My argument would be that, in doing your 3 above, Neo still ends up doing exactly what the Architect and the Oracle together are playing him to do; their objective is to persuade the Deus Ex Machina to give the humans a chance at more interesting co-existence, for which they set up viral-Smith as the threat, in the later two films, and Neo both as the means to turn a regular agent into a viral threat, in the first film, and ultimately the means to overcome him in the third.
I may well be wrong, but I find the whole series as a skillful and well-depicted exercise in careful memetic manipulation of a not particularly bright Everyman quite a bit more satisfying than it being the hamfisted Hero's Journey retread it appears on the surface.
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Date: 2010-06-15 05:34 pm (UTC)I may well be wrong, but I find the whole series as a skillful and well-depicted exercise in careful memetic manipulation of a not particularly bright Everyman quite a bit more satisfying than it being the hamfisted Hero's Journey retread it appears on the surface.