Kieran Healy

Matrix Algebra

I went to see Matrix Reloaded last night and thought it was pretty piss-poor stuff. Here is the basic plot structure:

1. Overly-long, self-involved, opaque speech from Character X.
2. Overly-long action sequence.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That’s about it.

Car chases, kung-fu and the endless speechifying of Morpheus, the Council Member, the Oracle, Agent Smith, the Merovingian and finally the Architect: it was a bit like channel surfing between a Monster Truck rally, Drunken Master and a C-SPAN Senate Finance Subcommittee hearing. By the time we got to the architect—I’m sorry, the Architect—and his brand of obtuseness, I was reminded of the scene in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin the Paranoid Android endlessly drags out saying what he sees written in Arthur Dent’s brainwave patterns. “Will you just tell us, you motorized maniac?!” screams Ford Prefect. My sentiments exactly.

The underlying free-will vs determinism idea wasn’t handled terribly well, with gnomic wallpaper covering over holes in the concepts. By the time we confront the Architect and discover that Choice is the problem and Neo is interesting because of his love for Trinity—well, we’ve landed right in Star Trek territory. “We may be only human but at least we have a choice!” “Tell me, Captain Kirk, what is this thing you humans call … love?” Spare us.

The Star Trek warning signals are present early on, with the inevitable Council Meeting. Why are future societies always managed by Grand Councils? As for the annoying Councillor (who is clearly stalking Neo, by the way—how else would he show up outside his door at the moment Neo happens to wake up from his nightmare?), well what can be said except, how did he get elected? He takes Neo down to the engineering level and marvels that he doesn’t understand how the machines work. Welcome to the division of labor, buddy. He sounded like the angst-ridden teenager in White Noise who’s alienated from his own microwave oven.

This post seems to be turning into a rant, so perhaps I should stop here. Matrix Reloaded isn’t truly awful, just poorly plotted and very badly paced. The design is good, I suppose. Carrie Ann Moss is cool, Laurence Fishburne has perfected the art of not laughing at his own dialogue, and Keanu Reeves is his usual non-self. At the very end, Reeves gets knocked unconscious by a couple of Sentinels. “He’s in some kind of coma” says Doctor McCoy. Couldn’t anyone have replied “How can you tell?”

I have to disagree with this one. Matrix Reloaded was excellent. I think one of the reasons it’s getting such negative reviews is that people are really only reviewing half a movie. Once Revolutions comes out all, or it least most, will be understood. This movie was great, especially if you pay really close attention to those dialogue scenes. Of particuar interest was of course the conversation with the architect, but also with the guy who was guarding the oracle.

people are really only reviewing half a movie.

Then maybe they should only have charged me $4.25 to see it. :-) The film should be self-contained. The Two Towers was only a “third of a movie,” if you like, but still much better than Reloaded.

if you pay really close attention to those dialogue scenes

I disagree. I think people are mixing up two things: (1) Having the Matrix-world be internally consistent, interesting and rich, and then seeing that conveyed in the dialogue; and (2) Putting a lot of references in the dialogue to everything from Baudrillard to the Gnostic Gospels. Lots of neat references are great, but I don’t think it gets you to (1).

Becca, unless Matrix Revolutions has us wake up and realize that Matrix Reloaded was all part of a terrible dream, it can’t do much to help.

Kieran, thank you for a wonderful review. A tidbit I thought you might appreciate: my girlfriend calls the Architect “Evil Colonel Sanders”.

Overly long action sequences? Surely you jest. Or did you want to see Keanu Reeves “act”?

As a viewer who thinks that the original “Matrix” belongs in the trifecta of must-see sci-fi films (along with “Dark City” and “Bladerunner”), I must agree with the negative review.

But the problems of doing a sequel to the orignal of this film makes me think of the inherent and unavoidable flaws in any sequel to flims like it.

Take as an example “Lethal Weapon”. The charm of that movie is that the lead character is depressed and suicidal and therefore an actual lethal weapon, for all concerned, including himself. The story involves his overcoming this through bonding with other people. So how do you do a sequel and keep the magic? You can’t. What would you call it? “Still Depressed and Dangerous, Yet Zany”?

In the original Matrix, Neo discovered the secret of the Matrix, and his one true love, how to overcome death, and that he was “The One”, with the power to bend the Matrix to his will. So what can he do in a sequel? Be in fight scenes and car chases. Yawn…

A popular theory is that Zion will turn out to be still part of the Matrix, which would explain some of the bizarre speechifying in Reloaded.

