"The Second Renaissance" (2003) are two anime short films which are a part of The Animatrix collection. Both parts were originally written by the Wachowski brothers, and part of the first short is based off a comic story the brothers did with Geoff Darrow called Bits and Pieces as a prequel to the science fiction film The Matrix (1999). They were rewritten and directed by Mahiro Maeda, who directed the anime series Blue Submarine No. 6. However, the brothers have acknowledged that they are satisfied with Maeda's version. The shorts were rendered by a mix of traditional hand drawn animation and CGI. Both are extremely violent.
The shorts provide a background to The Matrix. Part 1 explains the origins of the machines' conflicts with the incumbent human civilization. Part 2 shows the war which results in the machines' dominance and the creation of the Matrix. Both parts are structured as fictional documentary films, unlike the other shorts from The Animatrix.
The animated series Codename: Kids Next Door parodied the shorts in the episode "Operation: A.R.C.H.I.V.E."
Plot summary
Part 1
The film begins with an introduction to the Zion Archive and the access of Historical File 12-1, "The Second Renaissance." This file opens to the image of a city that is controlled by humans but where the everyday 'grunt' work is done by a vast multitude of artificially intelligent machines. Human morality and ethical standards have decayed due to the fact that the human population has become lazy and lethargic with the machines doing most of the work. At this point, the machines are content with serving humanity and "for a time, it is good."
This all changes when one of the machines, a household servant named B166ER, is threatened by its drunken owner. B166ER kills both the owner and a mechanic who had been instructed to deactivate the robot. This murder, which humans consider shocking and brutal, is the first incident of an artificially intelligent machine killing a human. B166ER is arrested and put on trial, but justifies the crime as self defense, because it "simply did not want to die." During the trial, the defense argues that machines deserve the same rights as humans, using the Dred Scott v. Sandford case as precedent, and that self defense is a legitimate reason for what B166ER did. However, the judges and government disagree and undergo a vast campaign to destroy all robots of B166ER's model type. The robots do have some sympathizers who attempt to prevent the destruction of robots on a wide scale but are unsuccessful. Maeda directs what follows to the robots as horrors that humanity has inflicted on itself. He references such incidents as the Eddie Adams photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's execution of a Viet Cong officer during the Vietnam War, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Holocaust. Eventually, the remaining humanoid robots go on to create their own nation, named 01 (or Zero-One, the numerals used in binary notation), in the Middle East. (Earth-orbit views of 01 imply that it is located in the Fertile Crescent, in an uninhabited desert region, near the place where human civilization started).
The machines of 01 begin to reproduce new and better artificial intelligence, echoing Vernor Vinge's thoughts on the Singularity. They also excel at creating technological consumer goods and are soon creating economic devastation in other countries. As the audience is informed, "The leaders of men, their power waning," order a blockade of the new country. Part 1 ends with the United Nations debating whether to declare war on the robot city and the rejection of two robot ambassadors, built as a robotic Adam and Eve, that are sent on what is believed to be a genuine mission of peace.
Part 2
This part begins with massive nuclear bombardment of 01. However, this does not destroy all of the robots and thus leads to essentially World War III between humanity and machines. As humanity begins to lose the war, a consensus is reached to blacken the skies in a final solution to cut the robots off from their primary energy source, the sun. There is a lot of spiritual imagery associated with this part of the episode as the humans draw closer to Armageddon with the machines. Operation Dark Storm, as the plan is named, is executed, with high altitude bombers dispersing a sky-darkening nanomachine (ironically, made by the machines of 01) into the air, while a ground offensive is launched on the machine forces. The plan is initially successful, although many of the human nations' weapons systems were built by 01 and are also neutralized by the black sky, resulting in the human nations launching massive, close-quarters infantry engagements, electromagnetic pulse artillery battery-fire, armored assaults with nuclear-powered tanks and powered suits, and even nuclear weapons. However, it is too late as the machines have already adapted. The newer machines, now no longer in human form and appearing more like the insectoid, squid-like Sentinels from the films, completely overrun the human forces. The machines, having "studied man's simple, protein based bodies," also resort to biological weapons, dispensing "great misery upon the human race." The war ends and the machines undertake to experimenting on humans to create a new energy source; hence the Matrix is created. The machines give the leaders of men an offer to accept this new world, but when they reject the offer, they are exterminated, removing the last resistance to building the Matrix.
Commentary
It is worth noting that these two shorts in particular portray the conflict between the machines and humankind in a way different from the other Animatrix shorts or any of the three movies. These two show the humans to be at fault and the instigators of the war. As a result, they provide a viewpoint that attempts to create a sense of sympathy toward the machines.
Also worth noting is that (while the films have been universally hailed as a visual and technical leap of mixing traditional hand drawn animation and CGI), some have pointed out some plot holes in the shorts, most notably in Part I. After the machines establish City 01 in exile, the narrator explains the machines excel in creating technological consumer goods, but there the narrator never explains why humans would buy these items from a race that they attempted to exterminate. Some have also questioned whether the human race would extinguish an entire people (the machines) over a single crime.
Furthermore, the wealth of details contained in the "Zion Historical Archive" contradicts Morpheus's statements in the original film, to the effect that the human resistance was unaware of how the war began. On the other hand, the film never makes clear how credible this Archive is. The nuclear bombardment of 01 can be considered another plot hole, because while radiation may not affect machines in a very serious way, the electromagnetic pulse created by nuclear explosions would have been more than enough to destroy the entire machine population. (The Matrix establishes that an EMP is the humans' only effective weapon against their mechanical adversaries; it is reasonable to assume that nuclear explosions—where EMPs were first observed—are at least as powerful as the bursts generated by shipboard power sources.)
It has been suggested that "The Second Renaissance" is just an interpretation by the survivors who had to piece together history in a ruined world. For example, it may be unlikely that the robots would be human shaped, or that they would work the way they are shown to do (in the style of Egyptian slaves), since one would expect the use of cranes and other non-sentient machinery. (In his proto-cyberpunk mystery novel The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov argued for the opposite viewpoint, noting that robots built in human form can manipulate pre-existing tools.) So, maybe it's all just pieced together, part from fiction (taking movies for real events) and part from facts.
"The Second Renaissance" also fails to resolve the thermodynamic problem frequently raised with the Matrix, namely that humans require energy input to survive and are therefore not viable power sources. (A fan-theory is that human bio-energy is not the main energy source of the Machines; it's the activation energy needed to start a fusion reaction while not violating the laws of thermodynamics. Why this activation energy must come from human biochemistry is, again, unexplained.)
External link
- As of December 2004, both parts can be downloaded for free from the official Matrix website: [1]
