More Is Less.
I’ve never hidden my distaste for the Matrix phenomenon. It’s isn’t because the special effects were too cool for me, or that I never was a big kung-fu fan, or the countless plot holes and logic leaps I had to make. All that comes with the risk of letting people who don’t know any better design your leisure time. What really cheesed me off about The Matrix is how much of an overt, unapologetic, bold-faced rip-off it was of one of my favorite books, Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Gibson is widely regarded as the father of the “cyberpunk” style of science fiction, and the heir apparent to the legacy of Philip K. Dick. Neuromancer broke the mold not only with its verbose prose and images of burned-out, technology-addicted cities and people, but primarily for a fresh, non-linear design of worldwide computer systems. In Gibson’s world, hackers “jack in” to a virtual world, an illimitable representation of programs, corporations, viruses, and death. A world that The Matrix is but a pale imitation of. Rereading the book only drove this point home for me.
Still, in retrospect, Neuromancer probably wouldn’t have made a very good movie anyway, if the half-baked Johnny Mnemonic is any indication. Plus, books and movies are two very different mediums, and trying to get them both to meet in the middle is always asking for trouble. Books are about lush descriptions and deep characters and storytelling. Movies are about color and sound and light. You have all the time in the world to read a book; with movies, you run the risk of losing your audience if you spend too much time on any one thing.
That said, I figured that any sequel to The Matrix could only be an improvement. If you please, my review of The Matrix Reloaded:
Give the Wachowski Brothers a little credit; there is a standing assumption with The Matrix Reloaded from the get-go that you’ve already seen Matrix I. No time is wasted with a preamble or plot synopsis, they jack you right in. Everyone knows the world has been taken over by superintelligent machines, that our perceived existence is nothing but an elaborate virtual reality illusion, and that a small coterie of free minds are dead-set on undoing it all. An early comparison to The Empire Strikes Back is not too out of place, although I wouldn’t go so far as to extend the analogy to say, Batman Returns or House Party 2.
The film opens with Neo(Keanu Reeves) having a bad dream, the effects of which surface occasionally to haunt him, but only become truly apparent near the end. Causality plays a big part in Reloaded, as we see later. Since realizing that he is, in fact, “The One” of Morpheus(Laurence Fishburne)’ blustery prophecy, Neo has found it difficult to grow into this quasi-Messianic role. While he has near-complete control of his superpowers while in the Matrix, his character still retains a lot of the insecurity he had in Matrix I, when he was still an embryonic superbeing. While Neo can fly like a rocket and manipulate machine-gun bullets, he’s still a long way from becoming one with the Matrix.
While the troublemakers in Matrix I came mostly from within, the threats in Reloaded approach on two fronts. The AI machines that have enslaved the majority of the human race have located Zion, the last human stronghold, and are burrowing towards it. Morpheus believes that the underground city’s only hope lies in Neo, and argues to burn valuable daylight with an audience with the Oracle. Zion’s commander, Lock(Harry Lennix) opts to bolster their defenses with as many ships as possible. Meanwhile, Agent Smith(Hugo Weaving, always excellent, whether as an elf lord or security program) has since taken a cue from the freed human minds and liberated himself from the machines’ mainframe, rewriting himself into a self-replicating virus. This one-man army of men in black redoubles his efforts to destroy Neo, whether out of spite or revenge, but clearly outside of the interests of the machines.
So far, all this sounds like only about ninety minutes of story. However, any first-year scholar of Matrix-lore knows that the rush-to-save-the-world plot is a mere skeleton upon which the Wachowskis intend to hang their own special brand of post-apocalyptic metaphysical blather. While the filmmakers have been simultaneously praised and chided over this, the practice does serve to bolster an otherwise paper-thin story and flesh out some otherwise one-dimensional characters. On the other hand, it makes for a great eater of time and braider of dialogue. Like making stew out of a fish because you don’t have enough to go around, this pseudo-religious gobbledygook serves as both a binder to bring the other elements of the story together, and a broth to make you think you’re getting more that you think you are.
