Very interesting, a documentary. It’s the first time the art style isn’t easy to define. It’s a mix of CGI frames with rather common character designs. Most of the time we see robots doing their thing, and we don’t really see that many humans.
In any case, this documentary explains how The Matrix originated, why the robots took over control and more background information behind The Matrix. It’s a rather gruesome tale, which makes clear that humanity indeed got what it deserved. This film has been split in two, so the last remaining one will end this story.
In the beginning, humans constructed robots, and the robots fully obeyed the humans. The robot design was rather unrealistic, but it does bring over the point. The robots possessed AI, and they were treated rather badly. Still, entire armies of robots kept working for the humans, doing all of the hard, harsh and dirty jobs.
Then, one robot stood up against its master, and killed him and his entire family. Because of this, humans got scared, and tried to dispose of the robots. What followed was a huge war in which the robots were shamelessly killed off in huge masses. People became to hate the machines. With passion. What follows is a couple of scenes showing the graveyards for these robots. It’s not funny when you realize how many of these were dumped. Entire ocean floors were filled with their corpses.
The surviving machines fled, in order to start a nation of their own, somewhere in Arabia. They called their nation “Zero-One”, or 01. They began to live a life of their own, improving their own AI and equipment. They then attempted to coexist with humans, and participate in the world economy. However.
The leaders of the humans, with their power degrading, didn’t feel anything for cooperation with the robots, who still had good intentions at that time. The robots, attempting to be recognized were killed off. What happens afterwards, we learn in the second part of The Second Renaissance.
Yet again, we’ve got lots of symbolism in this movie. The robots have been given a uniform and human-like design, like in most ancient robot movies. It’s not really realistic when you look at today’s huge diversity of machines. But by giving these robots human characteristics, this film does manage to give them a uniformity. Because of this, things don’t get unnecessarily complicated. And it also provokes some sympathy for these robots, like Matriculated tried to do. I’d say that The Second Renaissance managed to do this better than Matriculated.
Huge exterminations, like shown here, have occurred more often in the history of humanity, at times, even more extreme than this one. Most mass murderers never really got their equal payback (Incans vs. Spain, anyone?). This time, however, payback in the most extreme form arrives. Still, the fact does remain that people uninvolved got their payback as well. I guess that’s inevitable.
The question remains whether what the robots did was the right thing. After all, they were heavily abused, and revenge is sweet. Apparently, even for robots. Still, both the humans and the robots were wrong in this case. The humans for abusing the robots, and the robots for going through the extreme measures of locking the humans up. What happened to love and peace, everyone?
I liked the fact that unlike the most matrix stories this one wasn’t on humans side at all, just showed what happened as another third party would see it. While it wasn’t really realistic nevertheless brutal visuals, commentary and music was effective way to tell the story. And that’s what counts. Quite awesome short clip, I have watched it like four or five times already.
True, the story told was very impressive. I’m currently wondering how the second part will be closing this.
Can you talk to me who or what that hell is this woman that acess Zion’s files? Another program from Machine City?