Matrix Reloaded is bad “Godfather III” style and bad “Heaven’s Gate” style. It is an execrable sequel to a tightly plotted lean stylish film and everything The Matrix wasn’t – flabby, incoherent with fight sequences that had a tenuous relationship to the plot. But it is also bad as a standalone movie(ignoring the fact that it would be incomprehensible to viewers unfamiliar with The Matrix) with laughably bad dialogue and ludicrous Phantom Menace style procedural rubbish. Also, confronted with the “utopia” of Zion, did nobody else feel they would prefer to remain blissfully unaware, plugged into the matrix?

Not to mention that the trilogy seems to be losing it’s chance to be relevant and deep.
One could make a reasonable case that the first movie was basically about the corroding effect that television has had on modern life, especially (but not limited to) modern politics—- “If something false happens on TV, does the falseness matter. Hasn’t TV constructed a reality where all that matters is what is believed by those who watch it?”.

But like all analogies, this only works well and powerfully if one accepts it as an analogy.

Once you start going on about the details of Zion, how the Matrix was constructed etc, it’s obvious that one’s now deep in the world of an SF story independent of any sort of social analogy.

I’m surprised at all of the negative comments. I mean, it wasn’t as good as the original (how could it be), but consider:

By the end of the movie they had completely undermined the characters’ picture of the world. The rebels find out that they are not rebels at al: they are part of the system, and they are still under the system’s control. In fact, their whole rebelleous subculture was created by the system to channel the inevitable dissent. I think we can safely still read this as allegory…

Damn. The comments software deleted my “SPOILER ALERT” tags. If I give anything away to someone who isn’t expecting it, I apologize.

(SPOILERS)

Look, I understand people dislking Matrix: Reloaded.

Basically, in the Matrix films what you’re dealing with are Westernized Hong Kong wirefighting movies—they distinguish themselves by at least having some semblance of a rationale for all the zero-G kung foolery, but that’s about it. If you’re a fan of this genre, you’ll be able to overlook the flabby pseudo-intellectualism and cheesy “love conquers all” motifs—which were just as evident in the first film as the second. If you’re not, you won’t.

What I don’t understand are comments like “the Matrix is losing its chance to be deep and relevant.” Ummm, ex-queeze me? What was so “deep” about the first movie? I mean, forget for a moment that the whole thing is basically an almost embarrassing gothy-hacker fantasy of Being Tough… “The world is an illusion, from which only the Saviour (sorry, The One) can redeem you?” Garden-variety gnosticism. “We must battle the machines for our freedom”—garden-variety SF techno-paranoia, with a scientifically implausible rationale for the whole “Matrix” concept to boot. The Terminator did it better. Ships named “Nebuchadnezzar” and a Last Human City called “Zion”? Yeah, wow, that sure is some Subtle Allusion.

You know, I loved the original film and I also consider it must-watch, but not because it was “deep” or “relevant” or plausible or a genius exercise in intertextual reference. It’s because it broke ground in combining the Hollywood popcorn flick with the Hong Kong action flick, achieved that combination almost seamlessly, and delivered a fairly simple sensei-and-disciple plot driven by cool characters (by whom I mean the villains primarily, Smith and Cypher) and some staggering action and visuals.

Does “Reloaded” live up to that standard? Sure, and then some. It has the same flaws as the original—esp. the witless attempts at philosopherizing, the juvenile defiance-of-authority meme (wow, Zion’s “temple” is a rave, this-is-our-church-and-god-is-a-deejay… didn’t see that one coming…) and the “love conquers all” stuff, a depressingly durable motif in the SF field—but the action is if anything better than the first and more than makes up for the awkward pacing in the first half. I don’t remember actually gasping at any action sequence in the first film, but I did this repeatedly during the freeway sequence… worth the price of admission alone as far as I’m concerned. They even found ways to generate tense confrontation around Neo’s basically omnipotent character.

Entertaining baddies? Check. We don’t have Cypher any more, and No-longer-agent Smith doesn’t have the menacing cool of the original, but I was hugely entertained by the Merovingian and his twin assassins, by the Architect, and by the revelation that the Oracle is in cahoots with him and the Prophecy is basically a swindle. Mercifully, this cuts the rug out from under the whole messianic faith thing—speaking of “relevance,” that’s a meme that should chill the blood of anyone following current events—and makes it evident why so many of Morpheus’ countrymen regard him as a pompous kook. He is! Beautiful.

