9 Movie Villains Who Are Really The Victims
7. The Machines in The Matrix
The machines are evil, surely? I mean, its hardly new for science fiction to warn us about the future of technology or us losing our collective sense of humanity the further we develop artificial intelligence. But in the Matrix, the humans are the good guys trying to take bake reality from the Agent Smith viruses and flying machine Sentinels of the world. Right? Well, yes. But the machines wouldnt have to take over the world if we humans werent so terrible to them in the first place. Detailing the back-story of the Matrix is the anthology film The Animatrix, considered completely canon and, in one of its short films, detailing the start of the man-machine war. The Second Renaissance pinpoints the conflict as starting when one android, B1-66ER, kills his owner and a mechanic told to deactivate him in self defence. Keep in mind, this is already after humans have created androids and largely employed them as servants, which the androids are actually happy to be. B1-66ER is put on trial, judged not to have the same rights as human beings and is destroyed. The rest of the machines do not take this well and an all out racial conflict ensues.
It doesnt stop there either. The machines are then exiled, forcing them to set up their own society called Zero One. When this society begins mass-producing goods so well that it starts to undercut the world economy (take a moment to consider what that exactly means) then the UN sets up an economic blockade on Zero One and when negotiations fail, war is declared. This is where the machines draw the line. Considering the humans had already disregarded their rights, exiled them then tried to destroy their nations economy, Id say theyre quite a forgiving lot. The machines fight back and win the war against the humans, though this war destroys the planet. In need of a power source to survive, they use the waste energy of human bodies in rows of cocoon-like devices to power massive reactors (which Neo famously escapes from).
Ah! There you have it. Maybe the humans were responsible for the conflict, but when it was all over the machines used human beings for fuel. They must be the villains. Except, in turning humans into a power source for themselves, the machines also set up the Matrix, the virtual reality capable of housing all of the humans and (keeping in mind Im no scientist) being at least one thousand percent better than living a war-torn wasteland.