»Zionites could be the enemies of humans«

I was just thinking,

After watching the trailers (again) that it may be that the machines are in fact benevolent. Could it be that humans are perhaps living in the matrix for their own protection until the Earth's dark sky problem fixes itself?

This would assume that the history humans know (both in and out of the matrix) is false. Which is not hard to accept as the initial human histories brought out of the matrix are all hard coded. We can not really be sure that the history portrayed in the Animatrix is really what happned. The first person who began the resistance still grew up in the matrix. Besides, its not hard for the machines to plant items in the real world to start up the resistance, including evidence of the history so reported in the Animatrix.

It would also mean that the resistance (zionists) as it were are the enemy of not the machines but the human race.

Furthermore it could better explain why the first matrix didn't work. No system is perfect and the matrix is a system. Some people in the system just didn't accept it: They /knew/ something was wrong, so rather than have this crash the system they created an outlet for these people. And think about it: Humanities bent up hatred and loathing of deception is generally not apparent /inside/ the matrix. Inside the matrix there are no wars, because the war makers are in the /resistance/ outside of the system, in Zion. Sure they infiltrate the matrix from time to time and cause a few minor problems for the agents and kill some humans, but nothing /major/.

When Zion (inevitably) becomes strong enough to do major damage (as is the case when a Neo appears AND becomes a part of the resistance) Zion is destroyed, as it has been in the past. I guess normally these Neo's would be killed off by the system.

So the battle for Zion is reduced to a charade to keep those individuals outside the matrix (along with their warring notions) from /really/ affecting the system and the human race. I guess you are even improving the human race by out-breeding the warring parties. This take puts the fact that the Wochowski's purposely cast mostly dark skinned people in the resistance in a totally new (and let us hope) incorrect light.

To add to the general argument take a look at the speech in the engineering level: The talk hinges on the way humans and machines need each other. Nobody knows why or how it works.

The cryptic notion that the guy who protects the Oracle is really protecting the future only adds to this benevolence because he (as is the oracle) are parts of the system let us not forget - They are hard coded. Why would you hard code something to protect humans before machines unless the matrix is in fact benevolent at some fundamental level!

Any thoughts??

becasue there are other things that seem to indicate morpheus et all are evil: The scripture on the Neb's plaque is talking about demons hailing the Son of God, they paint all kinds of parallels between hell and Zion in dialogue and imagery... we get (in addition to points you already mentioned) that Zion is evil.

BUT what I think is that whatever Neo does, what the goal of everything is, is to have everybody living in harmony- machines and man together.

A plot twist revealing the characters everyone has grown to love so far are bad guys is not satisfying, and takes too long to set up and explain.

I prefer to think of it as the Zionites as being alienated from happiness (not just goodness), while humans in the Matrix are slaves of lies. Somehow, the symbiotic relationship between the two will be solved in a way that brings balance to everything.