Thanks! I like that you articulated beyond “it’s baaaaad”. I can understand and appreciate what you are getting at, even if I don’t relate entirely.
Personal does confound me a bit. Questions of “why should I care” puzzle the hell out of me. Because you decided to, obviously! But I am told that’s weird. I tend to consider media as being conceptual and aesthetic, and empathizing with characters instead of an actual person weirds me out as much as having an actual book or CD for a friend. But mine is somehow the minority view.
Sort of - I always thought of Neo and Smith as embodying an inextricable dynamic. They are a duality, where the emergence of one always implies that of the other. They are each others flip side. So I think that the third movie made the better decision of the resolution eliminating both of them.
This is where a lot of personal stuff confuses me. What is power when considered as nebulous potential, divorced from any specific goals? The power to achieve a thing, or know a thing? But what? For The Matrix to have worked as an exercise in pure self actualization, I think it would have done better to not portray Neo and Smith as avatars of conflicting societies. Neo could then have simply integrated Smith and carried on with a broader perspective. What I think is interesting about the intersection of personal power and societies is how individuals use that power in social ways. That power only means as much as what one does with it, how it is negotiated and shared, how it affects society and the world.
So I think that the continued struggle between 01 and Zion, The Architect and The Oracle, was a more valid way to continue the story. But I agree that there were some poor choices in how this was realized.
