“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
The execs thought audiences wouldn’t understand using human brains for processing power.
Same kind of change was made in the Three Body Problem series. Instead of the cosmic microwave background radiation flickering for a character who is viewing it through a device, all the stars in the night sky flickered for all of humanity. Lots of yadda yaddaing the science as well in that show.
I, uh… Okay? Admittedly I was already using PCs at the time that movie came out, but I feel that’s still easier to understand than using humans as batteries. I think both concepts are somewhat abstract but the brain as a bio processor is still something I can grasp more easily than trying to think of where exactly we even store out “energy” and how they’d use that. I would’ve been curious how normies from that time period would’ve seen this though.
Yeah, when the story got out (true or not) a few years after release the general consensus was that it was a bad call.
Probably also a matter of agency. Being used as a battery where you’re still in control of your mind goes over better than “we’re gonna hijack this persons mind and constantly make use of it”. It also then makes things like agents taking over people in the matrix or Smith getting out that much more impactful.
From my view, I feel it would’ve kinda made more sense in explaining the Matrix itself even. If it was computed by our brains, then a good portion of how we perceive it would likely just be part of our own brain processes. Like a dream. It’s often weird but when we’re dreaming we usually don’t perceive it as weird. They wouldn’t have to recreate a complete digital simulation, they just would have to hook up into our brains and let it do the world building.
Using brainpower to power the matrix makes sense, but it sounded like OP was initially just saying for spare computing period, whether for the matrix or anything else even if it wasn’t related.
“Using their spare brainpower” sounds more like them using the remaining parts of someone’s brain that is not used for whatever they do use to run their consciousness within the Matrix.
I guess they’ve never hard of the borg…