The REAL Matrix Revolutions SPOILERS thread

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Yeah, Smith may not have known that Neo was hard-wired to the Deus Ex Machina when they were fighting. I wonder if that would've affected his decision to assimilate Neo.

That was my conclusion at the end of the movie. Neo set a classic trap, tricking Smith into putting his code under the direct control of the machines, which Neo's real world body was hooked into. Of course Smith didn't know where Neo had jacked in from, Smith just assumed Neo was hacking into the Matrix as usual. Big surprise when he realizes too late that Neo had jacked in from a machine terminal. I assume that at that point the head machine just did a kill -pgid (Agent Smith) on Neo's body, and that was the end of Smith.

 

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But he also says that he, Smith, wants to get out of "this place." What does he mean by this? Did he just want to get out of that room with Morpheus? Did Smith actually come from the machine world and want to return? Did Smith always have some type of plan to overrun either the Matrix or Machine City before his battle with Neo? Are we, as fans, just supposed to disregard this remark?

Well, he told Morpheus that once Zion is destroyed, he didn't have to be there anymore. Smith believed his purpose was to find the access codes to Zion so the machines could go and destroy it. However, we know that the machines already know exactly where Zion is, since they've destroyed and rebuilt it five times already. So it appears that Smith is just another unwitting part of the ruse being played to control the 1% of humans who reject the Matrix, and The One. The purpose he believed he had was never his true purpose, but rather a lie the machines told him or programmed him to believe so he would behave in a way they needed him to. Why the machines needed to obfuscate his purpose, I haven't yet figured out.

 

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How all of this may play out is anyones guess, but it does leave things open for further development.

Yeah, they left it fairly open, however there was a small clue about one possibility in Reloaded. When Neo and the Councilman were chatting that night down in the Engineering level, they discussed the co-dependency of humans and machines. That appeared to be an allegory for a possible outcome to the war: a peace in which the machines create a true utopia inside the Matrix (perhaps as shown in the final scene of Revolutions), and some humans actually choose to live there, as Cypher did, powering the machines in return for the historically elusive paradise on earth.

Since the Enlightenment, human philosophical thought has been bent to the task of devising and implementing utopia. But all attempts have failed to some extent or other, and we are left only with an improved existence, but not a perfect one. Finally, humans are given a complete utopia, that can be just as real as the real world, by the machines. The problem of choice is finally solved, as humans are allowed to move in and out of the Matrix as they wish, and the Architect simply relies on the statistical probability that enough humans will chose to live in the Matrix to power the machines. The One may still occur periodically, but his motivation to fight against the Matrix will have been removed, since it is a concious choice of his fellow humans to live there.

Of course, that is all speculation based on a minute hint, but it seems reasonable to me. The problems with it are, 1) it would require the machines give up some of their control over the human race. Would they be willing to do that? 2) To live in the Matrix, humans would need the head and body plugs. Does that mean they will still be "grown" with those implants in place, and what do the free humans think about that? Further,if Zion-born humans without plugs want to get inside the Matrix, can they be implanted?