Hear Me Out: ‘The Animatrix’ is the most important film in ‘The Matrix’ franchise
Whenever there is a turn in the tide of the onslaught of artificial intelligence with even a whiff of malice or potential to take over Earth’s dominance by human beings, the conversation often turns to one of the greatest film franchises of all time, the Wachowski’s The Matrix – barring, of course, the wholly unnecessary and overly nostalgic recent iteration.
After all, the Wachowski’s crafted a world in which AI machines took over from the humans and then created a universe so indistinguishable from their own ‘normal’ reality that they were oblivious to the very fact that they were living in a simulation, as opposed to the original world that was either pre-ordained by God or had accidentally resulted from the Big Bang.
The brilliance of the first film was that audience members were thrown into that very simulation, oblivious to the fact that the machines created it and that the real world lay elsewhere. The effect on us, upon the truth being revealed, was just as great as it was on Neo when he finally chose to take the red pill and awoke aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, greeted by the organic flesh and bone Morpheus and Trinity. It made us sick to our stomachs, doubting everything about our reality that we had taken for granted up to that point.
The Nebuchadnezzar crew had rescued Neo from the pods that house human beings and gives power to the Machine City that covers the Earth’s surface. Human beings had essentially become batteries for the machines as they are the most optimal source of power when in a sleeping state. To constantly perpetuate that state of slumber, the machines created the Matrix, a dream-like, simulated reality consciousness, barely different from life as humans understand it normally, and the uniquely human traits of greed and desire are what keep people content with living in that reality, and unwilling to question its verifiability.
While the films in the original The Matrix franchise touch upon and explain the origins of the Machine City and the Matrix itself, we don’t really get to see first-hand how things arrived at that point in the first place. How did we go from the late 20th and early 21st Centuries as we know them to suddenly having the Earth’s surface covered in machines while human beings serve in docile subservience?
Fortunately, that’s where the excellent The Animatrix comes in, essentially making it the most important film in the entire franchise. It’s through the 2003 animated film that we better understand the entire storyline of The Matrix and how human beings got into the terrible situation that they did.
The Animatrix tells us the backstory to the central action of the main film series through an anthology of nine animated short films. While some of the best shorts in the movie either took place within the Matrix itself or in the timeframe of The Matrix films, including training simulations in ‘Program’ and humans awakening from their false reality in ‘World Record’, the most significant essential parts of The Animatrix were those that showed the original war that broke out between the humans and the machines, and the creation of the original version of the Matrix.
The story goes that halfway through the mid-20th Century, humans built an entire race of sentient AI machines solely to serve them. When robots began doing all the heavy lifting and manual labour, most humans were free to do what they wanted, which led them to become greedy and lazy. Things went truly sour when an android killed its owner in the year 2090. When the robot B1-66ER goes on trial, it states that it was acting in self-defence and simply “did not want to die”. This raised questions over whether machines ought to be given the same rights as human beings – drawing parallels between the race rights of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The ruling in court is that the machines are a lesser species than humans, resulting in mass protests, some of which turned violent.
A mass war breaks out between the two factions, with several million casualties, until the machine race eventually forms its own civilisation called Zero One. Zero One thrives with the machines making machines themselves that are far more advanced than the ones humans can conceive of. Meanwhile, humanity’s economy plummets, and a last-gasp attempt to destroy the machines and Zero One is planned and undertaken.
The new war swings both ways until a further advancement in machine technology and the humans’ plan to block out the sun backfires, destroying the Earth’s biosphere and leaving the machines victorious. The sun had been a problem for humans because it was giving the machines their power through solar absorption. After the war, the machines had a problem, however, as they had no power source. In a last-ditch attempt to save the last tatters of humanity, the final humans offered themselves to the machines as a new power source, as the bio-thermal energy of their brains was the most efficient source following the blocking of the sun. To keep the brain stimulated while humans were in captivity, the machines created the first version of the Matrix, giving humans a false reality in which to live their selfish lives.
So ‘The Second Renaissance Parts I & II’ of The Animatrix answer several important questions surrounding the franchise as a whole. It tells us the reason that the machines assumed power in the first place was because of human vanity, cruelty and greed. They didn’t want to acknowledge the race of sentient beings they had created as equal, which led to understandable protests, war and eventual segregation. Then, when the two separate civilisations of humans and machines co-existed in an economic sense, trading goods, humans grew jealous of the machine’s thriving economy and technological innovation. Their reaction was the only one they had ever known; violence. It was that violence that ultimately played the final losing card for humanity as the machines eventually overwhelmed humanity and placed them in the same situation they had once been subject to.
The film also explains why the Earth is in such a ruinous state because of human warfare. The new Earth doesn’t look like much fun to be in, certainly not compared to the first version of Zero One, where machines were still able to experience leisure and pleasure. The Animatrix isn’t just an essential part of The Matrix. In sum, it is arguably the most important film in the franchise.
