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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Shitty Movie Details
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Share your favorite movie (and other motion picture media) details, potentially with a shitty twist.
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Their original idea was that humans linked together would create a neutral network; their brain power would increase computing processing for the machines.
But the studio shut it down, saying it was too complex of an idea for general audiences. The battery idea was pushed instead, which doesn't actually work. Humans don't generate enough electricity to be batteries.
Damn that would have made more sense.
This would also imply that the Matrix itself is composed of the shared neural computing network of human minds, yeah? Which means that, in a sense, we each contribute to the collective fantasy that is the Matrix in some way (which ties way better into the Buddhist themes of the film)
Batteries don't generate electricity, they store it. And human fat actually is much more energy dense than the lithium ion batteries we have today. It's almost as energy dense as gasoline, but there aren't any animals that produce gasoline naturally. So if the robots needed a good way of storing excess energy (solar?) until they needed it, and they hadn't made any big battery advances by then for some reason, human bodies wouldn't be a terrible option if you had a good way to fatten them up when you had excess energy and have them burn the fat and turn some turbines when needed.
Problem is, the movie presents it as humans being a source of power, not simply storage. The humans blocked the Sun, the machines' main source of power, so they turned to humans.
Which, as others have pointed out, doesn't work: organic life can only continue with an influx of power, which means keeping humans as "batteries" would be a net spending of power, not a net accumulation.
Now, Morpheus says something like "... combined with a form of fusion..." so maybe the machines had found a way to produce power by fusing atoms found on Earth, and were using humans to store excess power, but that seems like a pretty inefficient approach, unless keeping humans imprisoned and docile was also a big part of it.
Apart from fusion, there were really only two sources of viable power for the machines: geothermal, or sending something up above the cloud cover created by the humans to capture sunlight.
Have you seen any of the Animatrix shorts? Because that's kind of what they show in The Second Renaissance if I remember correctly. It's also why they first tried to make a paradise for humans.