The Matrix Reloaded
Review
by : Eric
Barker
Starring:
Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne
Moss (Trinity), Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith)
Written and Directed by: The
Wachowski Brothers [Andy and Larry]
Sprawling,
pretentious, messy, confusing and still impressive, the Wachowski
Brothers’ sequel to The Matrix (1999) has arrived
in the midst of a hyperbolic atmosphere generated as much
by the audience as by the studio hucksters. It’s a testament
to the international good will created by the first film that
The Matrix Reloaded debuted everywhere in America
and Europe simultaneously. Apparently, much of the Western
world was eager to find out what happened next in the fanciest
multicultural blender ever constructed for the movies.
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Neo does his Agent Smith impression. Or is it Jean Baudrillard?
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The Wachowskis
are smart guys, plugged-in to all kinds of stuff that shouldn’t
fit together: global fashion trends, cyberpunk science fiction
and the slo-mo lyricism of Hong Kong action movies; philosophy
from Descartes’ radical skepticism to Baudrillard‘s
postmodern relativity (or what a friend of mine calls, more
appropriately, I think, hypermodernism); Buddhist psychology
and Gnostic theology; some of Keanu Reeve’s unexpected
strengths as a movie star/icon; the central tropes of superhero
comics, the elegant paranoia of Philip K. Dick; and the Magritte-like
texture of the Information Age. Parsing out the influences
in the world of The Matrix is not unlike disentangling
those in Star Wars, only the references are all hip
and with-it and rated R.
But while
all of these ingredients reappear at full tilt and volume
in The Matrix Reloaded, the blend isn’t nearly
as smooth as it was the first time around. Given carte
blanche to make a supersequel, the Wachowskis have designed
everything in the new movie to be twice as big -- the sets,
the stunts, the effects, the cast of pertinent characters
and the philosophical aura -- but the supercharged narrative
drive that propelled The Matrix into film history
has been supplanted by a nearly unending exposition, for what
amounts to an entirely new story and perhaps a new world.
The Wachowskis have been tempted by success to play with epic
scale and deeper meaning, and they can’t really be blamed
for that, after all, people do want more-more-more, but the
temptation has sapped their project of the key ingredient
that made it palatable to a mass audience: the world of The
Matrix is no longer fun.
Once upon
a time (last century, now) their story was shiny and relentlessly
efficient, skimming brightly over the oldest questions in
the philosophical canon, namely, “What Is Real?”
and “How Do I Know?” without ever losing its giddy
pace of invention. The brothers mixed in symbolism from many
sources and genres, stealing wholesale from the best while
never committing to one vision, and it gave their imagery
an openness most current films lack, glibly inviting multiple
interpretations. And still, The Matrix remained sassy
and irreverent throughout, a sly, top shelf Margarita of an
action movie, with an extra shot of Gold for oomph.
But The
Matrix Reloaded doesn’t even have a good wise-crack
during its first thirty minutes. The film opens with a visit
to Zion, the fabled underground city where the last “awakened”
humans of the future have long gathered, planning to launch
an eventual revolution against the machines that enslave the
human world. Zion receives a cursory mention in the first
film when Neo, the boyish Odysseus/Redeemer/Superman of The
Matrix, is first learning about his destiny as the savior
of mankind. But Reloaded stays in Zion for a long,
long time, the Wachowskis determined to give us a complete
layout of the place in all its pagan glory, and it mostly
resembles the set of a bad Mad Max movie (as opposed to a
good one), revealing some interesting but not particularly
compelling backstory for Morpheus, and a whole lotta rockin’
and rollin’ going on in preparation for a defense of
the city against an assault by the machines.
Why the
humans choose to party down when disaster seems imminent isn’t
clear; perhaps this is how the machines were able to take
over in the first place.
Though
the Wachowskis have exhibited a gift for clever dialogue in
the past, deftly keeping us distracted from plot holes, this
whole opening sequence feels like the brothers consulted George
Lucas during the writing, purposely trying to find the clunkiest
way to get across a dramatic idea, and then James Cameron
elbowed his way into the director’s chair to overspend
out the wazoo and ensure that no genuine moments reached the
screen. Zion falls flat right at the beginning, and The
Matrix Reloaded struggles for the next hour-and-a-half
to regain some kind of momentum.
It is
continually hampered by the very thing that made The Matrix
a joy: the Wachowskis’ soaring visual imagination. As
they have promised for four years, The Matrix Reloaded
contains flights of technical prowess that dwarf all previous
attempts by science fiction cinema to be cool. There is a
fight scene you surely must have heard about by now, in which
the principal villain of The Matrix, Agent Smith,
returns with the power to replicate himself indefinitely,
and no matter how many times you are told that Keanu Reeves
has to fight 100 guys at once, nothing can prepare you for
the sheer, staggering brilliance of the scene. There is a
thundering car chase which practically constitutes a movie
all by itself, pulling out every trick, every dip, turn and
reversal that a roller-coaster can perform, gravity and the
laws of space, time and matter becoming wild nonsense. But
both of these sequences -- the big fight and the big chase
-- go on far too long, their function as padding-in-lieu-of-story
gradually becoming clear, and therein lies this film’s
real problem.
