|
|
|
||
|
By The Manifest Staff
|
|||
| IN RANDOM ORDER: 1. THE BESPIN “ALL MY CHILDREN” ENDING  Before dealing Neo a fatal blow in the final fight scene, Agent Smith reveals a disturbing secret to The One: not only is Agent Smith Neo’s father (somehow, don’t ask us how), but Neo and Trinity are brother and sister (which means you were right to find their nipple-free “sex” scene in Matrix: Reloaded disturbing—it was incest!). Horrified by the backwards morality of the young Chosen Lovers, the Zion council votes to exile Neo and Trinity to the secret “other” underground human city, Xanadu, where the pair split up to join opposing rollerderby teams and are pitted head-to-head in a final steel cage match to the death.(S. Palomino)  2. THE ZIGGY PIGGY ENDINGOkay, stay with us on this one. First of all, Zion never survives the squid invasion: the entire city is gutted like a hemophiliac sow in a chainsaw factory, and Morpheus himself is reduced to a small pile of smoldering ash. Neo intuits this as he flies to The Machine City with Trinity, whines like a baby when she gets impaled on a rebar and dies, then walks onto the platform to confront The Machine itself, begging for a second chance. Suddenly, a square of light is drawn out on the metallic surface next to Neo, and a PHONE BOOTH (the same phone booth he used to make a phone call in the end of the first Matrix movie) pops out of the square in a haze of sparks and smoke. Out pops Alex Winters (previously cast as the third naked hippy from the right in Reloaded’s Zion hippy dance scene), accompanied by George Carlin and assorted character actors dressed as Norbert Weiner, Marshall McCluhan, Frances Fukuyama, Marvin Minsky, and U.G. Krishnamurti. They take the astonished Neo on a rollicking adventure back through time (soundtrack by KISS and Led Zeppelin), where he sits in various graduate libraries trying to understand the vagaries of neo-liberal economic policy, bioinformatics, esoteric neo-Vedanta philosophy and The End of History. After losing Minsky in a bar somewhere in 1970s France, the merry crew raids an M.I.T. sorority house and makes off with twenty pairs of stiff, crusty nerd panties, which Neo flings like ninja stars at the very first A.I. device—a foul-mouthed robotic TV personality named “Ann Coulter XV.34”—thus nipping the machine revolt in the bud. Neo returns to the future in time to see Trinity, Morpheus, Tank, Cipher, Dozer, Mouser and everyone else alive and well working as slaves to a race of lizard-men from Planet Flexx (who, no longer intimidated by the powerful Machines, have taken the Earth with ease). (Y. Wrath) 3. THE “JUST BUY A FUCKING MACINTOSH!” ENDING  Final scene: The Machine gets ready to jack Neo into the Matrix and ... and ... DRIVER ERROR. NEO V.2.0 INCOMPATIBLE WITH MATRIX."Whoa--" "SILENCE!" states the Machine with irritation. "DO NOT SPEAK UNLE--". But the Machines have all locked up in an operating system freeze! “Whoah!” says Neo. "Yay!" cheers Zion. But now humanity faces a new problem: everyone still jacked into the Matrix will die in 24 hours if the Machines are not unfrozen and made operational! Neo must now save the Machines to save the humans (Brief flashback to the scene in Reloaded where the Chancellor is discussing his views regarding who really has power; the people or the Machines)! A quick investigation reveals that the operating system the Machines all run on was based on an ancient 21st-Century technology known only as "Micro-soft". Most known records on this matter claim that a "reboot" is the first possible solution to the problem. Naturally, Neo tries a reboot of the system--nothing happens, beyond a basic DOS prompt. The next "Micro-soft Solution", according to the records, is to "reinstall." Finding a room piled ceiling high with little disketts, Neo and his friends set about the endless process of switching them in and out, hoping to bring the Matrix back online. This too fails (much to the annoyance of the audience, to whom a quick camera cut reveals a missing installation disk which had fallen behind a desk after Neo accidentally shoved the pile while showing off kung-fu moves). The failed installation process does, however, load up a backup version of the Merovingian, who had foreseen this very circumstances and considered it necessary to resurrect himself in such a scenario. Claiming to be an heir to the enigmatic “Micro-soft,” the Merovingian reveals the root of the sudden Machine shut-down: the impossible-to-prepare-for "Y3K" Problem, which