Question: I hope I'm not missing anything, but why do the machines allow Zion to be rebuilt each time the Matrix is renewed, the code returns to the source, etc. etc. and everything basically starts over? If people can consciously free themselves from The Matrix, fair enough, but wouldn't it just be easier for the machines to detach them, de-tank them and dunk them like they did to Neo? Otherwise they are in effect, re-creating their own enemies over and over again.
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Question: Why was only one Agent sent after all the Smiths when the woman saw them all in the burly brawl? Couldn't the Matrix itself have turned as many humans as it needed into Agents and outnumbered the rogue Smiths? Or did they interpret one Agent being beaten by a Smith as meaning they would never win against him?
Chosen answer: The Matrix only became aware of Smith after the one woman saw the fight, the woman was converted into an Agent and Smith then infected them. Other people nearby would also have been converted into Agents, but this occurred off-camera, as did Smith then infecting these people, the large influx of Smiths that occurs towards the end of the fight are the people who turn into Agents who then get infected by Smith.
Question: Why was the commander of Nest not allowed to see Optimus during the video conference? He was high enough in rank and security clearance to be entrusted with seeing Prime for himself, wasn't he?
Answer: Not exactly. Even the highest level of clearance can still bar people from something if it's considered very important. It was a decision made by the leader of the operation, and whatever he says goes, even if there is someone higher in authority than him.
Question: Why does AMEE prolong the death of the crew? Why not kill them all the minute they try and remove her power source?
Chosen answer: At first, she's assessing the threat level. After she determines them to be a threat, she then decides how to eliminate them. She decides on guerilla warfare because she can fare better in the environment than humans can. She was damaged, so if she tried to attack them all at the same time, she would likely lose the battle.
Question: In the movie, AMEE is shown to have various settings, such as 'Navigaton' and 'Military'. It is also stated that AMEE is on loan from the marines. My question is, before giving her to the crew of Mars-1, why didn't the marines remove the the military part of her programming? What possible use could it have been to the crew?
Chosen answer: It was disabled. The part of her program that was in effect was merely the survival instinct, given to it so it could protect itself.
Question: What exactly are those little bug things on Mars and how do they produce oxygen?
Chosen answer: They aren't given a name. They act like plants, except instead of absorbing carbon dioxide and expelling it as oxygen, they eat plants and release oxygen from their bodies. It's probably more effective than using plants since they weren't expecting to be able to breathe on the surface.
Question: This applies to both Revolutions and the first Matrix film really - why do the machines have no security around the Matrix itself? In the first film, Morpheus and co. are able to fly near enough to extract Neo once he's been de-tanked, and in Revolutions Neo and Trinity fly right by it - do the machines not think Zion might ever try and disable their main/only source of power, thus beating them once and for all?
Chosen answer: The vast majority of the machines live in one central "Machine City" which we see in this movie and is located somewhere in the middle east (The Animatrix:The Second Renaissance), the huge towers we see Neo in when he is first freed are scattered around the earth built on the remnants of the human mega-cities (New York/London/Tokyo/etc). This means that a) they are very very big and b) they are very spread out. The tower/cities are protected by Sentinel patrols (and possibly other defences) and the amount of damage one lone Zion ship can cause is insignificant at best and it's implied that the machines have control over the creation of new humans, so any pod-people lost could quickly be "manufactured" and replaced.
Question: In the scene where the hypertime QT agents are in Zak's house, one of them gets sprayed with liquid nitrogen, bringing him down to normal time. But, if he is in normal time, wouldn't Zak's mom and sister see him? Don't you think they would call the police after seeing a stranger in their house?
Chosen answer: Probably, but it's not essential to the plot so there's no reason to show it.
Answer: These are top agent like figures who likely don't want many people knowing what's going on. Those still in hypertime probably carried the normal-time agent out of the building before Zak's mom found him.
Question: Since Marty's actions led to him not existing, shouldn't no Marty mean that there would have been no Marty to get hit by the car in the first place, meaning that Marty would have just reappeared when he ceased to exist?
Answer: The simple answer is NO. According to the time travel rules established in the films, alternate realities are created when changes are made to the past. Marty continues to exist as long as there's the possibility that he exists in 1985. Small changes don't affect him. Marty only begins to disappear after the past has been altered so significantly that he would *never* exist in the present. But at the time he gets hit by the car, Marty hadn't impacted the timeline enough to assure his non-existence.
