“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.
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.