Thankfully, the levels of preaching are greatly reduced in Reloaded, but the movie is still a lot like patrolling the skies in an F-18; ninety-nine percent soul-crushing boredom interrupted with one percent of headfucking exhilaration. There are countless scenes of meetings between characters that fill in the endless spaces between the obligatory combat sequences, and most of what everyone says has either little to no influence on the plot(except at the end). What is missing is any kind of attitude or posturing; and the script is practically barren of clever comebacks and one-liners. While this makes for a refreshing change from the cookie-cutter heroes of the past who always seemed to be smart-asses who could do no wrong, it also gives the film a stiff, austere air; it takes itself way too seriously.
When the aforementioned plot gets convoluted, it is only to the point just before incomprehensibility. Take Neo’s meeting with the Oracle(the late Gloria Foster), which is essentially a rewrite of their first encounter in Matrix I. After drawling the movie’s most fortune-cookie-grade axiom, “We all gotta do what we all gotta do,” the Oracle charges Neo with an ancillary mission, to fetch a captive program called the Keymaker from the hands of a murderous information dealer, Merovingian(Lambert Wilson). This leads us to an interminable dinner scene with Merovingian and his wife, Persephone(Monica Bellucci, clad in a stupefying rubber dress), where Merovingian waxes philosophical on the merits of causality. This is all just preamble to the movie’s purported centerpiece, the freeway chase, which in itself is preamble to the team’s final assault on the machine’s mainframe. It’s not that it all doesn’t make sense, it’s just that we’re dragged thru miles of back roads to get to the punch line.
It’s also been posited that Reloaded can multitask for viewers; they can choose to enjoy the twin-pronged love story, or get all into the sci-fi, end-of-the-world aspect, or muse on the neo-mythological stances. All this is bullshit, of course; there is only one real reason why anyone would voluntarily plunk down their lunch money to see this sequel. Two words: bullet time.
Without bullet time, the only thing that would differentiate the scenes in the real world and the scenes in the Matrix would be the green tinge everything takes on when you’re jacked in. Without bullet time, filmmaking wouldn’t have taken the quantum leap both into innovation and self-parody. Without bullet time, Reloaded might have looked slightly less ridiculous, because it is everywhere. When Trinity jumps her bike over a railing, there’s bullet time. When Neo takes on more than one person in melee, there’s bullet time. Whenever anything explodes, there’s bullet time. Unfortunately, bullet time’s shelf life has been shown to be remarkably short, almost to the point of it becoming a one-trick pony. Undaunted, the Wachowskis spread it on thick, whether or not it’s called for, until you stop oohing and aahing and start snorting.
Not that you can blame the filmmakers, bullet time is the physics of the Matrix, it’s what makes Neo able to manipulate this false environment to his needs, as well as Agent Smith. In fact, the first time we see these two reunited early in the movie probably stands as the highlight of all the bullet time sequences. As a rogue agent, Smith now has the ability to infect other denizens of the Matrix with his programming, effectively cloning himself. Neo first takes on a half-dozen Smiths, a number which quickly doubles and doubles again. Everything at this point looks fairly routine, none of the moves are anything that would look weird outside a Drunken Master feature. The most high-tech effect so far is wire-work. But as the Smiths continue to multiply, Neo finds himself overwhelmed, even taking a few hits and getting impressed against a brick wall. This is where everything gets amped up; Neo yanks a steel bar out of the concrete to use as a quarterstaff, a recently pummeled Smith growls “More,” as a river of new suits explodes into the arena, and the bullet time switch is pulled.
The second half of this battle is a frenetic crescendo, as Neo sends Smiths flying into second-story windows, toppling into each other like Lincoln Logs, and crashing into park bench after park bench. Neo takes a wire-assisted spin around the pole, bicycle-kicking agents as he goes, in a dizzy tornado of mutated, balletic violence. It all comes to a head in the scene featured in the trailer, as Neo is flattened and dogpiled on by the horde of Smiths, then bursts out like a pipe bomb tamped with a rotten apple. It’s hard to describe the sheer restraint shown in this sequence, which makes the end result that much sweeter. After this scene, any use of bullet time is purely superfluous.