The
Matrix Reloaded is not the second movie in a trilogy,
as we have been led to believe, it is the first half of a
single sequel. The missing second half, The Matrix Revolutions,
is due to come out this fall. The Wachowskis (no doubt under
pressure from their producer, Joel Silver) have split their
new, $240 million movie into two parts, with a jerry-rigged
cliffhanger in the middle, the better to recoup their costs
so that Warner Brothers doesn’t go under because of
one film. Movie franchises have been dividing into threes
ever since Star Wars plundered the late 1970s box-office,
and it could be argued that the second film in a triptych
always suffers under the psychic weight of being a middle
child. But Peter Jackson broke that spell last winter with
his second Lord of the Rings installment, proving
that it doesn’t have to be that way, if your world is
big enough, and your own exploration of it is deep enough.
It also helps to be doing a straightforward adaptation of
J.R.R. Tolkien, who had one of the biggest, deepest, most
innovative minds in the long history of fantasy, myth and
fairy tales.
The Wachowski
Brothers don’t have that option. Their world is, at
best, a patchwork fabric of other people’s inventions,
and they’re going to have to make it on their own. The
Matrix Reloaded moves through several new wrinkles in
the system, incessantly promising bigger and better epistemological
and ontological revelations, but by the time Neo has fought
his way into the inner sanctum of the Architect, an oily guy
in a white suit who may or may not be Neo’s maker, it
has become apparent this film is only here to suggest what
The Matrix Revolutions may reveal. Coming to a theatre
near you in November.
Even if
I, the Critic, was going to spoil it for you, I couldn’t:
The Matrix Reloaded ends without really telling us
anything we didn’t know on the way into the multiplex.
Neo and Trinity (Reeves and the captivating Carrie-Ann Moss)
are still the coolest superhero couple kicking cyberass in
our time; Morpheus (the great Larry Fishburne) still has more
charisma than the whole city of Zion in heat; and Agent Smith
(the ultra-wry Hugo Weaving) is still the funniest guy in
the films’ wacked-out, surrealist universe.
But for
the plot twists, you need a program. The Architect speaks
in more riddles than the first film’s Oracle, and when
the he is done revealing whatever it is he reveals, the effect
is merely tiresome. Burbling a lot of hacker vernacular in
an arcane syntax, he gives the impression that he is saying
less than he is. Viewers tired of Reloaded’s
endless portentous flummery may wish for the neatly articulated
sneering of Agent Smith, a more traditional villain perhaps,
but one who knows how to state his point of view so that humans
will feel the contempt, really feel it, and perhaps even agree
with him for a moment: Hm, maybe we really are a plague. But
the Architect is that professor who put you to sleep with
polysyllabic discourses on minutiae, having never learned
how to make his ideas accessible to real pople.
None of
which is to say that The Matrix Reloaded is a bust.
On the contrary, it’s well worth a trip to the theatre,
a movie that can only be appreciated on a Panavision-sized
screen. And at the end, you still walk out of a Matrix
movie with your perceptions of reality shifted a tad off center.
On the street or in the parking lot, people around you actually
look like they’re living in the Matrix, with
their blank, preoccupied faces and habitual disengagement
from their surroundings. Maybe you recognize yourself, and
you wonder about the solidity of the concrete beneath your
feet for a moment. But it’s primarily because the incomparable
visual imagination of the Wachowski Brothers has just surrounded
you for two-and-a-half hours, not because the philosophical
underpinnings of the Matrix films have been elucidated
or expanded.
For true
enlightenment, I guess we have to wait for part 2 of part
2.
Free your
mind, indeed.
Notes:
TEAM PLAYERS:
Carrie-Ann Moss, Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving were
all seriously injured during the extensive physical training
required to act in a Matrix movie. Moss broke her
knee and Weaving slipped a disc in his neck, both while practicing
wire stunts, and Fishburne’s arm was in a cast for six
weeks after he shredded his wrist in a fencing move.
Mr. Reeves,
meanwhile, only suffered a blow to his wallet (this time),
giving up an estimated $38 million in his percentage of the
gross to soothe investor worries over the film’s astronomical
cost.
DOLLARS
AND CENTS: Budget for The Matrix: $63 million. Budget
for Reloaded: $127 million, three-quarters of which
was allocated to production design and visual effects. Budget
for Revolutions, filmed simultaneously: $110 million.
READ MORE
ABOUT IT: The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert
of the Real, by William Irwin [ed.], and Exploring
The Matrix, by Karen Haber [ed.], are both excellent
essay collections addressing the many cultural influences
on the first movie, and what they may or may not mean.
Irwin’s
book calls on a wide variety of U.S. and Canadian academics,
all of whom secretly love The Matrix, and it thoroughly
plumbs the philosophical implications of Wachowski World.
The Haber book has commentary from some of the best science
fiction writers of our time, including Bruce Sterling, Stephen
Baxter, and Pat Cadigan.
WHAT IS
THE MATRIX?: The next installment, The Matrix Revolutions,
opens on November 5 of this year.
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