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I’m not as happy as a woman who’s seen Keanu Reeves’
lean naked bottom ought to be.
The Matrix: Reloaded is at once not as good as and
better than the first movie, which you really should watch
before attempting this one. What’s not as good can be easily
chalked up to the fact that it’s been four years since the
style explosion that was The Matrix. I can’t count
the number of advertising campaigns that have appropriated
Matrix style or Matrix technology, most notably the now-ubiquitous
bullet-time. Major magazines have in-depth articles—some did
cover stories—on this movie. My own hometown newspaper, never
in the vanguard of good sense or taste, had a Sunday front-page
article on The Matrix: Reloaded. The production designers
of The Matrix so upped the ante for movie magic that
this time around the characters would probably have to emerge
from the screen to compel the same jaw-dropping awe. What’s
better than the first movie is the quantity and quality of
mayhem. The fight sequences are longer, the choreography is
inventive, and the editing doesn’t make it tough to figure
out who’s delivering the whoop-ass and who’s the whoopee.
So we’ve got a win and a lose, and what’s kind of a draw is
the deeper exploration of the pseudo-mystical bullshit that
underpins the Matrix universe, a witches’ brew of knee-deep
spirituality and mathematical wanking.
These fights: I’m sure some folks will take issue with the
some’s-good, more’s-better approach the Wachowskis have taken
regarding the fight scenes. Normally, in fact, I’d be in that
camp, but it’s so clearly a cartoon that’s been peopled, live
players fighting incredibly unrealistic battles with martial
arts, guns, and edged weapons. It’s not a boxing picture (not
that those are monuments of accuracy). These kinds of fights
always require you to step away from reality and rest your
common sense. You say you could hang with the fights in the
first movie, but these fights were too too fakey? News flash:
They’re not really fighting. They’re just pretending.
And in Reloaded, they’re doing mo’ betta pretending.
Much of Reloaded takes place in Zion, where we see
much more of the lives of the men and women of the real world.
The best that the real world offers is a majority-minority
population and choice, and frankly there’s little that makes
Zion look like a particularly inviting choice. Cypher’s methods
were treacherous, but his assessment seems spot-on. A lot
about this borrows heavily from 12-step programs. The clean
and sober world may not be pretty, but the issue is that you
choose to see it for what it is and then deal with it for
what it is. So in essence, the choice the residents of Zion
have made is sobriety, and their forces war to free the rest
of humanity from the toils of addiction. (Great. A shiny,
138-minute “just say no” ad.)
Zion is a sort of theocracy. Well, duh. The city itself is
dark, dank, and machiney (And was Jerusalem builded here,
among these dark Satanic mills?). It’s actually kind of
cool-looking, in a Dickensian way, running counter to the
cleanroom look one might have expected, given the technology
of the times. The denizens have a real get-down religion,
one where the homilies sound suspiciously like pep rally exhortations
and celebrating mass means scantily clad parishioners and
a rave. Actually it’s more of a mythological religion than
a denomination as practiced today. There’s a lot of talk about
who’s a believer (Morpheus) and who isn’t (Commander Locke);
who sees and then, like doubting Thomas, believes; and a good
deal of jawing about The Prophecy. It’s like meeting a bunch
of geneticists who tell you about their fervent belief in
tyromancy.
So about that movie. Now that Mr. Anderson has accepted the
mantle of being The One (Reeves), he must deal with being
the hope of humanity’s liberation from the virtual reality
of The Matrix. It’s a lot of pressure and, not surprisingly,
Neo’s having troubling dreams again. Morpheus’s (Fishburne)
ship, the Nebuchadnezzar—named for a conqueror of Jerusalem,
the same guy who cast Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into
the fiery furnace—returns to Zion for a war council. The Nebuchadnezzar
crew now has a new operator, Link (Perrineau), in addition
to Trinity (Moss) and Neo. Harold Perrineau’s character
gets a lot of screen time and is so fleshed out (in the first
movie, Tank and Dozer were practically supernumeraries) that
one suspects that he will have an even greater role to play
in The Matrix: Revolutions. At the council, they learn
that sentinels are mining their way toward Zion at a furious
rate, and a strategy must be devised to save this last outpost
of free humans.
From here, it gets hazy. The general plan seems to be that
most ships will remain in Zion to protect the city, but Morpheus’s
ship, to Commander Locke’s (Lennix) everlasting exasperation,
will head back into The Matrix to try to stop the sentinels.
