What Was The Matrix?
8 o'clock, June 1, 2003
Dragged my corpus derelicti out of the house this evening long enough to see The Matrix: Reloaded. My expectations were already set by the mixed (and not-so-mixed) reviews; and the level at which they were set turned out to be just about right. So I wasn’t disappointed. But I wasn’t exactly captivated, either.
I’ll leave the plot alone. Even with all the Philosophy 101, the plot was still the best thing about the movie. Will Shetterly’s already dissected the pacing and the structure, so I won’t go into those, either.
So no spoilers, okay?
But:
Here’s the thing about The Matrix: Whatever you could say against The Matrix, it did have style.
Here’s the thing about Reloaded: It doesn’t.
Car chases, explosions... we’ve seen all that a hundred times — as the trailers for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (talk about low expectations... but I digress) and Terminator 3 reminded us before the green katakana even started scrolling down the screen.
And the things we hadn’t seen before The Matrix, we’ve seen now; and The Matrix did it better. With the exception of a Bullet Time kick or two, Reloaded’s kung fu scenes and shootouts alike never reach the balletic grace of the first Matrix; nothing to match, let alone top, Neo’s training match with Morpheus, or Neo’s and Trinity’s slow-motion destruction of an entire SWAT team, impeccably choreographed and timed down to the chime of the elevator doors. Even on the fourth or fifth viewing, both of those scenes still send a chill down my spine, but today I got more of that from a split-second shot of two kids practicing kenjutsu in the preview for The Last Samurai than I did from Our Feature Presentation.
And then there’s the cinematography. That green patina that overlaid Thomas A. Anderson’s lowlife world, the grime of tenements and the dilapidation of half-abandoned shops and subway stations, the mid-70s cars, the whiff of circa-1980 depression and fatalism, the sense that nothing ever changes — all the things that subliminally suggested both the ugliness of the Matrix and the marginality of the ‘free’ humans’ existence in it — gone, replaced by a clean post-dot-com metropolis, packed with placements for Cadillac’s 2003 product line. If this is as bad as it gets, I’ll stick with the blue pill, thanks.
The tension between that verdigris demimonde and the shiny controlled world of the System — exemplified by the offices of Metacortex, the gleam of the cop’s mirrorshades (80s!), the polished marble of the lobby that Neo and Trinity demolish in that aforementioned slow-mo scene — not so much gone as diluted to meaninglessness by too many changes of scene and atmosphere, until we lose the ability to associate any of them with anything.
And as for Zion — I’m sorry, but I’ve seen better government, better spirituality, and better sensuality on Star Trek. That’s saying something, and it’s not saying anything good.
Don’t get me wrong; Reloaded is good summer fun, and it certainly has its moments (most of them involving either Hugo Weaving or Gloria Foster). But that’s the thing: it’s just summer fun. The Matrix was the cyberpunk aesthetic brought to life; by comparison, Reloaded is only an above-average action flick.
Good review.
But I think I may've been the only geek on the planet who didn't think much of the original movie.... It just didn't impress me much. I'd seen all the is-this-real stuff before, in Dick stories among other places, and the stylish cinematography, though nice, didn't seem to me to go that much beyond the little I'd seen of Hong Kong martial-arts movies.
On the other hand, I entirely missed all the this-never-changes stuff you're talking about, and I like that idea a lot; maybe I should go back and re-watch the first movie with the right expectations.