Question: Wouldn't Aladdin have one more wish, since technically he didn't wish for Genie to save him from the water?
Answer: Technically, yes. He would still have one wish left. After being knocked out, Genie asks Aladdin if he wishes for his life to be saved. After grabbing Aladdin, his head drops down, which Genie takes as a yes, However, since Aladdin was unconscious the whole time, he never actually confirmed the wish. Genie only assumed he did. Also, since Aladdin was out cold, he could once again make a case that he never wished for his life to be saved since he wasn't awake to make it.
Chosen answer: Under the rules that the genie lives by, he can only use his abilities to grant three wishes per person. He's already technically broken those rules once, when he helped Aladdin escape from the cave, despite Aladdin not actually wishing for it, but that wasn't an intentional violation; it can be considered a mistake on the genie's part, a misunderstanding of what Aladdin actually said. As he said after that incident, he can't give Aladdin any more freebies; while he can stretch the rules a bit, he can't consciously break them again by using his power on another non-wish, even to save a life. The genie's taking Aladdin's unconscious "nod" as affirmation that he agrees to use his second wish to be rescued from drowning. By the rules that govern the genie's existence, even though Aladdin didn't actually say it, it has to count as one of his wishes.
Question: Does anyone know if makeup/cosmetics or other beauty practices, such as women plucking eyebrows and facial hair, existed during this time period? I know that this is just a movie and the actresses are supposed to look attractive, but I'm curious if it would have really been around back then.
Answer: For Dark Age beauty hints look at the website of historical novelist Octavia Randolph, on https://octavia.net/ Your question is brilliantly answered in the section https://octavia.net/early-cosmetics/ The Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons and Vikings were buried with grave goods, items they used in everyday life. Archaeologists often uncover burials of men and women who were buried with elaborately carved combs for hair care, tweezers for plucking out surplus hair, ear scoops and small wash basins. There is good evidence that people processed herbs and flowers as cosmetics and make-up.
Answer: The historical sources from the time in question are scant - it's not called "the dark age" for nothing. Having said that, beauty practices like plucking eyebrows and make-up have existed since ancient times. We can safely assume that there were certain ideals of beauty, and ladies of all times strove to meet them. These ideals have changed frequently over the times, so plucked eyebrows may or may not have been the fashion in early medieaval Britain.
Question: Why did the author of the book, that this movie is based on, hate this movie version so much?
Chosen answer: He felt that it took too many liberties with the story. In the original agreement, Dahl himself was to write the screenplay (he was, by that point, a not-unsuccessful screenwriter), only to find that his version of the script was subsequently heavily re-written, including what Dahl felt were a number of unnecessary gimmicks, such as Wonka's penchant for literary quotations. Even the title of the film was changed from the original "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", in order to tie into the launch of the "Wonka Bar", a new candy bar made by the Quaker Oats company, who co-financed the film. Annoyed at all the changes, he ultimately disowned the film and refused to sell the cinematic rights to the sequel, "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator".
Question: I don't get it. How can an eclipse stop evolved humans from accessing their abilities?
Chosen answer: As of season three it has not been explained. The characters gained powers after the solar eclipse of the first episode and temporarily lost them during "The Eclipse". It could be some form of cosmological radiation, Hiro and Ando make Superman analogies (who only has special powers because of Earth's yellow sun), Suresh believes it may be coincidental, or it might possibly be related to the catalyst, or it could be influenced by an as yet unseen character.
Question: World War 3 may have been the reason for the nuclear war, but what caused World War 3?
Chosen answer: It's never stated what caused it (in this movie, at least). So much time has passed that historical records have been lost or destroyed, and the remaining humans are no longer literate, nor do they have any inkling about their species' past. The apes also do not appear to know the reason, only that mankind somehow destroyed their own civilization.
Question: Why does Ben need to find the city of gold to beat the kidnap charge? The President's story of "We got trapped and he saved my life" would work just as well without the discovery.