Everywhere Neo goes, everybody was kung-fu fighting. Each
stop they make is bracketed by a palate-cleansing fight scene
that pleases the senses (Mostly. The music is just dreadful!)
and clears your mind for the next course of pseudo-mystical
techno-babble. Right after the meeting, agents show up and
there’s a fight. A nice little “Gunsmoke” moment of trash
blowing through empty alley like a tumbleweed prefaces this
first fight.
Their first stop is a consultation with The Oracle (the late
Gloria Foster), a genial, if cryptic advisor. Untypically,
she gives Neo actual concrete advice: Find The Keymaker (Kim).
To do this, Neo first has to fight Agent Smith (Weaving),
who is now not only resurrected, but who has the computer-virus
power of replication. This is the celebrated Burly Brawl,
the fight between Neo and 100 Agent Smiths that we’ve been
reading about, and it is a spectacle. It’s also confusing,
not in terms of what’s happening, but why it’s happening.
Neo now has so many awesome superpowers that he’s just the
baddest cat around. We know how these fights are going to
end. The man can fly. He can leap tall buildings in a single
bound without mussing his slicked-back hair, losing his bad-ass
sunglasses, or rumpling his long black sacerdotal garb. Why
bother fighting at all? I’d know I’d be saying, “Fear me,
puny agents! Mwah-hah-hah-hah!” from about 50 feet up. Well
anyway, there’s a huge fracas, including a dogpile-on-the-rabbit
moment during this very nice fight. It includes nifty freezes
like comic book panels. From making moving pictures out of
comic books, the Wachowskis’ beast turns on its own tail and
makes comic books out of moving pictures.
Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus make their way to the effete and
villainous Merovingian, who is holding The Keymaster against
his will. Naturally the Merovingian isn’t inclined to give
up The Keymaster just because they asked him nicely. The Merovingian’s
luscious wife Persephone (Bellucci), gives up The Keymaster
just because her husband is annoying, although she does want
a little something in return. Meanwhile, Zion’s council calls
for volunteers to aid the Nebuchadnezzar. Niobe (Smith),
formerly the paramour of Morpheus but now with Commander Locke,
is one of the captains who answers the call. The centerpiece
of the mayhem follows and I guaran-damn-tee it’s like no mayhem
you’ve ever seen. Nearly 15 minutes of kung fu, car fu, gun
fu, truck fu, blade fu, bike fu, as our heroes battle to get
The Keymaster safely away so that they can unmake the sentinel
threat.
The acting was all over the place. Fishburne was totally
hammy. Why does Morpheus sound like Agent Smith in his speech
cadences? Moss is an interesting actress. Of the three leads,
only she successfully portrays two distinct characters: the
passionate, tactfully sensitive Trinity of personal life and
the highly effective, ass-kicking, video-game Trinity she
must be inside The Matrix. Reeves has never been as poor an
actor as slander would have it, but he exhibits a certain
lack of affect here, though losing some of his humanness could
be a valid part of Neo’s evolution from Mr. Anderson to The
One. Interestingly, he’s at his most human not in his passion
with Trinity, but when he’s with The Oracle, in whose confusing
presence he’s attractively insecure. Anthony Zerbe!
Zerbe frequently played weaselly guys who turn on their associates
and bite them in the ass, the sort of roles Joey Pants
often does now. As such, Zerbe was sometimes, uh, over the
top? Here, he’s good. He’s more restrained than he used to
be, yet enough of a cypher that he may be a kindly, rambling
old fart or there may be more there than meets the eye. When
he goes for a stroll with Neo, one wonders whether to warn
Neo to look for a sudden shiv in the back.
Me, I’m hoping for a third installment that packs a true
surprise—say revealing Neo and the Zionist resistance as radicals
monkeywrenching a Matrix that’s actually our benevolent and
beneficent protector—but who knows? The Matrix: Revolutions
suggests that we’ll see, you know, a revolt. But then again,
it could be the circle of life, stuff coming around and going
around. I read that the ending of Reloaded was a cliffhanger,
and so it was. There were several legitimate cliffhanger moments
the directors might have chosen to end the film. The one they
picked wasn’t the one I’d have picked, especially since I
was none too sure what I saw (and some of my co-viewers gave
varied answers). But then, no one’s giving me upwards of $300
million to make movies…
The Wachowskis serve up maximum spectacle inside a popular-philosophy
meditation on faith, perception, and reality. And after all,
a hero has to have some moral or philosophical underpinning.
If all you do is kick ass and take names, you’re not a hero,
you’re a thug. Reloaded is definitely worth seeing,
but it cannot match the first movie and we shouldn’t hold
that against it.
—Roxanne Bogucka
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
