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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.

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. (more…)