Film Review: THE MATRIX RELOADED ***(out of 5)
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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.
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 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 people.
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 injured 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.
The Matrix Reloaded
written & directed by Andy & Larry Wachowski; director of photography, Bill Pope; edited by Zach Steinbergwith: Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity), Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith)
2 hr., 18 m.; a Silver Pictures - Village Roadshow production, Warner Brothers, rated R
release date 5/15/03
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
