BBC Focus Magazine

[Liam Sheppard]

woulnt it have been more beneficial for the robots to have hooked up a load of apes? rats? pigeons? or something to the matrix, insead of unruly humans?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Or cows, or wales even, yes it would I guess, but then it would also make for a far less interesting film.

[Shadowwolf]

Well humans are a good size, much better than small animals and it may have been more humane than just exterminating them; they get power and the humans live on in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. To be honest it was not really that bad a deal as the so called free humans had a pretty miserable lot and a constant fear of annihilation.

Besides if it were cows that they had hooked up then there never would have been a film, had to be humans really.

[Jamie]

. . . and a cow performing a roundhouse kick to the face would look ridiculous!

. . . although the acting might have been better than Keanu's.

Comedy aside, the Matrix conviniently overlooked that the laws of thermodynamics that indicate that humans and animals consume more energy than they provide.

Wll, I think they did. Perhaps I'll be corrected.

[M Paul Lloyd]

It's the old conservation of energy clause.

Work and heat are both energy transfer mechanisms.
No matter how it is transferred the total amount of energy in any system NEVER changes.

[Jamie]

Then why not just burn the food rather that feed them ? Then there's no human maintenance overhead.

[nemisis39]

I always looked at it as the man against machine gig ( great film trilogy btw definitely in my top 10 )

man creates machine,
machine gets smart,
man gets annihilated by machine,
machine takes over,
man fights back.

Not to sure if we weren't the best power source they could have found, though with a war on the magnitude they waged i wouldn't have thought that they were thinking much about animals more thinking about how to win it and take over. Then see what was left and worry about how to incorporate and extract the power, also i would imagine that they artificially produced humans to feed there ever increasing power need so could be that they found it easier to reproduce us than animals

There was a scene in the film were they were discussing tastes and food. the question posed was how did the machines know what chicken tasted like (amongst other things ) the answer was they didn't that’s why everything tastes like chicken

[Shadowwolf]

Perhaps immobile humans sustained on an easily produced glop produced enough power for the machines needs? Mind you I don't think that they were really focusing so much on the strict physical reality of getting power from humans, just a plot device.

man creates machine,
machine gets smart,
man gets annihilated by machine,
machine takes over,
man fights back.

You forgot after the second line, "man enslaves and mistreats smart machine", "smart machine has enough".

Check out the animatrix which expands the story background.

[worldmaker]

woulnt it have been more beneficial for the robots to have hooked up a load of apes? rats? pigeons? or something to the matrix, insead of unruly humans?

There was a far deeper reason, but for that answer you have to take the green pill.

[Shadowwolf]

Oh yes that cannot tell you because you won't believe it, so take some of 'our' drugs to help you see it the way we want you to.

You ask me, he was sucked into a mind frack cult.

[Colm]

They could've made up some mumbo jumbo about needing the brain power of humans to power their machine properly or something

Although maybe it was just a sadistic revenge by the machines to use the humans... Although I haven't seen the last Matrix or even all of the second one..

[Shadowwolf]

For the reasons behind the conflict you should check out the Animatrix, a collection of animated shorts of which some are damn fine.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Yes, I'll second that Mr.S some really good work in there.