On Tuesday, May 13, 2003 I purchased seven tickets so that me and a group of friends could see the 10:15pm showing of The Matrix Reloaded last night, on Wednesday, May 14, 2003. Suprisingly enough, at the theatre I saw it at, there were no Star Wars like line-ups, which one may have expected given the high media and consumer anticipation of this film. Especially given Joel Silver’s comments in Entertainment Weekly regarding the film’s 95 percent awareness rates and 89% definite interest in the film - numbers supposedly unheard of in movie marketing circles. I know most of my friends wanted to see it, I just wonder how many saw it last night and why the theatre I saw it at wasn’t sold out.
But I digress, there is no doubt that The Matrix Reloaded will be a giant hit, and should easily hit the $200 million mark within the next week or so, in-spite of the two and a half hour running time. And perhaps that is the film’s greatest strength and its weakness as well. The film has a slightly disjointed feel to it, as if it almost loses its deeper mythological underpinnings in favor of more action and less character or storyline.
One of the strenghts of The Matrix Reloaded (the sequel to the 1999 hit The Matrix, as written and directed by the brothers phenom Andy and Larry Wachowski) is that it wastes no time in jumping right into the action, and just like in X-2: X-Men United, the audience is better off for it. It captures you, it pulls you in and reminds you that things aren’t as they seem, whether you are in the computer-generated world that enslaves mankind, or outside of it. In fact, the opening is really just a foreshadowing of things to come, serving as a dream within a dream for both the audience and the characters, one that seemingly has no ending.
All the central characters of the first film are back, from the Christ-like figure of Neo (Keanu Reeves), the possible saviour of mankind who battles with the concepts and disbeliefs surrounding predetermination and choice; to Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), whose love for Neo is boundless and seemingly provides both hope and tangible salvation for our hero-God Neo; to Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), an Obi-Wan Kenobi cum Darth Vader like character whose complexities and image run deep throughout both the world of the Matrix and that of the world outside it. And even the evil Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) is back, but this time he too lives outside the Matrix, in more ways than one. Like our heros, he too has been fundamentally transformed in this sequel-movie, and his transformation maybe the lynchpin that will either cause everything to fall apart or to survive.
Joined by a number of new characters, both good and bad, everyone in this film looks super-cool. In spite of a rather mediocre continuation of the ideas as presented in the first film (with the only real revelation being that perhaps there is no choice and perhaps man and machines cannot exist in and of themselves in the continuum that has been created). In this sequel, all of our characters have so seemingly mastered the world of the Matrix, being able to move so seemlessly through it, with an amazing ability to manipulate it so easily, that the FX sequences that come along with this manipulation really do come to life, being unreal but tangible at the same time.
But what I perhaps found to be the most interesting is how the Wachowski brothers build on the emphasis that the world of the Matrix is not as it seems, by deconstructing it in both visual and mental ways. Whether it’s a clock or a piece of cake or even meeting the Oracle once again (as played by the late Gloria Foster), nothing is as it really seems. There are some truly breath-taking visuals of in this film, that pay homage to many great visual artists of our time, from those of comic books to Alfred Hitchcock himself, with the face of evil rising up out of a flock of flying Crows, a scene which in and of itself also acts as a truly terrifying foreshadowing of the terror to come. The Wachowski brothers know what it is like to experience a truly great comic book, and they have created the ultimate comic-book movies with these two films (and I’d even argue that they did so with Bound as well), creating a young boy’s wet dream, but not forgetting that great movies appeal to both sexes, and they provide enough character development to make it seemingly layered and complex for female viewers as well.
But in the end, The Matrix Reloaded perhaps is The Matrix Overdone. For all their visual brilliance and modern day techno flair, the Wachowski brothers just can’t live up to the completeness and seemlessness of the storytelling that occurs in the first film. After watching The Matrix Reloaded, I couldn’t help but think, ’’so what if Neo doesn’t know what he is going to do, can’t we dealve deeper than this?’’ I also wasn’t that impressed with Zion, the hide-away of those humans who have resisted and escaped the oppression of the computers, aside from the rave scene, nothing really attracted me to this place, and nothing made me experience the awe that was built up behind it in the first film. Again, I’m forced to ask, ’’so what if the future of Zion is at stake? Why preserve this orgy?’’ But for me their is an answer to this latter question and it holds a lot more meaning for me and it is one that is more clear than the questions I had about Neo. Even when one considers that the answers to both questions may be the same.
The Matrix Reloaded is disjointed storytelling at best, and it is glarringly obvious that this film is nothing more than a two and a half hour commercial for the events to come in story three, The Matrix Revolutions, which comes out later this year. But that’s not to say that The Matrix Reloaded is not worth seeing. It is, especially for its many groundbreaking special effects, all of which blow anything George Lucas has been doing with the Star Wars prequels right out of the water. The Matrix is the Star Wars for the 21st Century, blending myth, mayhem and breathtaking action together in a way that we quiet frankly have never seen before.
Grade: A-