Without sounding like a complete genre geek, I’d hazard to call Reloaded a head movie. Near the end of the action, the team has penetrated the machine’s mainframe(cleverly disguised as an office building in beautiful downtown Sydney) in an attempt to halt the squid-like Sentinels’ progress towards Zion. At the center of the machines’ power, Neo comes face-to-face with the Architect(the creepy Helmut Bakaitis), the creator of the Matrix, who reveals to us the circuitousness and causality that exists between the machines and the humans. While he confirms that Neo is “The One,” he is in fact the sixth human to exhibit the abilities(which would technically make Neo “The Six”) and the machines’ mission to wipe out Zion is the sixth such incursion. The prophecy of “The One” that Morpheus clings to so tightly is in fact a fabrication, purposefully leaked by the machines to the freed humans, in order to call forth “The One.” Why? The Architect says that this current assault on the humans will be the sixth time they have successfully destroyed Zion, and that the Matrix has been in existence for longer than anyone thinks it has. Every time “The One” manifests itself and the machines pave over Zion, the Architect gathers enough data to upgrade the Matrix, to make it even more immersive and harder for humans to escape it. The humans rebuild Zion, “The One” comes forth, and the whole process begins again; the machines’ quest for perfection and immortality. The prophecy is a debugging program.
While this revelation does bring some much-needed cohesion between Matrix I and Reloaded, it sort of stalls on-screen because it’s not told that well. Only later, after I had digested the rest of the movie did it all become clear. Maybe if the audience I was with wasn’t half-asleep from getting up early on a Saturday morning to catch a cheap matinee, they might have gotten it, too. As it was, half of them got up and left during the credits and missed the teaser for The Matrix Revolutions, which hopefully will explode more heads than Reloaded did. One of the theories I’ve already heard going around follows in the whole nouveau-life-of-Christ vein; that Neo will bite it in Matrix 3, only to be replaced by his son, who was probably conceived during a weird town meeting/rave/orgy scene(which seems like a complete waste of time, knowing that tentacled killbots are homing in on your subterranean Main Street). Some think that Neo should have kicked off in Reloaded, and come back to give guidance from beyond, Obi-Wan-style.
The Matrix “mythology,” in addition to the obvious Messianic references, also features some not-so-evident nods to other world lore. “Zion” itself is what Rastafarians call Africa, basically Rasta heaven; whose counterpart is “Babylon,” the white man’s power structure. The analogy becomes even more complete when you take into account that a number of the cast members on the human side are black, while Agent Smith and his brethren are Casper-white. What’s confusing is the name of Morpheus’ ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. In addition to being the largest bottle of champagne you can buy, Nebuchadnezzar was an infamous Biblical head of state, known for laying waste to the Jews and rebuilding Babylon’s kingdom. The name of Niobe’s ship, the Logos, is even more telling. Logos is supposed to be the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and is often identified with the second person of the Holy Trinity, the so-called “word of God.” If the Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction symbolizes the fall of Babylon, then the Logos may turn out to serve as Revolutions’ primary mode of transport and dealer of heavenly justice.
If the cast has a weak link, it lies in Trinity(mannish Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo’s better half and subject of his tragic dreams. While her character served as a dynamic catalyst in Matrix I, she’s little more than window dressing in Reloaded, playing a weak foil against the myriad of additional females. The obvious equivalent to Trinity is Niobe(Jada Pinkett Smith), another hovercraft captain and old flame of Morpheus. Strong, cunning, and intelligent, her character is unfortunately wasted, with little dialogue and even fewer key scenes. She is crucial, however, in helping Morpheus survive the freeway chase; hopefully her role will be expanded in Revolutions. Replacing Matrix I’s Tank as the Nebuchadnezzar’s pilot is Link(Harold Perrineau), in probably the most honest, unpretentious performance of the lot.
By the end of the movie, a few things have been cleared up, but a few more are still occluded. Was Zion destroyed? We hear talk about it, but never see it. What was the point of rescuing the Keymaker when all the team needed was one key? Why was Monica Bellucci even in this movie? Was Neo still in the Matrix when he knocked out those Sentinels? And what’s up with those albino motherfuckers? As a whole, Reloaded comes across as just as good as Matrix I, which was mincing, self-important, and overblown; but at the same time pretty to watch, funny, and just good cracking, end-of-the-world sci-fi. The sequel simply has all the good and bad parts in different places now.
