Somewhat flawed scientifically, but intriguing ideas

Rating: 8/10 (7 May 1999)

"Matrix" was definitely thought-provoking. I've been a hard-core science fiction fan since I was in my early teens, and am always glad to see a film which draws on some of the more complex ideas of the written genre, as opposed to stereotypical space operas.
I did find a few faults with the underlying rationale for the AI exploitation of the human race, however. Supposedly the machines had been almost entirely reliant on solar power (which I found a dubious premise to begin with), and then we're told that the perpetual smog has blocked out that power source, necessitating using people as living electrical generators/batteries. The problem with that idea is that a human being (and indeed any form of biological life) requires energy input, and where are all those calories coming from? There was mention of recycling the dead people and feeding them to the live ones, but even assuming 100% energy recapture efficiency (a practical impossibility), no more can be gotten out of the people than is being put in, and the machines' use of that power represents an external drain on the biological system. Also, I'm afraid it's absurd to postulate (as the movie did) that Earth's interior could cool significantly over the course of a couple of hundred years in the absence of sunlight -- it would probably take closer to a couple of billion years. After all, it's almost as hot down below nowadays as it was a couple of billion years ago, and the slow rate of heat loss by radiation into space has had a lot more to do with that than the influx of sunlight.
These flaws didn't ruin the movie for me, because I could think of at least one better reason for the machines to be exploiting the human race in an even more horrific fashion. For instance, the human brain is a much better computer in some ways than anything we're ever likely to build, and I can see how a new breed of artificial intelligences might want to use that processing power for its own purposes. And since very little of our brain capacity is directly involved in conscious thought, I can see how the AIs might be content to use only the unconscious parts, or possibly every conscious effort by a human in the virtual world could actually be a processing activity for the benefit of the machines in a disguised, symbolic form. Thus, rather than providing us with a virtual reality merely to keep us biologically functional, the VR could be part of the exploitation itself.
For whatever purpose it might be done, the images of people being raised from birth obliviously socketed in endless hardware arrays will be with me for a long time.
Of all the ideas presented in the movie, the one I found most intriguing in an intellectual sense was that even if we could be presented with a perfect, utopian virtual reality, our brains would reject it because the element of struggle against adversity would be missing. And I wonder how at the end, the movie's hero could ever be sure that all his trials and seeming successes within the virtual world, and even the supposedly real external world, hadn't merely taken place in an even larger virtual reality. How could he ever know that his "real" body wasn't still plugged in somewhere? For that matter, how can any of us ever know that ours aren't? Descartes, who mused several hundred years ago about the dilemma of a person trapped by an "evil genius" in an imaginary world indistinguishable from a real one, would've appreciated "Matrix," I'm sure.