I'm not sure why the idea of a small resistance group needing to take action that might harm some otherwise innocent people for the sake of saving everyone in the end is particularly stupid. Particularly when those people are being used as meat shields/a potential army for the machines to take control of and stealth isn't an option. There'd be no movie if they sat around doing nothing for fear of innocent people getting killed. Kind of a silly thing to do when your entire race has been enslaved.

Also what spuuky said regarding human batteries. Everyone knew the human battery thing made no sense even back in 98 but there's no stupider group of humans than movie execs and I just always went with the neural network thing as my head canon anyway basically. Seems weird to me to let one plot point that's a bit silly but ultimately not even that important to the story ruin the whole movie for you. I mean hell, most SciFi stories of all kinds are about as far from actual plausibility as you can get scientifically but I don't hate star trek because almost every alien is humanoid.