Still say Matrix 3 would have been better if the cliffhanger at the end of 2 had been that "the real world" was just another nested layer of the Matrix for those who rejected the primary fiction.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
We should consider if my use of the quote was really a hook for talking about the script or a metaphor for something else. I won't spoil it by explaining too much though, let our imaginations run free on this one.
I think Matrix 3 would have been better if it was more about humans taking control of the Matrix and trying to figure out what a virtual utopia looks like.
I think that would work better in The Animatrix; putting it in 3 would be a tonal shift, plus a sudden human victory would feel a bit Mary Sue or Deus Ex (ironically) Machina to me.
But in The Animatrix, you could get away with that, plus we can see the early attempts at utopia that Smith described. Perhaps something about how utopia for some people didn't work for others could be illustrated with an auto-antonym on some load-bearing part of the dystopic-utopia?:
Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.
We can see this even in current discussions of fiction, where people look at e.g. The Culture and see a dystopia, while famously many of the powerful in tech are parodied for taking the wrong lessons from fiction with "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus".
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.