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Gibson is widely regarded as the father of the “cyberpunk” style of science fiction, and the heir apparent to the legacy of Philip K. Dick. Neuromancer broke the mold not only with its verbose prose and images of burned-out, technology-addicted cities and people, but primarily for a fresh, non-linear design of worldwide computer systems. In Gibson’s world, hackers “jack in” to a virtual world, an illimitable representation of programs, corporations, viruses, and death. A world that The Matrix is but a pale imitation of. Rereading the book only drove this point home for me.
Still, in retrospect, Neuromancer probably wouldn’t have made a very good movie anyway, if the half-baked Johnny Mnemonic is any indication. Plus, books and movies are two very different mediums, and trying to get them both to meet in the middle is always asking for trouble. Books are about lush descriptions and deep characters and storytelling. Movies are about color and sound and light. You have all the time in the world to read a book; with movies, you run the risk of losing your audience if you spend too much time on any one thing.
That said, I figured that any sequel to The Matrix could only be an improvement. If you please, my review of The Matrix Reloaded:
Give the Wachowski Brothers a little credit; there is a standing assumption with The Matrix Reloaded from the get-go that you’ve already seen Matrix I. No time is wasted with a preamble or plot synopsis, they jack you right in. Everyone knows the world has been taken over by superintelligent machines, that our perceived existence is nothing but an elaborate virtual reality illusion, and that a small coterie of free minds are dead-set on undoing it all. An early comparison to The Empire Strikes Back is not too out of place, although I wouldn’t go so far as to extend the analogy to say, Batman Returns or House Party 2.
The film opens with Neo(Keanu Reeves) having a bad dream, the effects of which surface occasionally to haunt him, but only become truly apparent near the end. Causality plays a big part in Reloaded, as we see later. Since realizing that he is, in fact, “The One” of Morpheus(Laurence Fishburne)’ blustery prophecy, Neo has found it difficult to grow into this quasi-Messianic role. While he has near-complete control of his superpowers while in the Matrix, his character still retains a lot of the insecurity he had in Matrix I, when he was still an embryonic superbeing. While Neo can fly like a rocket and manipulate machine-gun bullets, he’s still a long way from becoming one with the Matrix.
While the troublemakers in Matrix I came mostly from within, the threats in Reloaded approach on two fronts. The AI machines that have enslaved the majority of the human race have located Zion, the last human stronghold, and are burrowing towards it. Morpheus believes that the underground city’s only hope lies in Neo, and argues to burn valuable daylight with an audience with the Oracle. Zion’s commander, Lock(Harry Lennix) opts to bolster their defenses with as many ships as possible. Meanwhile, Agent Smith(Hugo Weaving, always excellent, whether as an elf lord or security program) has since taken a cue from the freed human minds and liberated himself from the machines’ mainframe, rewriting himself into a self-replicating virus. This one-man army of men in black redoubles his efforts to destroy Neo, whether out of spite or revenge, but clearly outside of the interests of the machines.
So far, all this sounds like only about ninety minutes of story. However, any first-year scholar of Matrix-lore knows that the rush-to-save-the-world plot is a mere skeleton upon which the Wachowskis intend to hang their own special brand of post-apocalyptic metaphysical blather. While the filmmakers have been simultaneously praised and chided over this, the practice does serve to bolster an otherwise paper-thin story and flesh out some otherwise one-dimensional characters. On the other hand, it makes for a great eater of time and braider of dialogue. Like making stew out of a fish because you don’t have enough to go around, this pseudo-religious gobbledygook serves as both a binder to bring the other elements of the story together, and a broth to make you think you’re getting more that you think you are.
