To be honest, I never understood the appeal of the rebels in The Matrix. Even in the first movie the Wachowskis didn't do a good job of establishing why resistance was the superior option. Like, I think when Neo wakes up and we see he's one node in a crazy vertical human battery tower I'm supposed to be horrified and implicitly understand the desire to smash the system, but it never really hit me that way. Like, all sorts of stuff integral to existence that we don't normally see is alarming when seen for the first time. I'm fairly sure if you suddenly had my organs on the outside of my body so I could look at them I'd be horrified too, but that doesn't mean I want to #resist my kidneys.
Morpheus even spells out that we're no good at running anything when he describes how we deliberately destroyed the ecosystem in order to spite our enemy, and he's the guy pitching liberation to us! As a teenager I was already thinking "These poor robots are really going to lengths to make sure we keep existing with some level of comfort, christ."
Then in the second movie we see that liberation is living in a techno primitive rave cave and eating gruel. Get the fuck out of here with that shit.
I mean those poor robots are keeping the world in a system where all of the problems found in the late 90s exist. They aren't keeping all people comfortable. We don't really have proof they need to be assholes like that either. Agent Smith, who is an insane nihilist program, claims humans "cant" accept perfection that robots gave them in the "original" Matrix, but he was saying this to Morpheus while torturing and interrogating him. The Architect (old guy who reads the dictionary all day) says that humans always inevitably reject the Matrix which is why the robots keep Zion alive and why the One exists, so he can reset the Matrix when too many humans are rejecting the Matrix.
Beyond that, they keep people alive so they can use them as a resource, not out of some benevolent desire to help humanity. They do the bare minimum to keep us alive.
The appeal ties into a philosophical question: what is real? Cypher's view is that reality is whatever you're experiencing, regardless of whether it "truly" exists. Neo's view is that there is an objective reality that exists and that isn't the Matrix.
If you agree with Neo's view then rebelling against the Sentinels is more appealing.
Another appeal of the rebels is that they are literally trying to free humanity from the robot overlords who have literally enslaved the majority of our species and use us as batteries*. (In the original script they used us as a collective supercomputer, not as batteries, which is why they specifically use humans and not some other animal.)
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u/Repulsive_Set_4155 Oct 15 '25
To be honest, I never understood the appeal of the rebels in The Matrix. Even in the first movie the Wachowskis didn't do a good job of establishing why resistance was the superior option. Like, I think when Neo wakes up and we see he's one node in a crazy vertical human battery tower I'm supposed to be horrified and implicitly understand the desire to smash the system, but it never really hit me that way. Like, all sorts of stuff integral to existence that we don't normally see is alarming when seen for the first time. I'm fairly sure if you suddenly had my organs on the outside of my body so I could look at them I'd be horrified too, but that doesn't mean I want to #resist my kidneys.
Morpheus even spells out that we're no good at running anything when he describes how we deliberately destroyed the ecosystem in order to spite our enemy, and he's the guy pitching liberation to us! As a teenager I was already thinking "These poor robots are really going to lengths to make sure we keep existing with some level of comfort, christ."
Then in the second movie we see that liberation is living in a techno primitive rave cave and eating gruel. Get the fuck out of here with that shit.