Fatal Flaw in The Animatrix

I needed to get at least one blog up on the site here, so I dug through my computer and found something that I could copy and paste (being that it is 11:32PM and I still have to feed the baby before going to bed and getting up at 6:00AM)...

Fatal Flaw in The Animatrix

I watched the beginning of the Animatrix over the weekend (I have seen the last half of it about 5 times- but never the first half), and I have to say that it was quite entertaining.

What I was always curious about was the episode known as "The Second Renaissance". This is the portion of the animated film that tells the story of how mankind was the creator of his own demise and of how the Matrix came to be, as I am sure many of you already know.

Do you remember when the humans first went to war with the machines? The humans decided to drop a few nukes on the machine city known as "Zero-One" which was located in the middle-east. According to the movie, and I am paraphrasing, 'Unlike their human adversaries who had such delicate flesh, the machines had little to fear from the bomb's intense radiation and heat'. Suffice to say, the nukes had no effect on the machines and the machine army went forth upon the planet Earth to unleash it's foot up the ass of mankind. Well, that's how the story goes.

What they forget is that, when a nuclear device detonates, it releases an extremely powerful Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). Such an EMP would render any electronic equipment within the surrounding area of the bomb- at least a radius of a few miles- totally useless. Even in the Matrix movies, the machines have no defense against an EMP pulse, as it is demonstrated at least once in every part of the Trilogy (all of the ships in the human fleet carry an EMP device that they can use as a last resort).

What this means is that if the Matrix story line totally adhered to the laws of physics (and this is tough one to miss), the machines would have never made it past the nukes in the beginning of the war. There would have been no "scorched sky", and the human race would go on being an out-of-control 'viral infestation of the planet Earth'.

But, all of that aside, it was still an entertaining movie.