he claims has struck at just this moment: 2999 AD, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds. There was a .000001% chance that everything would grind to a screeching halt, and it did. Movie ends with Zion engaged in a ferocious court battle with the Merovingian’s “Micro-soft” just as the tenuous friendship between Morpheus and Neo devolves into an argument over whether “Micro-soft” should be hailed as heroes for having the foresight to embed the Y3K bug which killed the Machines (Morpheus’ take), or monsters for dooming countless imprisoned souls to a very real death in the defunct Matrix (Neo’s position). (Another quick camera cut behind the very same desk which hid the reinstallation disk reveals the film’s punchline: a power cord leading to the mainframe. An unplugged power cord.) (M. Francois)  4. THE PAUL WOLFOWITZ, GALACTIC NEO-CON ENDINGFor all their ravenous power and prodigious technology, The Machines seem strangely uninterested in the conquest of outer space. Needing a human face to hide their flatland depredations from more benevolent star-hoppers, The Machines make a deal with Neo as he confronts them in the final scene. Morpheus is spared and Trinity put in cryogenic preserve in order to induce Neo into the role of real-world Liaison for The Machines as they wend their way into intergalactic politics. It’s in this capacity as liaison that Neo’s most startling realizations come to pass: RIVAL communities of Machines exist on every planet in the solar system, powered by massive populations of humanoid E.T.s held in place by their own versions of the green-hued Matrix of planet Earth, including the purple Simulacrum of Pluto, the orange and navy blue Façade of Jupiter’s moon Io, the teal Maya of Mars, the burgundy w/ pinstripes Dream Machine of Neptune, and the hot pink Fun Jail of Uranus. Not only that, but each alien “matrix” has it’s own Agent Smith (or Agents Jones, Thompson, Michaels, Levine, and Bonzo the Klown, respectively), and in a final fight scene, Neo karate chops 6,056 individual agents in the neck and dumps their bodies on an asteroid bound for the center of the sun. The Earth-base Machines now reign victorious throughout the solar system, and with Neo’s help set their sights on a more ambitious target: rearranging the stars of the entire Milky Way to spell out “Bring it on Andromeda!” in ones and zeros. (P. Salamone) 5. THE LITTLE BUDDHA ENDING  Sorry, we couldn’t resist another reference to the Keanu Reeves filmography. But, unlike the ridiculous Bill and Ted’s scenario (#2—you got that, right?), this one actually makes a bit of sense. In the climactic scene of this 1993 Buddhist epic, Keanu – robed and top-knotted as Prince Siddhartha himself—sits under a tree and comes to see though all illusory forms of suffering, sin, and separation. Yet where that movie failed, this one shall succeed in breaking through the very barriers of the film itself, depositing Keanu-Neo into the body of Keanu-Siddhartha just in time for the soon-to-be Buddha’s confrontation with the demon Mara. Upon resisting Mara’s threats and temptations and defeating the demon god, Keanu-Neo-Siddhartha-Buddha finds himself reincarnated in the tiny, blonde-headed body of Jesse Conrad (child actor Alex Wiesendanger) as he is chosen to succeed the fictitious Lama Dorje—but it doesn’t stop there! Keanu-Neo-Siddhartha-Buddha-Jesse next transmigrates to the set of another 1993 movie, the MacCaulay Culkin vehicle The Nutcracker where Wiesendanger had an uncredited part. During a shooting break, Culkin is kidnapped by Keanu-Neo-Siddhartha-Buddha-Jesse-Wiesendanger and brought back to the Matrix proper, where he is set to work constructing various booby traps around an abandoned house inside which Neo lies in wait for his final confrontation with Agent Smith. But Agent Smith never makes it past the electrified doorknob, so Neo is forced to take on Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern (who also managed to transmigrate between movies) in a slow-motion conflagration of spilled paint cans, buckets of nails and a handful of M-80s. The whole thing ends in June of 1966 with Pesci and Stern standing guard as Roshi Philip Kapleau cuts the ribbon on the brand-new Rochester Zen Center, where Keanu-Neo-Siddhartha-Buddha-Jesse-Wiesendanger is cloistered in a secret chamber and sought out by the upper echelon of Buddhist seekers throughout the world for his wit, wisdom, and multiple personality syndrome. (S. Palomino) |
©2003 The Manifest E-Zine