Film

When Se7en scriptwriter Andrew Kevin Walker picked up his Empire award for best screenwriter (or something similar), his acceptance speech mentioned how he’d been aiming to win the vote of manic depressed students with his script and this was proof he’d succeeded.

I think the Warshawski brothers were aiming for the same thing with The Matrix. As you might recall, Agent Smith takes Morpheus to one side and says that he’s worked out that humans are viruses, because we grow without limit, etc. This was his rationale for wanting to wipe us out.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), this chimed with a load of teenagers, who thought they’d been given some higher truth. Pseudo-intellectual sci-fi movies will do that to you.

However, I do feel that Agent Smith drew an incorrect conclusion. All he correctly determined was that a species of animal will expand without limits if there aren’t checks on it from natural predators, etc.

We aren’t viruses, my friends. We’re bunnies.

I can’t help but feel that would have ruined the mood, having a psychotic bunny-hater as an enemy. I’m sure you could argue about Smith’s mindset leaping to the best analogy his computer-generated mind could hit. But all the same, I think it would have been fun.