Interesting subject

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2010)

This was a very interesting film. I plan on seeing it again, and I don't often see films more than once.
The film rightly questions our view of "reality," and asks "what is Real?" like a few other recent films of the past few years (The Truman Show, Dark City), but the characters themselves never leave their own dualism. That is to say, we are to accept the "resistance" as _real_, and life in the cocoons as unreal. The heroes don't realize that they are merely abandoning one "drama" for another. What would have been VERY interesting would have been if, at the end of the film, we discover that the heroes never really left their cocoons in the first place, and that the whole struggle was merely another virtual drama induced by the Machine to keep the heroes happy.
It also would have added to the dramatic tension if the Agents were portrayed as "good" guys rather than evil automatons. I.e., they want humanity to be happy and are willing to let us keep our brains intact and allow us to live out any kind of virtual fantasy we like as long as they are able to feed off of our electrical energy and, eventually, our bodies. If the Agents had under-minded the heroes' faith in their "resistance" reality, there would have been more emotional tension as they would have to ask themselves if they really want to keep fighting or just relax and give in. The deck would not be so neatly stacked in favor of struggling.
After all, that's basically the way it is in duality. You can exchange one virtual drama for a million others, but we all get eaten at the end. During the film, I wondered to myself what a realized sage (like Ramana for instance) would have done if he had suddenly realized that he wasn't really sitting on a mountain but was in fact lying comatose in a liquid-filled cocoon having a dream that he was a sage, while mechanical spiders were sucking off his vital bodily fluids and electrical energy. I suspect it wouldn't make any difference to such an individual.