Okay, I know this is about as timely as Y2K, since the movie was released in 1999, but it’s on TV at this very moment, so it’s on my mind. To recap the premise of The Matrix, before I get to my beef: it seems like mankind has lost the War Against the Machines, circa 2199. The machines have (quite ungratefully) enslaved their makers, literally encapsulating all humans from birth in little pods, feeding us by tubes. This is so that we can serve as power sources, “batteries” in a massive thermal and electrical energy producing infrastructure. The Machines apparently were using solar power, but we messed that up for them in the War.
Now already I have a beef, but it gets worse… in order to keep us docile, the Machines created the Matrix, a neurally interconnected virtual reality simulation that they feed to the humans via a tube to the brain. This convinces us, in our stupor, that it’s still 1999, and all is well.
Right. Well, first of all, why would a human wired into a pod from birth even need to be kept docile? Surely this wouldn’t be a big issue, and even if we did become agitated, wouldn’t that just generate more energy? And even if worse occasionally did come to worst, the Machines could just open that little escape hatch and flush those occasional little troublemakers into the Hudson. So why go to all the trouble of feeding our brains this complex virtual reality? Makes no sense, machines wouldn’t do that.
But here’s my real beef: why use humans at all? Where are all the COWS?? For starters, they’re already docile. And even if they did need to be fed some kind of Matrix to keep them contented cows, all you’d really need would be a five minute loop of a nice day in the field, some white puffy clouds, maybe an occasional tourist in a passing car yelling “mooo” out the window… child’s play for a Machine VR programmer. Plus, think of all the methane they could harvest, must be a million things a Machine could do with methane.