Thankfully, the levels of preaching are greatly reduced in Reloaded, but the movie is still a lot like patrolling the skies in an F-18; ninety-nine percent soul-crushing boredom interrupted with one percent of headfucking exhilaration. There are countless scenes of meetings between characters that fill in the endless spaces between the obligatory combat sequences, and most of what everyone says has either little to no influence on the plot(except at the end). What is missing is any kind of attitude or posturing; and the script is practically barren of clever comebacks and one-liners. While this makes for a refreshing change from the cookie-cutter heroes of the past who always seemed to be smart-asses who could do no wrong, it also gives the film a stiff, austere air; it takes itself way too seriously.
When the aforementioned plot gets convoluted, it is only to the point just before incomprehensibility. Take Neo’s meeting with the Oracle(the late Gloria Foster), which is essentially a rewrite of their first encounter in Matrix I. After drawling the movie’s most fortune-cookie-grade axiom, “We all gotta do what we all gotta do,” the Oracle charges Neo with an ancillary mission, to fetch a captive program called the Keymaker from the hands of a murderous information dealer, Merovingian(Lambert Wilson). This leads us to an interminable dinner scene with Merovingian and his wife, Persephone(Monica Bellucci, clad in a stupefying rubber dress), where Merovingian waxes philosophical on the merits of causality. This is all just preamble to the movie’s purported centerpiece, the freeway chase, which in itself is preamble to the team’s final assault on the machine’s mainframe. It’s not that it all doesn’t make sense, it’s just that we’re dragged thru miles of back roads to get to the punch line.
It’s also been posited that Reloaded can multitask for viewers; they can choose to enjoy the twin-pronged love story, or get all into the sci-fi, end-of-the-world aspect, or muse on the neo-mythological stances. All this is bullshit, of course; there is only one real reason why anyone would voluntarily plunk down their lunch money to see this sequel. Two words: bullet time.
Without bullet time, the only thing that would differentiate the scenes in the real world and the scenes in the Matrix would be the green tinge everything takes on when you’re jacked in. Without bullet time, filmmaking wouldn’t have taken the quantum leap both into innovation and self-parody. Without bullet time, Reloaded might have looked slightly less ridiculous, because it is everywhere. When Trinity jumps her bike over a railing, there’s bullet time. When Neo takes on more than one person in melee, there’s bullet time. Whenever anything explodes, there’s bullet time. Unfortunately, bullet time’s shelf life has been shown to be remarkably short, almost to the point of it becoming a one-trick pony. Undaunted, the Wachowskis spread it on thick, whether or not it’s called for, until you stop oohing and aahing and start snorting.
Not that you can blame the filmmakers, bullet time is the physics of the Matrix, it’s what makes Neo able to manipulate this false environment to his needs, as well as Agent Smith. In fact, the first time we see these two reunited early in the movie probably stands as the highlight of all the bullet time sequences. As a rogue agent, Smith now has the ability to infect other denizens of the Matrix with his programming, effectively cloning himself. Neo first takes on a half-dozen Smiths, a number which quickly doubles and doubles again. Everything at this point looks fairly routine, none of the moves are anything that would look weird outside a Drunken Master feature. The most high-tech effect so far is wire-work. But as the Smiths continue to multiply, Neo finds himself overwhelmed, even taking a few hits and getting impressed against a brick wall. This is where everything gets amped up; Neo yanks a steel bar out of the concrete to use as a quarterstaff, a recently pummeled Smith growls “More,” as a river of new suits explodes into the arena, and the bullet time switch is pulled.
The second half of this battle is a frenetic crescendo, as Neo sends Smiths flying into second-story windows, toppling into each other like Lincoln Logs, and crashing into park bench after park bench. Neo takes a wire-assisted spin around the pole, bicycle-kicking agents as he goes, in a dizzy tornado of mutated, balletic violence. It all comes to a head in the scene featured in the trailer, as Neo is flattened and dogpiled on by the horde of Smiths, then bursts out like a pipe bomb tamped with a rotten apple. It’s hard to describe the sheer restraint shown in this sequence, which makes the end result that much sweeter. After this scene, any use of bullet time is purely superfluous.
