. I’m going to try and pull together a couple of my thoughts on all the discussion I have seen so far, though it really warrants a new site, something I’ll have to do in my copious free time.

It’s probably better to completely ignore the philosophy in the Matrix than to look at it superficially. It’s not light stuff, and offhand comments that just confuse people do more harm than good. A good place to start would be Philosophy and the Matrix, which I’ve deep-linked partly thanks to the movie’s awful website. (You would think that with all the millions floating around they could hire a decent web developer.) There are some excellent essays there, but to really appreciate it I think you need familiarity with the original works of Kierkegaard, Hume, Baudrillard, the Bible, Plato, Hok, Descartes, and probably more than those that I missed. Can you criticize what you don’t understand? Yes, but not from a philosophical point of view. It’s like reading T. S. Eliot without knowing Dante; you may appreciate some of the words but you miss the deeper meaning. There are so many levels of allusions that you get a lot more out of it. I admit that every time I have seen Reloaded (three times now) I pick up something new.

For example: As the Nebuchadnezzar explodes, Morpheus (Greek god of dreams, son of god of sleep) says something to the effect of “I had dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.” Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king in the Book of Daniel, has troubling dreams (2:2) that deny him sleep and orders all the wise men killed when they can’t tell him what his dream was. Morpheus goes further, let’s look at Ovid’s Metamorphoses

King Sleep was father of a thousand sons —
indeed a tribe — and of them all, the one
he chose was Morpheus, who had such skill
in miming any human form at will.

Is Morpheus, as an instrument of the Oracle, and possibly the Architect, simply the one chosen by the Architect (who as the creator of the world that keeps humankind in a state of perpetual hallucination would be a good parallel to Hypnos) to lead the One (anagram: Neo) to the “garbage collection” that is the reinitializing of the Matrix? It’s obvious that a lot of thought went into the creating of the story of the Matrix, and seeing it merely as an action film with sketchy CGI or a Christian allegory or a product of the internet boom mentality doesn’t really do it justice.

All that from one line, and yet you have reviews that devote half their ranting to the experience of going to the movie rather than going to the movie itself. You have people who built the first Matrix up so much in their minds that anything less than a total orgasmic experience is a complete let down. You have the otherwise brilliant Anil Dash saying that Bane/Smith at the end is Cypher, who as everyone knows died in the first movie.

Intelligent discourse on the movie is really lacking; a couple of things should happen in the blogoshpere.

• There should be a FAQ everyone should read before posting about the Matrix.
• There needs to be a single place we can all trackback, so that some meaningful cross-blog conversation can happen, and the discussion is aggregated in an easy-to-follow manner.
• People should watch the movie again, preferably at an afternoon matinee where the reality of the movie-going experience doesn’t keep you unpleasantly grounded in your surroundings.
• Most of the Matrix fan sites I’ve seen, like the movie site itself, are amateurish. At the least a tasteful design would be appreciated. Leave the media (pictures, clips, etc.) out to keep bandwidth costs down, and just offer insight to the movie. A wiki would be a nice, allowing everyone to lend their individual interpretation and respond in kind, but that model works so badly for all but the geekiest audiences that I think a “letter to the editor” setup might work better.
• I’m sure there’s more that could be done, any suggestions? Is some of this already out there?