The Animatrix - The Second Renaissance: crimes against sentience and its importance in the Matrix trilogy

So I promised I'd write something following up my Ash and David comparison, but uhhh...that might not be happening anytime soon. I've been kind of lazy in trying to get the Alien DVD, and now it's been close to a month since I saw Prometheus, so David is kind of falling out of my mind. I also meant to see Aliens just to talk about Bishop, but that never happened either. I really do want to get back to that at some point (or at least mention something about Bishop, since he seems like, chronologically, the first android in the series that doesn't try and kill anybody), but for now it's kind of on the back burner until I get around to watching Aliens or rewatching Alien.

So instead of talking about androids in the Alien franchise, I want to talk about the machines from the Matrix trilogy. Now, now, I know Reloaded and Revolutions are intensely unpopular (I still think Revolutions is decent, it just doesn't live up to the first film), but don't worry, I don't really plan to mention them. In fact, I'm not going to talk much about the first movie either (though I do love it and need to watch it again so don't be surprised if there's more Matrix talk in the future). I'm going to talk about the Animatrix, specifically The Second Renaissance segments. The other parts are all pretty good (I'm also a huge fan of World Record and Program), but The Second Renaissance has a depth and sophistication that the others do not, mostly because it tells the backstory of the world pre-Matrix. I read somewhere that its story was originally intended to be one of the other Matrix movies as a prequel, but some sort of executive meddling prevented that. I'm really torn on whether I'd like it better as a full movie or in this form. I think it definitely has enough to make a feature out of, but on the other hand, there's some powerful and disturbing imagery that I'm not even sure they could get away with in live-action.

(Interesting but unrelated: the machines were originally enslaving humans to use their brains as processors instead of using their bodies as energy, but the powers that be thought that might be too complicated for people. I almost wish they had kept it in though, at least so smartasses would stop bringing up flaws in the battery logic. Not the point!)