Rooting for the robot

Centuries from now, when some distant descendant of Roger Ebert sits down to write the definitive guide to 21st century cinema, he, she or it may take note of the exact moment when “The Matrix” series ceased to be fun. It occurs in “The Matrix Reloaded” when Neo, the hero played by Keanu Reeves, turns into a robot.

Not literally, of course. If you saw the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 sci-fi hit “The Matrix,” you already know that Neo is one of a handful of human characters battling an army of evil machines that keep people suspended in pods, seducing their minds with virtual-reality fantasies while their unprotesting bodies are drained to make battery juice. Although Neo retains his humanity in “The Matrix Reloaded,” the original’s much-anticipated follow-up, viewers still may have trouble telling Homo sapiens from cyborg without a DNA test.

Not so long ago, when men were men and machines had cogs, we imagined robots and other mechanical pseudo-humans as our opposites. Now, wired to our home computers, Prozac and Palm Pilots in hand, Botox and breast implants lending a spooky “perfection” to our features as we ponder shuffling our genes in order to build a better kindergartner, we don’t seem as fazed by the idea of reprogramming ourselves into something beyond the merely human. No wonder pop culture is increasingly ambivalent about whether people or androids and their ilk deserve to inherit the earth -- and which group is ultimately more “human.”

“The Matrix Reloaded” starts to muddy the old man-versus-machine debate in a sequence in which Neo single-handedly routs a posse of clones descended from the dry-witted, revenge-minded Agent Smith; they swarm on Neo like hysterical schoolgirls chasing the Fab Four in “A Hard Day’s Night.” The episode should electrify, but it fizzles because the audience quickly realizes that Neo has become just another invulnerable Hollywood stunt-mannequin, able to flick aside enemy assailants like so many gnats while barely ruffling his leather duster.

In the first “Matrix” installment, though Neo could dodge bullets and vault across rooftops, he was still largely bound by his human limitations, vulnerable and sweet in a geeky, kid-brother kind of way. We could identify with his fears of confronting a terrifying hidden reality, his existential dread at the state of the world.

But the “Reloaded” Neo is humorless and preternaturally reserved, and with practically unlimited powers (he can fly; he can intuit the bad guys’ presence like a cybernetic Miss Cleo), he’s hardly discernible from the unfeeling, brutally efficient machines he’s supposed to be fighting for the sake of the human race.

Like his cohorts Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), he seems sleek but soulless, imposing but dull.

In contrast, Neo’s nemesis, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), especially in the first film, comes across as Mr. Personality, making wisecracks, bearing old grudges, and even griping humorously about his job because it means he has to hang out with humans. Honestly -- whom would you rather sit next to on a cross-country flight?

The dreams of today’s culture

If for past generations being human partly meant learning to make peace with one’s physical and mental imperfections, today’s culture holds out the dreams of perpetual youth, bigger brain cells, or the ability to look like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston with the shake of a test tube.

In “The Matrix Reloaded,” the fantasy is of unlimited consciousness combined with gravity-defying physical ability. “Free your mind,” the movie insists, and your body will follow. The filmmakers seem to believe all this is possible without the benefit of character-building confrontations, without having to deal with loss or limitations, sacrifice or death. (In each film, a key character seems destined to die, only to be snatched from the jaws of mortality at the last moment.) Neo can download a computer’s hard drive into his brain to get smart, but can he get wise?

Since “The Matrix” was released four years ago, thousands of words have been written citing its philosophical and literary influences, from Plato’s analogy of the cave to French bad-boy intellectual Jean Baudrillard. But another book that speaks resonantly to the themes the movie raises is Bill McKibben’s just-published “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age” (Times Books).

In it, the author of “The End of Nature” argues that new technologies such as genetic engineering and advanced robotics threaten not only human survival, but also human identity. What will it mean for any person to set an Olympic sprint record or have an IQ of 160 if it’s all mapped out in a lab before birth? McKibben asks. What will be distinctive about these achievements if they can be attained by anyone who can afford to purchase the right chromosome sequence?

It’s in sci-fi treatments like “The Matrix” and the novels of William Gibson and Greg Egan, McKibben asserts, that we can best see the consequences of such once-unimaginable scenarios. “I think that we’d be wise not to try to turn ourselves into robots or robots into ourselves if there’s no need to do it,” he says. “It’s not clear what the necessity is for that in our lives.”

The problem may be that we don’t exactly know how to define “human” anymore. (We’ll see another cinematic example of the receding line between people and ‘bots when the third installment of the “Terminator” series blasts onto cineplex screens later this summer. What does it say about a film’s view of the human condition when the machine, a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger, keeps being asked back for the sequels?)

“There’s a huge philosophical discussion about what makes a person a person, but I think the important thing to acknowledge is that a nonhuman can be a person,” says Michael S. McKenna, an associate professor of philosophy at Ithaca College in upstate New York. “E.T. could be a person, Data from ‘Star Trek’ could be a person. There are some scientists who think that a dolphin could be a person. Consciousness depends on the ability to reflect upon and evaluate oneself. You needn’t be a human being to be a person, and given that it’s possible there are animals that are nonhuman persons, it’s not inconceivable to imagine that you could build a person.”

Changing view of machines

The notion that machines could be as sentient and multidimensional as human beings was slow to develop in pop culture. When machines began replacing human labor on a large scale during the Industrial Revolution, they were often regarded as Satan’s smoke-belching spawn, sinister tools of the ruling class.

