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The Matrix Reloaded
****
Cinema
Reviews - Week of July 4, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
138 minutes. Written and directed by Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski. Starring
Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Harold
Perrineau, Jada Pinkett Smith, Monica Bellucci, Lambert Wilson, Harry Lennix,
Randall Duk Kim, Anthony Zerbe, Gloria Foster, Nona
Gaye.
When you think about it, the "Matrix" movies are
really just one big con-job. They pose like great science fiction while being
full of plot holes -- I'm still not sure, for example, how people are supposed
to conceive or give birth in the matrix, or why in the first movie Agent
Smith didn't get rid of Neo by absorbing himself into the guy's computerised
body before he realised he had to defend himself. Their characters beg us
to think while their scenes are full of rip-roaring action that panders to
our baser instincts. And most obvious and important of all, their stories
are supposed to be parables about seeing through the system and not letting
the media fool us into complacency, but every time we go see a "Matrix" movie
or buy one of its spin-off products, we're feeding the Time-Warner-AOL monster
and becoming part of the problem.
There's a scene in "The Matrix
Reloaded" which, I think, sort of answers that. The Oracle, that
character from the first movie whose wise words of fortune telling were supposed
to guide the hero on his path, sits him down this time and guides him into
a secret. She's a program created by the designers of the matrix, she says,
and he should judge for himself how much weight to put on her words. The
information pays off later in the plot, but maybe there is a dual purpose
to the moment, and the filmmakers are addressing us: Don't trust the messenger,
but still think about the message.
Or maybe not. The movie is full of so much highfalutin
philosophy, legend, symbolism and plain riddling, expressed in the solemn
tones of freedom fighters and long words of experts, that you need to pay
extra-close attention to notice it, never mind reflect. But that's one of
the things I like about this series: You can call it pretentious nonsense,
full of holes, contradictory, messy. What you can't say is that it makes
us think less deeply than the average action film. There are levels on which
it works, and levels on which it doesn't, but all of them hold our attention.
The Matrix series engages me with its use of folklore and myth, and sometimes
stirs me with its anti-establishment ethics, but even when I'm railing against
its inadequacies, I do so with a certain grinning respect.
"Reloaded" opens in Zion, the last human city,
as humanity is on the brink of having to defend itself against a bunch of
sentinels that the machines are sending down to destroy their habitat. At
the same time, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) is trying to convince the grand
council to spare some ships to go out nearer the matrix and go on some more
offensive missions, because he's sticking to his conviction that Neo (Keanu
Reeves) is The One. Neo himself is having nightmares about his beloved Trinity
(Carrie-Ann Moss) plunging to her death, at the same time as discovering
new limits to his superpowers, and having to contend with the fact that Smith
(Hugo Heaving) has found a way to clone himself and open bigger cans of
whup-ass.
Don't understand any of this? Didn't see the first
movie? Tough. The filmmakers, Andy and Larry Wachowski, expect you to keep
up, and "Reloaded" builds to an impenetrable but stunning speech by the Architect
(Helmut Bataikis), the godlike program responsible for designing the matrix,
who taunts Neo with longwinded explanations that get into how nothing ever
changes because the framework of things knows how to crush messiah figures
while keeping the hope of saps alive, and letting the patterns repeat
themselves.
Of course, there are big action set pieces, like
a fifteen-minute battle on the freeway, where cars chase each other and
characters fight on top of trucks, and an amazing fight sequence where Neo
uses all his martial arts and gravity-defying skills to single-handedly deal
with a horde of cloned Agent Smiths. Now and again some of the images have
that rubbery computerised look that you would find in a video game, and it's
weird to see the occasional dodgy shot, because mostly the effects are invisible,
and your brain is not only twisted by the implications of the plot, but wondering
how the hell they managed to do this and that. This isn't a movie where you're
disappointed because the special effects are bad, but because your expectations
are beyond the sky, and there's only so much redefining of effects technology
that the Wachowskis can actually do.
"The Matrix" was a masterpiece; it showed us things
we had never seen before, and its ideas seemed revolutionary at the end of
a decade when summer blockbusters had been getting bigger and dumber to higher
box office grosses. "The Matrix Reloaded" is not quite as powerful -- because
Larry and Andy are secure in having created a worldwide phenomenon, and no
longer have to worry about hooking in an audience, they've let the complications
of the script run away with themselves, and they have long stretches of character
specifics and bloated effects instead of the slow-building intensity that
made the original tense as well as mesmerising. But do I care? Hardly. What
we're seeing here is an explosion of creativity, and although it's riding
the wave of its predecessor, it does so in a thrilling way. If it makes me
a sap to eat up everything these movies have to offer, go ahead and colour
me sapped.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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