Chapter Two: The Matrix Reloaded
By Brett Beach
July 8, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To fill this Hackman vacuum, please do rent/buy/stream Night Moves, one of the best of the spate of mid-to-late-1970s American films where a political thriller and/or detective story serves as allegory for the malaise and rot of a nation. Hackman is at his anti-heroic Everyman best. It’s sardonically funny, brutally violent, and features an ending that will dazzle your eyes and break your heart. Kind of like how mine is at the moment.
Relevant to some of what follows: This will be my last Chapter Two for a stretch. I consider this more of a summer hiatus than a Sleater-Kinney “indefinite” hiatus, but time will tell. The whys and wherefores? Simply put, I am running on fumes, as many parents of infants can be from time to time. I feel like there are hours in the days for only so much.
What does this list include? Well, there’s my day job (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday); working out (during my lunch hour, as I have reached the age where slower metabolism decrees that the gut is more easily obtained than shed); making dinner for me and my girlfriend (tonight I tackled a recipe that Rachael Ray prepares for Donald Trump - Steak Pizzaiola Burger); and, oh yeah, spending time with my son. Attempting to carve out time chunks for movie viewing and column writing doesn’t seem to be in the cards at the moment. And would I really want to attempt this if the result would be feeling resentment towards my son for doing what six-month-olds do? I can’t dignify my hypothetical query with a response. I will simply proceed with the regularly scheduled programming.
In my very first column, I admitted that there were a lot of films I had seen only once. I offered it up sheepishly then as I do now. My excuse (which is a fair one, but still . . .) is that I was more concerned with seeing as many films as possible in my younger years and trusting my judgment from that singular experience. The great ones, as with the worst ones seemed easy enough to spot and all the ones in-between - from flawed masterpieces to heroic failures - would just have to kick around my head until I got around to a second viewing, which might never happen.
And yet, as someone who finds it impossible to take notes that might actually help jog my memory in a post-viewing assessment, I too often relied on an initial feeling that - facts be damned - may have been swayed by the particulars of my state of mind that day, the circumstances of the viewing, or the buzz (both current and historical) surrounding said film. Certainly, every critic (indeed everyone who holds forth an opinion on any work of art) is subject to outside forces having a say in their initial (as well as subsequent) critiques. It’s an unspoken but universal truth that need never be acknowledged until, well, you come clean and admit that your opinion has changed.
In my third column I discovered to my sadness that Scream 2 did not hold up as glowingly as my memory said otherwise. The thrill of seeing it on opening night and being in a sold-out auditorium with a group of friends and a crowd eager to be scared silly had imparted a warm sunrise glow around the whole experience. (Despite that, and feeling burned by Scream 3, I am excited for next year’s Scream 4.)
This time around I reverse course and extend an apology to The Matrix Reloaded, a film I had seen only once prior, and have tended to reduce to these epithetical talking points: “pseudo-intellectual”; “needlessly complicated “; “underground eve-of-the-apocalypse techno-rave” (what were The Wachowski Brothers smoking!); and “over-hyped freeway chase sequence.” Coincidentally, those were some of the same critical opinions I carried into the theater with me. Time has mellowed me out on all those points, and a few others to boot (but not so fast Matrix Revolutions, I still find you crushingly disappointing)
So what’s my excuse? Where was my head the first time around? Well, 2003 was a modern-day annus horribilis for me on a personal level. As an indicator of (or is it symptom of?) such, I did not see any movies from mid-February until early August. None. No movies in the theater, on DVD, through pay-per-view or On Demand. Nothing made-for-cable, made-for-television, or filmed by some friends and shot on digital. I didn’t give up on media entirely. After all, I had the final episodes of Buffy to think about.
This wasn’t the first time I had done this, either. There was a brief spell in early 1998 where I mostly sat out movie going - Firestorm, The Replacement Killers, and City of Angels excepted. I am often fond of quoting the cliché, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.” This doesn’t mean I always follow my own advice. Considered from the other side of the coin, once you do something you never thought you were capable of, simply because it was something that “could be done,” you have taken the red pill as it were, and there is no going back for the blue.
I am striving for some philosophical underpinnings here, as a way of acknowledging my shift in opinion on the second Matrix film, but I fear I am simply handing out vagaries. To couch this in less mystic terms, when The Matrix came out, I had yet to be married. In fact, I wasn’t quite along to the status of engaged. Between the May 2003 release of The Matrix Reloaded and the November 2003 release of The Matrix Revolutions, I became divorced.
I didn’t truly get back into the groove of watching films until September (when I watched The Matrix Reloaded and Terminator 3 back to back at a second-run theater). The first film I viewed after five-and-a-half-months of celluloid silence was American Wedding and I recall it to be a singularly disorienting experience for several reasons. For someone who loved the first two slices of Pie, this installment felt lackluster. On top of this, I truly had trouble focusing on the screen because the act of sitting in a theater and watching something being projected seemed weird. My brain couldn’t maintain and sustain the illusion.
The primary reason for disorientation had something to do with the fact that I was watching the third feature in the American Pie saga with a married woman who was not my wife. The surreality of that situation specifically and the preceding weeks in general was not simply compounded, but made exponential later that evening when our affair was uncovered by her husband. There’s a lot more that could be said about that, and it most likely will be down the road as I don’t consider anything in my life off limits for discussion here, but I find I am drifting ever further away from my reconsideration of Reloaded in an attempt to too specifically set the scene.
Let me circle back to my last column and the initial question I posed: Have there been movies that have been “ruined” by becoming trilogies? Would it be better to have the fond memories of Jack Sparrow’s not-quite-so-grand entrance in Curse of the Black Pearl, and Thomas Anderson’s perfectly pitched “Whoa” in The Matrix without the messiness of what followed? In re-viewing all three films in the Matrix trilogy, what strikes me about the first one is how innocent and goofy it seems, both pre-George W. Bush and pre-9/11, 10 years later. It’s a mash-up of genres, styles, and attitudes but with a keen ability to laugh at its own excess without dipping into self-parody.