That attitude persisted, in fits and starts, throughout much of the 20th century. Charlie Chaplin transformed himself into a comic monkey wrench in “Modern Times,” gumming up an assembly-line monstrosity. Metal bipeds threatened mankind with annihilation in any number of post-World War II sci-fi flicks. In Britain’s “Dr. Who” TV series, the Daleks matched the appearance of a vacuum cleaner on steroids with the twisted soul of Adolf Eichmann, racing around and bleating “Exterminate! Exterminate!” in tinny castrati voices.

For the most part, these machines were ugly and unimaginative, with one-track minds and the personalities of the Maytag Man. That began to change when visionary fantasy auteurs such as Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton realized that robots and other intelligent life forms are most formidable and intriguing not when they’re different from us, but when they’re almost exactly like us, so much alike that it may be impossible to spot the difference -- until it’s too late.

That perception lay at the core of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” the source material for Ridley Scott’s landmark sci-fi film “Blade Runner” (1982). Around the time of the movie’s release, Dick gave a telling interview, parts of which are reprinted in Danny Peary’s indispensable “Cult Movies 3.”

While researching the Nazis for another book he was writing, Dick said, he came upon the diary of an SS soldier assigned to occupied Warsaw. The soldier observed that he and his colleagues were being “kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.”

Dick told the interviewer: “It is not human to complain that starving children are keeping you awake. There ... was born my idea that within our species is a bifurcation, a dichotomy between the truly human and that which mimics the truly human.”

Films such as “Blade Runner” and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” radically and disturbingly argued that if humans no longer acted like humans, what reason was there to root for them versus the machines? Other ‘70s dystopian movies like “Silent Running” and “Westworld” showed humans to have poisoned the planet through greed, warfare, moral decadence or environmental destruction, while becoming as cold and unfeeling as any robot. When the actual robots took over, or took their revenge, it was hard not to cheer under your breath. We’d come a long way from the evil steel doppelganger in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”

“Blade Runner” initially flopped with many reviewers and the public because its human characters were deemed too inhuman -- which, of course, was exactly the point. The “post-human” feel that Pauline Kael and other critics found in “Blade Runner” was deliberately created by Scott and his production team to scramble the distinction between the ostensibly human characters such as Deckard, the robot-hunting mercenary played by Harrison Ford, and the exploited, cruelly short-lived “replicants,” who’d been pressed into slavery by their human masters.

Later movies such as Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” and “The Matrix” pushed these arguments even further, daring to ask whether simulated intelligence, nonhuman personhood and a virtual existence might not actually be better than the “real” thing.

“A.I.’s” young hero, David, is a robot boy equipped with the capacity to reason, dream, intuit and bestow unconditional love. As portrayed by the cherubic Haley Joel Osment, he’s much more sensitive and likable than the scheming biological offspring of his adoptive human parents, making him both endearing and unnerving. This visionary fairy tale of a film unsettled some viewers and critics who may have been expecting director Spielberg at his warm and fuzziest. Instead, “A.I.” reminds us that robots are really the mechanical stand-ins for our own desires and fears -- and their seeming perfection throws our shortcomings into high relief.

Faced with a choice between an unbearably grim, human-made reality and a seductive electronic fantasy, a virtual existence concocted by a machine, “The Matrix” asks how many, or rather how few, people would rather fight than surrender their core humanity -- not only their physical bodies, but also their capacity for free will.

As Cypher, the Judas figure of “The Matrix,” says in a much-quoted line of dialogue: “You know, I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”

Free will carries less weight

In “The Matrix,” Neo’s fearless quest to know the truth is supposed to represent the antithesis of Cypher’s cynical surrender. By the end of “The Matrix Reloaded,” according to the movie’s internal logic, Neo has truly begun to liberate himself in transcendent Zen fashion. Yet his evolution makes him appear not more human, but less so. Because his powers now rival or even exceed those of the machines, his choices are less consequential; his exercise of free will carries less weight than it did when he was more obviously made of mere flesh and blood.

Though Morpheus tells Neo he is the One, the savior of mankind, Neo’s Ubermensch cool clashes sharply with the hot-blooded primitives living in Zion, the last human holdout, who rave against the machines by throwing massive dance parties that morph into orgies. Until nearly the very end of the second film, when he risks Zion’s survival to save his love interest, Trinity, Neo’s attitude toward the machine-oppressors might as well be: “Can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em.”

Of course, we’ll have to wait for the final installment of the Wachowskis’ trilogy, “The Matrix Revolutions,” to open in November before we’ll know how Neo handles his new powers. Perhaps, as McKibben and others suggest, humans can demonstrate their superiority to machines not by imitating and competing against them, like or chess master Garry Kasparov matching wits with IBM’s Deep Blue, but by embracing their own “imperfect” human condition.

In “2001,” it is only when the soft-spoken, emotionally lobotomized Dave becomes angry with HAL for killing the other astronauts that he connects with his own warts-and-all humanity, earning the right to survive and save, by analogy, the entire race.

Are robots and other intelligent machines our enemies, or our alter egos and heirs? “The Matrix Reloaded” likely won’t be the last film to raise that uncomfortable question, to make us interrogate our own identities and even wonder if life as a Tin Man or Tin Woman might really be so bad after all -- if we only had a heart.