When all is said and done, you still won’t know. But given the legacy of the first film (which left you leaving the theater curious about your own existance). I would guess that when all is said and done, they would like you to still wonder.  There is a big biblical play, but once again it only works if everything weve seen so far is in the matrix. The oracle would in fact be Jesus, the Architect would be God, and Smith would be Lucifer.

Jim -
Oh, I didn’t mean to associate the characters with that list of “themes” in exactly that way, my fault.  Let me put it another way:  many of the characters Neo encounters represent challenges or questions to Neo on one way or another.  The Big Interactions and Conversations he has with them represent a challenge presented to Neo and a theme in the movie.  When he talks with Morpheus, I don’t mean to imply that Morpheus represented Reality in the movie, but that Morpheus’s character was always bringing up the nature of reality vs. dreams and consciousness with Neo, lots of what Morpheus says to Neo reflects his character’s role to challenge Neo in that way....but on that note, Morpheus is also aligned with the religious/faith/God theme of the movie, as he also talks a lot about his complete faith in The Oracle and the Prophecies, and don’t forget (how could you??) his big Sermon on the Rock...that was a crazy nutty scene, eh?  In the dance/rave/(orgy??) that followed, I wasn’t sure if I was watching a car commercial or something (take a look at some recent car ads or Adult Drink ads if you don’t know what I mean!)
Also, I don’t think The Oracle herself is meant to BE God - but she reflects the role of a High Priestess, maybe, with a direct line to a god...whether that’s the Architect, or something/someone else.  I mean, she really does predict things that really do come true, as you said, Jim...how??  She knows Neo’s dreams, she knows who Trinity will fall in love with, she knows Neo’s smallest movements to come (shen he broke the vase in first one).
Either she does have a link to a supernatural source that allows her to know all of this, OR all the boys and girls are still in the Matrix even in Zion...that’s all I can come up with, anyway.  Which was why I asked originally, are Morpheus and Trinity, etc., programs designed to find and court Neo respectively, to bring him to the Architect??

I think ther is a bigger questions, and that you are purposely led away from it from the beginning of the first movie, and that you will come back to it at the very end of the story. I think you will find they have always been in the matrix, even in Zion, but the question remains “What is the matrix?” It may end up being as the story had lead you to beleave, but it could also be any number of different things, a video game such as Tron (high tech sequeal due out next year), it can be a dream (links awaking), it could be a simulation (skewed version of total recall), it could be a computer virus (t3 rise of the machines), it could be almost anything.

Bullpup—if the WB’s go any of these routes

“I think you will find they have always been in the matrix, even in Zion, but the question remains “What is the matrix?” It may end up being as the story had lead you to beleave, but it could also be any number of different things, a video game such as Tron (high tech sequeal due out next year), it can be a dream (links awaking), it could be a simulation (skewed version of total recall), it could be a computer virus (t3 rise of the machines), it could be almost anything.”

They’ll never be anything but adolescent comic book hacks in my book :). 

I lean away from Zion being part of the Matrix, but don’t exclude that as a possibility.

Jim

Shanny brings up a point that was my first idea when I saw Reloaded: themes. The first film had us walking around going ‘Do I exist?’ ‘Does anything exist?’ ‘How do I know?’. The question of the first film is ‘What is reality?’ In the second one there was all this talk of causality and choice. So Reloaded’s question is ‘What is free-will?’ There is a stream of thought there, which might give us clues as to what Revolutions will be like. There are three levels to every question: What, Why, and Where. What is eating? Why do we eat? Where do we eat? “What is reality?” “Why are we here (to fulfill some divine destiny or to carve out our own future? Destiny or choice?)” The third one thus falls into “Where is reality?” I think that the entire focus of Revolutions will be on answering the questions between the relationship of Zion, The Matrix, and the real world.
Seeing the preview of Revolutions after the credits, we saw that Neo will fight Smith in some street deserted, except for the hordes of Smiths. We also know that those security exo-suits in Zion will get to go into action. So we know that Zion will be attacked and we can assume that the ultimate battle will be between Neo and Smith. What if ‘The Matrix’ exists in two parts independant of each other, but still one program: Zion and The Machines. What if the Architect runs the Machines, not the actual Matrix? I’m thinking that Revolutions will be the final struggle between Zion and the Machines for control of the Matrix, once the nature of their relationship is established.

Jim-
You should watch ‘Unbreakable’. I think that comics have been keeping alive artistic romanticism while the rest of pop culture has been taking a cynical nose dive away from imagination. Imagination, according to the poet Coleridge, is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite’. In more religious terms: ‘the attempt by man to repeat the act of creation performed by God’. There’s a book you might want to read called ‘The Sleep of Reason’ by Derek Jarrett which discusses this idea more fully.

-Za’chary

Zach—thanks for the references.  I’ve seen Unbreakable, but I’m not sure how you’re referencing it.  Right now I’m inundating myself in William Blake, so I’m getting plenty about The Imagination :).  I don’t think comics are the primary domain of imaginative activity in western society.  I used to read them as a kid, and going back to them I find them terribly limited.  They’re good for the audiences they were written for.

Interesting thesis about Revolutions, btw. Definitely a possibility, I guess we’ll just have to see.

Shanny—does the Oracle really know the content of Neo’s dreams?  Seems like in Reloaded she had to ask him about them, acting then as an interpreter.  If she was just generally asking about whether or not he was having dreams, I don’t think that’d require any special knowledge on her part.  I think that’s part of the territory.

Jim