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sorry, i should have picked a lower resolution poster image whoops (e: fixed)
Also holy shit this movie still kicks so much ass. I rewatched it recently and i was blown away by how excellent it still is 25 years later. Most movies do not age this well.
I've always though a better explanation was that the machines didn't want the humans for batteries and therefore made the Matrix, that's just Morpheus getting the sequence of priorities out of order. They wanted to put the humans in the the Matrix to prevent having to genocide their creators, and in turn they were recycling the by-products to maintain their fusion reactors (Morpheus says they use fusion energy as well as humans).
I vaguely remember the humans were some sort of neural creativity computer thing, but that got changed later to batteries
Yeah originally they were meant to be using the humans for computing power, there's some hangover of that, like how the agents can jump between people and some other thing I can't remember right now. Even in that scenario I think it makes sense they're adapting around imprisoning humans. The Animatrix shows the humans as being the aggressors in the war and the machines initially wanting peaceful coexistence. Initially making the matrix as a paradise seems like a benevolent thing to do.
Morpheus already in his explanation tells Neo that they really don't know much about the pre-war time, him being wrong about the Machines motivations makes a lot of sense, especially given the film trilogy shows us that even the machines themselves have conflicting beliefs and priorities and the series is ultimately concluded by a ceasefire, that the machines are willing to accept.
Animatrix was dope