 • About the ratings • Write your own review • Back to main page ![[]](http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/06/93/06/image_6936.gif){kind=small} 'MATRIX' succumbs to the Hollywood machine
By Jeff Salamon American-Statesman Staff Posted: May 14, 2003 Four minutes into "The Matrix," Carrie-Anne Moss's Trinity found herself the object of a rooftop chase scene that was a clear homage to the opening sequence of Hitchcock's "Vertigo." The visual reference was more than just a tip of the hat to The Master. Hitchcock's mid-century San Francisco might seem worlds away from a 22nd-century dystopia, but "Vertigo's" air of paranoia and layers of hidden identity are as clear an antecedent as you're likely to find for "The Matrix." If "The Matrix Reloaded" were to cite a film for inspiration, it might look to another ode to mental instability: "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." Like that shaggy-dog comedy, "The Matrix Reloaded" is a bit of a mess, stuffed with more characters and plot points than it can possibly handle. It's an occasionally entertaining mess, to be sure. But when it's not entertaining, it veers between the tiresomely kinetic and the numbingly talky. This is not what "The Matrix" set us up for. That film prompted so much hype, so many catch phrases ("Take the red pill") and so many homages, parodies and ripoffs, that it's easy to forget what a skilled achievement it was. Yes, its thematic content was a college freshman's notion of deep thoughts: a synthesis of virtually every spiritual, philosophical and mythical cliché in history. But this serving of Joseph Campbell's Soup was so thick you had to eat it with a fork; every second-hand idea was given visual and narrative body. At the center of the film was Keanu Reeves's Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, a computer programmer who sensed that something was terribly wrong with his life. As Trinity and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) revealed to him, he was right: His entire world was a computer-generated illusion (aka the matrix) that disguised the fact that sentient machines had turned humanity into the energy source for a nightmarish cybernetic state (aka reality). Neo was the prophesied savior who would destroy this prison. Though there were stylistic influences galore -- Japanese animation, Hong Kong action flicks, film noir -- writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski kept them on a tight rein. "The Matrix" was that oddest of films: a claustrophobic spectacle. This special effects-laden crowd pleaser largely took place indoors, a fact that was emphasized by camerawork that more often than not cut actors off at the forehead. "The Matrix Reloaded," by contrast, looks like a theatrical play that has been clumsily "opened up" for film. Rather than the cramped dialectic of matrix and reality that drove its predecessor, "Reloaded" offers an excess of outdoor locales -- a freeway, a mountaintop aerie, an urban playground -- and the underground city of Zion, where thousands of Neo's human allies plot the downfall of the matrix. "Reloaded" starts off beautifully enough. Once again, Trinity is on the run, and when she jumps out of a skyscraper with an agent in pursuit, the Wachowski brothers seem to be reinventing cinema for the digital age. As Trinity falls backward, the action shifts into crystal-clear slow motion. When she and the agent shoot at each other, it's oddly intimate: We register every grimace and wince, the bullet trails carve out smoke rings in the air, and the likely meeting with the asphalt below promises consummation rather than unwelcome death. But until the exact same scene is repeated toward the end of the film, we never see its like again. The Wachowskis were, reportedly, obsessed with outdoing the effects in the first film, and "Reloaded" becomes a tiresome game of oneupmanship. As all the advance stories mention, Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith, so menacing in the first film, has morphed into a hundred or so duplicates, at great expense and behind-the-scenes effort. But the effect is closer to long division than to multiplication -- one Smith is terrifying; a hundred are merely pesky. And Zion, which many took to be a legend in the first film, is here made concrete, turned into a rave club tribute to the set design of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and Ridley Scott's "Alien." Though Zion is admirably multi-racial, it carried more power when you imagined it was a myth Morpheus desperately believed in, rather than a place he goes to refuel his ship. The desire to show us the money infects virtually everything. The fight scenes are spectacular, but they repeat their tricks too many times, and a fireball-filled 14-minute car chase looks like the Wachowski brothers' attempt to show Jerry Bruckheimer who's top dog. In 1999, "The Matrix" struck back at the big-budget Hollywood empire by demonstrating that people want a little think-think to go with their bang-bang. It opened a couple of months before George Lucas' "The Phantom Menace," and guess which film the Force was with? But four years later, the energy's moving the other way. The "Matrix" homages that popped up in "Charlie's Angels" and "Daredevil" now appear to have been the Borg-like Hollywood machine's attempt to assimilate "The Matrix." And indeed, the franchise has been swallowed whole by the kind of Hollywood devices the first film sought to blow away. "Reloaded" is full of show-bizzy shtick: leaden buddy-flick banter, hey-look! cameos (Harvard prof Cornel West shows up as a Zion council member) and a climax that demonstrates that the series has devolved from a variation on the grail myth to a postmodern heist flick. The film, jarringly enough, doesn't end at all -- it leaves us with a cliffhanger that's supposed to whet our appetite for the third installment, "Revolutions," due in November. Like everyone else, I'll go see it. But I'll have nothing but respect for anyone who chooses to take the blue pill instead. | |||||||
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