This is an earlier version of The Matrix, not the first,
maybe the 2nd or 3rd. The free humans of Zion have their
ships and can hack the Matrix but they cannot enter it the way Morpheus and his
crew can.
Tyler is The One in this version of The Matrix and he
manifests through an existing nameless person. The Narrator is commonly
referred to as Jack, the Edward Norton character. His name is, of course,
Thomas Anderson.
Jack carries The One, who manifests as Tyler. Just as Neo,
he works in a corporate building in a city and live alone in an apartment.
The purpose of Fight Club, the Project Mayhem, is to recruit
humans who want to wake up and build and army. At this time they cannot get
humans out anymore than they go in so they create the house on Paper Street,
which is quite possibly a Construct, or tied to one, an interface with the
ship, or even the Zion mainframe.
The buildings that Tyler wants to destroy are the ones that
power the machine army. Destroy the buildings and all power is cut to the army
and Zion is saved.
Just as Neo saves the most recent Zion by fighting the Smith
army inside the Matrix, Tyler saves his
version of Zion by destroying the 10 buildings inside his Matrix.
The Fight Club itself is part of the Construct that allows
humans to fight and train and sustain ongoing intense injury without really
being hurt more than superficially or disabled in any way.
It is implied that Tyler is a Morpheus style ship leader who
comes in and out of the Matrix as a ghost who interacts with Jack. Jack is
therefore The One, and becomes so at the end, and will be the leader inside the
Matrix after the machine army is dead.
It is possible that Tyler is The One and manifests through
Jack, the way The One is the recent Matrix lived as Thomas Anderson until he
“started to believe”.
There are no Agents in the Fight Club Matrix. It is likely
that this is the first time the machines realise the humans in The Matrix, led
by The One, and with outside help from ships, pose a credible threat. So
the machines now create the Agent programs and put them inside the
Matrix to deal with both human insurgents and rogue exile programs so this
won’t happen again.
In the original script for Matrix 2, before the Reloaded
script was created, Neo and co do have to go and destroy buildings to stop the
machine army. The building Neo works in as Thomas Anderson is actually the hub
of the buildings that controls the machine army. This element does not appear
in Reloaded, though the concept of cutting the power to 27 buildings as part of
the mission remains.
So in earlier versions of The Matrix, the human army and The
One would indeed destroy buildings to take down the army threatening Zion.
In the Matrix 2 script this takes a darker turn as the buildings
are destroyed in the day while fully populated. The premise is that each human
mind working in there represents a body in a pod and that body provides he
power for a sentinel. Destroy the building, all the minds die, so the bodies in
the pods die, so the Sentinels die. But you sacrifice all those human lives to
achieve this. So in the Matrix storylines this element was never pursued.
Similarly is the “burly brawl” where Neo fights the many
Smiths, in the original script, each time Neo kills a Smith we see it revert
back to the human form it was before it was taken over. We know this happens as
in the Matrix film we see Trinity shoot an agent (“dodge this”) who then
reverts back to human form. So as Neo is fighting the Smiths he ends up amongst
a pile of human corpses he is creating. This element was also removed from the
script.
So at the end of Fight Club we see Jack/Tyler/The One
destroy all the buildings, now empty, and stop the sentinel army at the gates
of Zion.
Marla is, of course, Trinity.
