Second Time, No Charm

Watching The Matrix was like being injected with pure adrenaline, but the experience also served as its own vaccine -- you could only do it once. I caught up with the film perhaps a year after its initial released and was stunned how much it had diminished, far more than the scaling-down from theater to TV screen could account for. Especially if you hadn't seen the Hong Kong movies its jaw-dropping wire-work was inspired by, but even if you had, The Matrix was like nothing you'd seen before. But once you had seen it, and saw it again, Andrew and Larry Wachowski's cringeworthy dialogue, their adolescent grasp of both philosophy and sexuality, came rather abruptly to the fore. There's very little in The Matrix worth savoring that you don't grasp fully the first time around -- it's designed to be swallowed whole and evacuated quickly, as intense and as fleeting as a dessert-induced spike in your blood sugar. (That doesn't take into account the legions of fans who've been gobbling blue pills by the handful for the last four years, but I'd wager it's the fast-food comfort of the familiar that keeps drawing them back, not the hope of finding something new on the 15th viewing.)

There's no chance that The Matrix Reloaded could instill the same awe as the original, but it's not just sequel-itis that keeps Reloaded from connecting. The script acknowledges the imperative to top the original early on; as Neo (Keanu Reeves) faces off against a handful of Matrix-defending Agents (who still dress like fastidious morticians), he remarks, Hmmm. Upgrades. In fact, they're not noticeably more agile than in the first movie, but the same can't be said of their erstwhile leader Agent Smith (the fabulous Hugo Weaving), who (unsurprisingly) survived his seeming destruction at Neo's hands, and (surprisingly) has developed the ability to replicate himself, climaxing in a sequence where dozens upon dozens of Smiths assault Neo simultaneously.

That sequence, dubbed the Burly Brawl by the crew, illustrates as well as any the bind in which Reloaded finds itself. Due in no small part to the standards set by the first film, it's no longer enough to have characters perform stunts that defy not only human physiology but the laws of physics -- it has to look real. Assuming that if Weaving had 99 identical twins Entertainment Weekly would have told us by now, we know that Weaving's being doubled either digitally or by stuntmen in Weaving suits, but every time you catch a glimpse of a figure in the background who almost, but not quite, looks like the actor, you're thrown -- not to mention all the times that the patented bullet-time camera moves reduce Reeves to a phony-looking digital stand-in. There are plenty of moments in both Lord of the Rings films where fantasy overwhelms reality (so to speak), but The Matrix's whole mythology is caught up with the difference between reality and (computer-generated) fantasy, so when the line is blurred in places where it's not supposed to be, the whole movie gets knocked off course.

Reloaded ups the ante as well as the number of Agent Smiths, with the introduction of the human stronghold Zion, located near the Earth's core (the science underlying which goes blissfully unexplained). The underground stronghold is either primitive or futuristic, depending on which suits the Wachowskis' needs. When the human forces organize for defense against the machines who are burrowing through the Earth's crust to destroy them, the parliamentary disputes take on an unfortunate Star Wars cast, but the subterranean caverns also provide an opportunity for Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to doff his shirt and beat the war drums Spartacus-style. (The sequence that follows, a sort of pagan orgy set to a techno beat, goes on for what feels like an eternity. Fellini the Wachowskis are not.)

The Wachowskis retain their knack for breaking up techno-heavy scenes that otherwise might be suffocating with unexpected gestures, as when Morpheus, towards the end of an almost perversely long freeway chase, is battling an Agent atop a speeding tractor-trailer, and saves himself from going over the edge by grabbing onto the Agent's tie. But the sheer amount of elements in Reloaded -- which, as if anyone needs to be told, sets up a third installment, The Matrix Revolutions, to be released in November -- is exhausting: wraithlike twins who can de- and rematerialize at will (and, continuing the Wachowski's bizarre design sense, look like albino Rastafarians); a refined but foul-mouthed power broker (Lambert Wilson) and his rubber-clad wife (Monica Bellucci) who guard the entrance to the Matrix-controlling mainframe; the suggestion that every vampire, werewolf and alien you've ever seen is just a wayward program the system doesn't know how to cope with; not to mention a hopperful of oracular mumbo-jumbo and existentialist gobbledegook. (One can only pray that the deadening block of the latter unloaded at the film's climax relieves the burden for the third installment as well.) It's possible that Revolutions will end up being one long delirious climax, which could mean that getting Reloaded out of the way might prove to be a worthwhile chore. But even before the To Be Concluded which abruptly ends The Matrix Reloaded, you feel like you're only watching half a movie.

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August 18, 2005
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