Without sounding like a complete genre geek, I’d hazard to call Reloaded a head movie. Near the end of the action, the team has penetrated the machine’s mainframe(cleverly disguised as an office building in beautiful downtown Sydney) in an attempt to halt the squid-like Sentinels’ progress towards Zion. At the center of the machines’ power, Neo comes face-to-face with the Architect(the creepy Helmut Bakaitis), the creator of the Matrix, who reveals to us the circuitousness and causality that exists between the machines and the humans. While he confirms that Neo is “The One,” he is in fact the sixth human to exhibit the abilities(which would technically make Neo “The Six”) and the machines’ mission to wipe out Zion is the sixth such incursion. The prophecy of “The One” that Morpheus clings to so tightly is in fact a fabrication, purposefully leaked by the machines to the freed humans, in order to call forth “The One.” Why? The Architect says that this current assault on the humans will be the sixth time they have successfully destroyed Zion, and that the Matrix has been in existence for longer than anyone thinks it has. Every time “The One” manifests itself and the machines pave over Zion, the Architect gathers enough data to upgrade the Matrix, to make it even more immersive and harder for humans to escape it. The humans rebuild Zion, “The One” comes forth, and the whole process begins again; the machines’ quest for perfection and immortality. The prophecy is a debugging program.
While this revelation does bring some much-needed cohesion between Matrix I and Reloaded, it sort of stalls on-screen because it’s not told that well. Only later, after I had digested the rest of the movie did it all become clear. Maybe if the audience I was with wasn’t half-asleep from getting up early on a Saturday morning to catch a cheap matinee, they might have gotten it, too. As it was, half of them got up and left during the credits and missed the teaser for The Matrix Revolutions, which hopefully will explode more heads than Reloaded did. One of the theories I’ve already heard going around follows in the whole nouveau-life-of-Christ vein; that Neo will bite it in Matrix 3, only to be replaced by his son, who was probably conceived during a weird town meeting/rave/orgy scene(which seems like a complete waste of time, knowing that tentacled killbots are homing in on your subterranean Main Street). Some think that Neo should have kicked off in Reloaded, and come back to give guidance from beyond, Obi-Wan-style.
The Matrix “mythology,” in addition to the obvious Messianic references, also features some not-so-evident nods to other world lore. “Zion” itself is what Rastafarians call Africa, basically Rasta heaven; whose counterpart is “Babylon,” the white man’s power structure. The analogy becomes even more complete when you take into account that a number of the cast members on the human side are black, while Agent Smith and his brethren are Casper-white. What’s confusing is the name of Morpheus’ ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. In addition to being the largest bottle of champagne you can buy, Nebuchadnezzar was an infamous Biblical head of state, known for laying waste to the Jews and rebuilding Babylon’s kingdom. The name of Niobe’s ship, the Logos, is even more telling. Logos is supposed to be the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and is often identified with the second person of the Holy Trinity, the so-called “word of God.” If the Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction symbolizes the fall of Babylon, then the Logos may turn out to serve as Revolutions’ primary mode of transport and dealer of heavenly justice.
If the cast has a weak link, it lies in Trinity(mannish Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo’s better half and subject of his tragic dreams. While her character served as a dynamic catalyst in Matrix I, she’s little more than window dressing in Reloaded, playing a weak foil against the myriad of additional females. The obvious equivalent to Trinity is Niobe(Jada Pinkett Smith), another hovercraft captain and old flame of Morpheus. Strong, cunning, and intelligent, her character is unfortunately wasted, with little dialogue and even fewer key scenes. She is crucial, however, in helping Morpheus survive the freeway chase; hopefully her role will be expanded in Revolutions. Replacing Matrix I’s Tank as the Nebuchadnezzar’s pilot is Link(Harold Perrineau), in probably the most honest, unpretentious performance of the lot.
By the end of the movie, a few things have been cleared up, but a few more are still occluded. Was Zion destroyed? We hear talk about it, but never see it. What was the point of rescuing the Keymaker when all the team needed was one key? Why was Monica Bellucci even in this movie? Was Neo still in the Matrix when he knocked out those Sentinels? And what’s up with those albino motherfuckers? As a whole, Reloaded comes across as just as good as Matrix I, which was mincing, self-important, and overblown; but at the same time pretty to watch, funny, and just good cracking, end-of-the-world sci-fi. The sequel simply has all the good and bad parts in different places now.
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