Answer: Ben lured the President to the tunnel to ask him about the Presidents' Secret Book, knowing the President wouldn't admit its existence in front of anyone else. This also means the President couldn't tell secret service what really happened. Ben told him he needed to see the book "to lead us to the discovery of the greatest Native American treasure of all time." The President doesn't know if this is true or if he has some other criminal plan for the book. Finding the treasure shows the President that Ben was telling the truth. Had Ben been lying, the federal charge of kidnapping the President would put Ben in prison for life, effectively punishing him for the kidnapping as well as for lying to the President. Considering Ben had already discovered a massive historical treasure once before, and knowing the recently tarnished name of Ben's family, the President was willing to trust that Ben wasn't lying about his intention and gave him the information needed.
Question: What has ended up with Max? Billy promised to go back and release him, but we never see that happen, and no explanation is given for that in the Epilogue. Is Max a real figure? If he is, what has happened to him? Did he manage to escape, or did he die in prison?
Answer: Max WAS a real character, and a Dutchman in real life, rather than an English one as portrayed in the movie. He eventually got paroled and later treatment for a severe drug addiction he had too.
Answer: It's never stated what happened to Max. The film was a heavily fictionalized version of Billy Hayes' book, and the Max character appears to be fictional as well or at least a composite of other real-life imprisoned Westerners that Hayes met while in a Turkish prison.
Question: I know there is one quick shot of a real iguana when Robert Davi puts it on the couch, but are all the other shots fake? And why did they use a fake iguana and not a real one in the rest of the shots?
Chosen answer: Reptiles are difficult to train and handle, and can hold up filming by being uncooperative. Using a reptile model would simply be easier and faster. Long hours on a movie set is also stressful on animals. There may be other shots with the real iguana, but I can't say for sure.
Question: I know that this is such a small detail, but it's been bugging me for a while and google has been no help. In the original series, the command uniforms were gold and security was red, but in Next Gen and everything thereafter, it has been reversed to command being red and security being gold. Anyone know why the change was made? I'm looking for a real world explanation, not a continuity one as I already found one of those. Thanks.
Answer: When ST:TNG went into production, television had changed drastically from the time the original series aired in the 1960s. Not only were special effects far more advanced, but editing, camera angles, set design, lighting, color schemes, types of film used, and so on, were all very different. It was likely a decision of what looked best from an artistic-design point-of-view to give the series a fresh, updated look as well as to reflect how much Star Fleet had changed since Captain James T. Kirk's time. Red is also a very prominent color, and it draws the viewer's eye to it, and to the character wearing it. Therefore, that became the command color. Also of note is that the "old" uniforms, as of the Star Trek original series movies, had more or less universally switched to red uniforms with smaller department insignia. Thus, chronologically they removed colour coding in favour of pure red for everyone, and then decided to bring back colour coding - but retained the red for command instead of switching back to the old way.
Question: What exactly do the machines do on a day-to-day basis? What's their reason for existing? Is it solely to maintain and perfect the Matrix, develop more efficient programmes and hunt down the remaining humans? Are they planning universal domination? Or just designing more cute inquisitive little metal spiders with which to fill their cities?
Chosen answer: The machines tried to peacefully found their own nation before the war that sent the last of the human race underground. So their society would not be entirely unlike our own. They perform tasks similar to a society based on agriculture would. They are not planning any sort of domination. They just wanted to be free and respected as mankind's equals. Humanity wouldn't have it, so they did what they had to do to survive.
Question: It wasn't addressed in the movie, but did NASA intend for Lev Andropov to go on the mission, assuming the RSS didn't blow up? It seems odd that later on, he has his own pressure suit and spacesuit without any explanation.
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Chosen answer: The machines use the humans as power so it stands to reason that they would want to hold onto as many humans as possible (even defective/inefficient ones). The Architect, in his enormous speech in Reloaded, states that the Zion "solution" was an acceptable (from the machine point-of-view) way of dealing with people who rejected the Matrix (less than 1% of the total pod-people population). Those freed would then free others who also reject the matrix (this is desirable for the machines as the disbelief could spread and result in more rejecting the matrix resulting in "crashes"). Once the Zion population gets too big the machines eradicate it and start again. So, yes, the machines are creating their own enemies, but strictly on their terms as part of the plan to keep the matrix going.
Sanguis