The film rushes along breathlessly, barely pausing between fight sequences, plot twists, and declarations of love, yet a lot of key questions remain tantalizingly unanswered. The defining image for me, then as now, occurs about 108 minutes in, as the Wachowski Brothers include a completely gratuitous underbelly shot of scores of spent artillery cartridges raining down from the helicopter that Neo and Trinity are using to rescue Morpheus from the clutches of Mr. Smith. I was far along into my stint as an usher at the Broadway Metroplex in 1999 and I always timed my pop-ins into the auditorium to be sure and catch that shot. The grin that I am sure the Wachowskis counted on eliciting from that excessive moment endeared them to me. The abrupt ending, with Neo taking to the skies, did not. (Indeed, the closing shots of each part of the trilogy rank among the weakest individual elements in the respective films.)
The Matrix Reloaded still holds the record for the largest opening for an R-rated movie: nearly $135 million (or almost half its final gross) over four days. In the weeks that followed, the drops (even with a Memorial Day holiday) were steep and swift. Still, Reloaded finished with $281 million domestic and $460 million foreign, considerably healthy increases from the grosses of the first. It stands at number two on the list of highest-grossing age-restricted films, beaten only by another feature about a Chosen One who must overcome his fears and doubts to secure salvation for his people.
With a combined budget for the sequels ($300 million) of nearly five times the cost of the first one, the Wachowskis were given what seems like free reign to take the story in whatever direction they preferred and come up with whatever mind-blowing action sequences tickled their fancy. Clocking in at nearly 15 minutes, the freeway chase extraordinaire that comes in the final third of Reloaded impresses me more now than it did in 2003. Seven years of CGI overkill since have helped to render it even more physical and dangerous.
It’s telling that instead of trying to top the bullet-time moments from The Matrix, the Wachowskis opted for something with an inherently old-school vibe: motorcycles, cars, semis, and the humans at their wheels all en route to becoming twisted wreckage. It’s also perversely ironic that the character of Neo doesn’t feature in this mini-epic until the closing seconds (and only then simply flying in to save the day.) The key battle scenes featuring him - his first encounter with the legion of Smiths, a battle against a small arsenal of assassins in a baroque mansion foyer, his showdown with Ghost - are exuberantly photographed and exciting in their own way but they suffer from the appearance that Neo now seems all but invincible on a physical plane. The only things that seems capable of dragging him down are his doubts about his true purpose and his desire to uncover the true measure of the Matrix’ strength and limits.
To this end, The Matrix Reloaded is structured like an endless series of Socratic dialogues punctuated by rousing speeches and high-octane action as Neo converses with and looks for answers from the Oracle, the Machiavellian power broker Merovingian and his wife Persephone, the mysterious Keymaker, the god-like Architect, and of course, the gone-renegade Agent Smith. Neo’s fighting ability is beside the point. It is annoying for me when he simply chooses to end any number of confrontations by flying off. (Couldn’t he have done that at the beginning?) However, his quest for knowledge and his willingness to reconsider his ideas on the power of fate vs. free will are ultimately what drive him along.
But the Wachowskis aren’t interested in existential noodling for noodling’s sake and they take some definite risks with Reloaded. The loss of the sly self-mockery from the first film and its replacement with a more serious and somber tone hurts the film to an extent. Keanu Reeves is definitely more entertaining in blank-faced Zen action mode than he is hidden in black robes and designer shades feeling the weight of the world. Becoming Messianic renders Neo as more of a totem and symbol than a character and takes him out of the story for large chunks (even more so in Revolutions).
The rave dance freak out is the most glaring example of the riskier material in Reloaded and the most obvious example of the power the Wachowskis had in making the sequels. Preceded as it is by Morpheus’ rousing Henry V-esque call to arms speech (a reminder of the Shakespearean tone that Lawrence Fishburne can so easily assume) and intercut with Neo and Trinity’s passionate love-making, it’s a gonzo rush of body-shaking and dread-flipping that was an easy target for derision. I was part of that enclave in 2003. This time around, I was thankful for its raw energy, its sexual vibe, and yes, for its air of dementedness.
That dementedness carries over into any number of striking individual shots that are as pleasingly over-the-top as my beloved moment from The Matrix: an elegant and reserved woman’s internal chocolate-instigated orgasm; our first glimpse of one Mr. Smith addressing another Mr. Smith; Neo massaging Trinity’s heart back to life (after removing a bullet from her abdomen.)
Considering that The Matrix Reloaded begins with apocalypse not-quite-now (72 hours and counting) for the safe haven of Zion and ends with that apocalypse still pending (12 hours and counting), its abrupt ending and lackluster cliffhanger don’t come close to sucking the air out of what the preceding two hours have built up. That’s what Revolutions accomplishes with its excruciatingly over-blown battle scenes, warmed-over retreads of moments from Reloaded, and a psychedelic new-day-dawning final shot that seems to all but point the way towards Speed Racer. Opening at only half of what Reloaded did and finishing with a proportionate total ($139 million, well below the gross of the first), the series flamed out as fantastically as it had burned brightly only months before.
But those gripes should be for another day and someone else’s column. For almost the entire length of The Matrix Reloaded, the Wachowski Brothers keep the plates they have set in motion spinning frantically, interjecting action into their philosophy (or vice/versa), providing long-awaited answers that only lead to more questions and hinting at a better future (theirs, ours, and the Matrix’) that still might come to pass. Would that more of their questions and ours had remained unanswered.