The Matrix: Wasted Potential

This is a tale for all the fellas, try to guess what the Matrix tells us. Bust a move! But not the move that they did in making the 2nd Matrix movie (the Matrix Reloaded) or the 3rd Matrix movie (the Matrix Ultimatum). Anyway, I wanted to talk about how much of a head cannon was built up between the 1st Matrix movie and the 2nd one. And like Dune, it's important to place Paul Atreides (or in this case the Matrix 1.5) in its time. It was the best of times, it was the early internet days of the early 2000s. There were a ton of trilogies at the time: Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Matrix. X-Men 2 wasn't actually terrible, it was a good popcorn flick, something to go see with friends, shout "That's Mystique!" when you see a character that's obviously Mystique on the screen (like shooting at the screen, it's fun and everyone else in the theatre appreciates it). Well, during that time, people were happy with the sequels (especially the Lord of the Rings) and the Matrix was no different. People expected the Matrix sequels to be as good, if not better, than the first movie. The head cannon, which is when fans insert what they THINK the creator of whatever content will do or did do, was strong. People at the time were saying things like "Morpheus is the lord of dreams" which must mean that he's actually just introducing Neo to another dream. Neo will discover that he's actually a machine and he's the one being controlled by agents (humans) in the Matrix. Or the "real world" was just another Matrix, like a box in a box like that good TNG episode where Morirarty thinks he's escaping the holodeck but he's really just in another program that is generating content on the fly (literally as the character is flying through space so pun intended). Back to the head cannon. There was so much theory on where things were going but I think the best idea is that we keep things going with the whole "this isn't real" thing. By saying to the audience "You're in the 'real' world now Neo, this place is Zion, we are flying in ships, this is a all real" that was awful. The draw of the original Matrix was that people can and do see how artificial are existence seems to be. We rely on physics and natural laws that sometimes seem too good to be true (think life in the universe or the time that we live in). You're saying that we just HAPPEN to exist on the only life-supporting planet and just HAPPEN to exist at a time period when artificial intelligence and simulated reality is taking off. Very convenient. Basically my point is that the audience never should have been allowed to stop questioning what is real. They should have been stuck on that roller coaster similar to the arguments people had about Inception (even though it's clear that Cobb made it back to his kids because they were older, the top was starting to lose momentum, etc.). I could go on but that's my general premise, the Matrix could have just stopped with the first movie or we could have had a crazy wild ride through questioned reality, that's the point of this post. Good day!