I Can’t Tell You How Awful the Matrix: Reloaded Is. You Must Experience It For Yourself.
A Review/Ponderance of The Matrix: Reloaded by Mike Meyer

Hahaaa. What a deliciously clever title for this review. You see….how I took the thing from the other movie…and put it with the thing….yeah? Okay, that was unnecessary, so let’s get down to brass tacks. The Matrix: Reloaded can be summed up in one word…Ow!

As with anyone with a soul and imagination, I was blown away by the first Matrix film. It was a hallmark film for a number of reasons. It was one of the tightest stories, visually and aesthetically, you’ll ever see come out of Hollywood. And it was one of the first films I’d seen to ever use CG not just for special effects, but to enhance the style and aesthetic of the film. Combine that with keen comic book sensibilities of storytelling and composition and you have a movie that offers the best of both worlds…a smart movie with a lot of ass kicking where the smarts and the ass kicking played off of and enhanced each other, instead of each individually fighting for screen time.

But something happened in the 4 years and the billions of dollars generated and spent since the release of the first Matrix. Something got lost. Somewhere between the fan newsgroups and studio-enforced BulletTime quotas and creative hubris and god knows what else, the very heart and soul of the Matrix was buried, and the sequel was resurrected from it’s decaying remains with all of the bells and whistles the first movie brought but without any of the creative core. More appropriately, it should have been called Matrix: Unloaded.

First off, the very heart of everything…the story. It’s one thing to have a loose shaggy story, but plug that into the Matrix realm and what was once shaggy is now sloppy. The archaic start of the film….Neo’s dream…sets the tone for the entire movie with it’s celebratory use of CG over substance. There were but small shreds of story that actually moved the story along and even those were just plain sprawling and “okay maybe that makes sense a little”. It was an acid jazz free form hippy love from start to finish. And all of it was at the whims of the special effects and attempting to create more signature Matrix visuals.

But I’ll get back to visuals in a second. Let’s talk about performances. I’ll leave Keanu to everyone else because he’s a tired tired whipping boy who only actually performed in one film (The Gift) and he couldn’t act in the first one so let’s just say he’s our control element. But Laurence Fishbourne knows how to act…but apparently forgot for a few hours. It’s not a good thing where your character is the film’s center of constancy and wisdom, and your performance is wrought with inconsistency and foolish decisions. Throughout the film, Morpheus would invoke -isms from a wide range of characters from characters as close as Agent Smith to as far away as Yul Brenner’s King of Siam. The only guiding light in this film in terms of performance is Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith. He trumped his performance in the first one, which was already beyond stellar. Too bad the powers that be sought to taint it with that ridiculous street fight scene.

So let’s talk about those visuals now. At best, they were almost okay. I’ll tell you one thing though…there sure were a lot of them. As such, no one really caught onto why the first Matrix had such a visual impact. Because it was the COMBINATION of tight, expressive shot composition and the cool CG effects. For some odd reason the great composition was shoved to the side to make room for more CG. Which is a silly notion if you think about it and not just because I’m a huge Philistine when it comes to anything CG. It’s because here in 2003, BulletTime does not impress people. It’s a huge visual joke that is now just a big a part of the Matrix as all of the things that spoof it. Don’t try to impress me with things that I’ve come to accept as the norm, especially raw with poor composition, but give me a lot of it so it seems better. You’re fooling nobody. You’re not drawing anyone’s attention away from the fact that you have a loose awful story, poorly written characters, schizoid editing, and….OH YEAH….I’m dedicating a paragraph alone to one scene in particular because not only is it bad, it’s downright disrespectful from everyone who saw it to everyone who’s worked in film from today to the Edison studio days. Of course I’m talking about the infamous scene where Neo meets the architect of the Matrix. SPOILERS!

So, after using the key master (who died before he could find Sigourney Weaver, gatemaster of Gozer) to get into the very heart of the Matrix, Neo comes face to face with the architect of the Matrix. In the minutes that follow this man attempts to explain to Neo how the prophecy of the one is just another program in the Matrix along with a lot of exposition about the Oracle, what went wrong, etc. So in this pivotal point of this visually charged trilogy, the filmmakers take both Neo and the architect on a journey through some kind of period-emulation program that allows Neo to see first hand how things went wrong…right?….WRONG! The architect just tells him, droning on for over 10 minutes about technical minutia that the filmmakers made up, never wavering from one of three shots a) the master, b) Keanu’s blank expression, and c) the architect flapping his gums. You sad, horrific people! Show them what you’re talking about SOMEHOW! Don’t tell them. You just basically gave the finger to 100 years of cinema without flinching. And not in a Godard “remove you from the illusion” kind of way. Because why would you do that in a Matrix movie? It was out of pure laziness. And coming from the people who brought you the first Matrix….a film that utilized visuals very successfully to explain itself 4 years prior…someone should have said something. And then FILMED SOMETHING TO PUT IN THERE!!!!

So there you have it. A huge almost Freudian nightmare that the first Matrix had one night. And true to form to nightmares, though it can give you insight into what you’re really about, there is no distinguishable beginning or end and when it’s all over, leaves you with a sense of having braved an awful thing. Unfortunately for this nightmare, you know when the next one’s coming. Should you avoid sleeping that night? You be the judge.


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