The cinematography wasn’t as consistently good; that’s about the only point on which I’ll fault the sequel vs. the original. And there was one scene that seemed truly pointless (the fight scene with the Oracle’s bodyguard). In most other ways, though, the sequel lived up to and maybe even surpassed its predecessor. That doesn’t mean it’s great cinema in the larger sense… it isn’t. Neither was the original. But is it great popcorn cinema? Absolutely, in much the same way as the original was. I’d see it again in a heartbeat.

1. Overly-long, self-involved, opaque speech from Character X.
2. Overly-long action sequence.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But couldn’t that also describe Homer?

>>Why are future societies always managed by Grand Councils?

They need them in order to manage the single currencies which all future societies seem to have implemented (it presumabyl takes central banking technology beyond our ken to make the Klingons and the Vulcans form an optimal currency area?)

I guess the wachowski boys are done plundering the postmodern section at barnes and noble. What an achievment…they became fascinated by the greatest marketing tag and ‘collation’ in book publishing history, i.e. ‘postmodernism’. What they put together simply doesn’t belong together…kind of like the list of authors Richard Rorty fires off in every other paragraph he’s ever written since the mid 70’s. When are people going to stop wasting their time on the peculiar phenomenological tricks that Heidegger inspired….it’s to easy, it leads nowhere and anybody that spends just a little time with it comes away with the same thing…although they seem to believe they have individually discovered something profound.

No argument that there’s no coherent philosophy going on in the Matrix. OTOH, “Postmodernism” is a brand name mostly used a) by people who don’t understand continental philosophers but imagine themselves to be championing them, and b) by people who don’t understand continental philosophers and would therefore like to dismiss them. Apart from the small coterie who have actually identified themselves as “postmodern” (and some of them quickly had second thoughts, Lyotard frex) it has virtually no usefulness in describing any actual body of thought and could, I think, be pretty safely junked to the benefit of philosophy in general.

I’m no Heidegger fan, mind you, but…

Philosophy Comic made after the first film:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/djp/comic.html

He takes Neo down to the engineering level and marvels that he doesn’t understand how the machines work. Welcome to the division of labor, buddy. He sounded like the angst-ridden teenager in White Noise who’s alienated from his own microwave oven.

Heh.

Love the White Noise reference, although I must confess to being consumed w/ teen angst over not having throught of it myself. & I call myself a DeLillo fan… For shame.

The whole movie, as Mr. Healy aptly puts it, is a logorrhiffic exultation of half-assed pseudophilosophizing. The first flick had the decency of embedding cultist fodder into the actual plot & kept the dialogue if not fluent then @ least… grounded. When it gets to the point where Mr. White-Haired Councilman has to ask rhetorically “just what is control,” however…

During the offering scene in Zion, I kept hearing in my mind Morpheus yelling in falsetto:

“Go Away Neo IS NOT THE MESSIAH, he is a very naughty boy!”

I firmly believe there hasn’t been a decent car chase scene in a movie since The Blues Brothers.

BTW, didn’t people make the same comments defending Phantom Menace as they do Reloaded? It’s only setting up the plot … don’t worry … Attack of the Clones will be much better!

I have to say, I think I mostly agree with Doctor Slack. I thought the Matrix was a fun action movie with an interesting plot, and I never thought its “philosophical implications”, such as they were, were anything more than trappings for the story. They were interesting, but not particularly profound. And the first movie had its flaws. long boring speeches by Morpheus, for instance. Keanu Reeves. And so on.

Matrix Reloaded, I thought, was largely at the same level. The action scenes, I thought, were fairly spectacular. And I thought the plot was about as engaging, after the rather tedious opening part got done with. I enjoyed the Merovingian and the Architect, and thought they suitably messed around with what we thought we knew in the first movie. Further, I felt like the Wachowski Brothers actually know what they’re doing – that they know where they’re going with the various plot elements they’ve introduced, and are going to tie them up competently in Revolutions. Of course, this may not prove to be true, and I may have to eat crow, but I really felt like Matrix Reloaded, aside from some rough spots at the beginning (and they were pretty rough), was a fairly engaging and entertaining action movie, with a mildly thought-provoking plot – about the same thing I thought about the first movie.

Looks like most of you who read Kieran’s review didn’t get it. But that’s why these movies are so successful in the first place. If only the rest of life made such sense. Whee!

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