After watching both Matrix and Matrix Reloaded, a question popped out of my mind.. “What is Matrix?”. To me it sounded so familiar to me and it seemed I have known this for ages. I have been born and brought up in a very religious Jain family and been going to temple/sthanak since childhood. From that time I have been told that do good things in life so that u can achieve salvation and get rid of your sins and out of this Bhramjaal.
Question arises: Can I compare this Bhramjaal with Matrix?? Can I say Matrix is a modern way of spreading religion and it concepts?
Most of the Eastern religions, viz Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc. believes in Karma: which we all know as life and death cycle. It says you are going to stay in this world and will follow that cycle till you get rid of your sins. It says this earth itself is Mayajaal or Bhramjaal which u should leave to attain salvation or mousksha.
So it sounded familiar to me that both of them are talking about the same thing. In the movie, Neo and Morpheus helps to liberate people from the matrix. To me Neo and Morpheus sounded like religious leaders or munis or shadus as religion says who are there to show other people the right path to get rid of mayajaal which is described as Matrix.
These munis, shadhus or religious leaders get their knowledge from higher powers (GOD’s or Deva’s or whatever different religion says). So does Neo. He gets his knowledge and advice and right path from ORACLE in the movie. Again I found a similarity, higher power can just tell u the path but again we as humans have to decide which path to choose. Same thing happens in the movie. Oracle tells Neo about Architecture and Mainframe but leaves to Neo what he will choose.
Speech of Morpheus reminded me of Bhagwat Gita where Krishna says to Arjuna, If you have to fight evil, go ahead and fight without worrying about the consequences. Similar message was passed on by Morpheus to the people of Zion who were being threatened by the invasion of machines. Also there is a similarity between Agent Smith: virus program and evil doers as described by Bhagwat Gita. In both the cases, it indicates inside the matrix/bramjaal you have to fight for the Truth against all Evil.
Again, there is a similarity between the two in terms of life cycle. Religion says, once the life is over on this earth, new Yug will come and again there will be new life on this earth and cycle repeats itself. In the movie it has been shown that city of Zion has been destroyed 5 times and for the 6th time there is going to be a huge war between man and machines.
I am not much familiar with Western Religions, so I tried the net to figure out if somebody has found and written about similarities between Western Religion (Islam, Christianity, Zionism etc.) and found one article: https://facingthechallenge.org/matrix.htm.
If there is so much similarity between the movie and religion, can we say that Matrix is a modern way of spreading the religion? If there is so much similarities between the Eastern and Western religion with the movie, then we can obviously say that Eastern and Western religion have similar philosophy and underlying message and all religion are same.
About the movie itself, I really like the concept of the movie which is totally different from rest of sci-fi movies. In this movie they have shown Neo has become more mature and have taken the responsibility of liberating humans who are stuck in the matrix. All the liberated people are living in a city of Zion and many of them believes NEO is THE ONE who has powers to fight against the machines. On other hand there are people like commander LOCK who does not believe in his supernatural powers but believes that they are humans and its practical to be prepared and get ready to fight.
Neo, along with Morpheus, Trinity and Link goes to meet ORACLE, as they believes she can guide or shows them the path to fight against the machines. Oracle tells Neo indirectly that if he wants to destroy the matrix then he has to reach the mainframe and for that he will require key maker who can unlock the doors of the mainframe.
After all the fights and action with various programs and agent smiths (version 2.0) he is able to reach the mainframe. There he meets with the Architecture-who has designed this current version of matrix (version 6.0).
What happens in the end, its shocking to me and left me guessing. I would recommend people to watch the movie and make their own opinion, as I have seen people have analyzed the movie in different ways and at times all the possibilities looks logical.
I personally like the way the movie is made but on negative side I will say, it is bit lengthy. Couple of scenes like dance in Zion and love making scene between Neo and Trinity seems out of place. Also ending was very abrupt and seems like marketing statagy as they want people to come and watch Matrix Revolution that is coming out in November 2003.
Overall I will rate this movie very good and I hope u guys enjoy the movie and have nice time.