directors/screenwriters
Andy Wachowski
Larry Wachowski
producer
Joel Silver
cinematographer
Bill Pope
music
Don Davis
editor
Zach Staenberg
cast
Keanu Reeves (Neo)
Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus)
Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity)
Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith)
Jada Pinkett Smith (Niobe)
Gloria Foster (Oracle)
Monica Belucci (Persephone)
Lambert Wilson (Merovingian)
Harold Perrineau (Link)
Nona Gaye (Zee)
Randall Duk Kim (Keymaker)
Harry Lennix (Commander Lock)
Anthony Zerbe (Councillor Hamann)
Neil Rayment (Albino Twin)
Adrian Rayment (Albino Twin)
Helmut Bakaitis (The Architect)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 138m
u.s.
release: May 15, 2003
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other wachowski
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- bound
- the
matrix
- the
matrix revolutions
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There are two ways of looking
at The Matrix Reloaded (and, by extension, its 1999 predecessor):
Either it's a film of ideas disguised as an action flick, or
an action flick disguised as a film of ideas. The general public,
I suspect, will not be drawn to this long-awaited sequel just
to hear philosophical notions bandied about, though hear them
it will. No, the honest response to a Matrix film is also
twofold: Either the movie kicks ass or it doesn't. As someone
who was rather dismissive of the original movie, I can report
that Matrix Reloaded does indeed kick whatever is put
in front of it, at least on the level of comic-book/anime/techno-dweeb
escapism.
We pick up Neo (Keanu "I
still know kung fu" Reeves) and his un-merry band of rebels
-- stoic Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), PVC-clad Trinity (Carrie-Anne
Moss), newbie Link (Harold Perrineau) -- in their continuing
resistance against the Matrix, a machine-generated code programmed
to keep humans in unwitting bondage while using their energy
for computer fuel. Interestingly, Morpheus, an unquestionable
hipster sage in the first film, here is revealed to be just one
voice among many in Zion, the underground city where the last
free humans take shelter. Not everyone, it seems, takes Morpheus'
prophetic shtick as seriously as he himself does, though it's
a measure of this largely humorless film (Joe Pantoliano's wise-guy
Cypher is missed) that nobody tells him "Dude. There are
other people besides you. Try some decaf."
Brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski
crafted a reasonable shiny-black diversion with The Matrix;
I wasn't as impressed by it as many others were, but I can see
the appeal of it (mainly, it's a computer geek's wet dream: if
you spend most of your waking life pushing floppies in and out,
you might get chosen to be a kung-fu hero and get jiggy
with Carrie-Anne Moss). The brothers, however, seem to have caught
the George Lucas disease -- they've become too smitten with the
perfume of their own borrowed ideas (not only from pop culture
but from philosophy -- Lucas had Joseph Campbell, the Wachowskis
genuflect towards Derrida and Baudrillard). Maybe they read too
many furrowed-brow essays on The Phenomenology
of The Matrix.
Whatever the case, every twenty
minutes or so, we get an action sequence (more on those in a
minute) designed to outdo everything else ever; between the money
scenes, we get characters standing at attention and burping prophecies
and deep thoughts at each other. Whenever a new character called
the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim) opens his mouth, cheese falls
out: "I know this because I must know." Glad you clarified
that, Sparky. Another new character, the Merovingian (Lambert
Wilson), drones on (in a French accent, yet) about causality.
But the Wachowskis save the best for last, when Neo steps into
a Kubrickian white room and meets the deus ex machina
himself, the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis), whose professorial
white beard dislodges things like "Which brings us at last
to the moment of truth wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately
expressed and the anomaly revealed as both beginning and end."
Would you like fries with that?
When it's not brooding Gnostically
about determinism and what-have-you, The Matrix Reloaded
does put the extra money on the screen. When Neo's dryly self-amused
nemesis Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) replicates himself, like a
virus, to form a hundred-man army against Neo, the sequence is
fun if a little too PlayStation-ish. The opening Trinity-and-agent
bullet-time plummet is so good it's shown twice. And the fourteen-minute
freeway chase has been and will be justly celebrated as one of
the great concussive symphonies of force and momentum. Reloaded
takes what I enjoyed in the original -- the freaky eye candy
-- and cranks it up to 11. The stuff in between, I -- and maybe
you -- can take or leave, unless you thrill to dialogue like
"While it remains a burden assiduously avoided, it is not
unexpected and thus not beyond a measure of control." Yeah.
What he said.
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