FilmBlather.com

"What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?"

Those of us who are fans of cinematic science-fiction are faced with a fundamental problem; a catch-22, if you will. You see, sci-fi movies, with exceptions, by their very nature require complex production design and special effects to show us their creations. These bells and whistles, without exceptions, require big budgets. For filmmakers to obtain the money they need, their scripts need to be easily accessible to a large audience, devoid of anything overly heady, impenetrable or otherwise difficult to comprehend. Ambitious science-fiction, understandably, faces a great deal of obstacles on its way to the big screen. With Star Wars dying a long, slow artistic death and Star Trek a commercial one, with Steven Spielberg being one of the very few established filmmakers with the clout to give the genre a shot, the dearth of worthy specimens is ever more severe.

People will scoff at The Matrix Reloaded, just like everyone scoffed at Brian De Palma's wonderful Mission to Mars, like many scoffed at Spielberg's masterpiece A.I.. I am immensely grateful for it. Many sequels rehash their predecessors; this one expands and redefines the mythology of The Matrix, confounds our expectations, wows us, toys with us, shows us things we have never seen. It is, in every way, a work of tremendous imagination. We need this movie so badly.

And you see, the thing is that I was growing very frustrated with the Wachowski Brothers by roughly the end of reel five. Where the first film combined a compelling futuristic vision with a disarmingly naive view of fate and destiny, this one seemed to be devolving into mysticism, faux-spirituality and mumbo-jumbo. But then -- wham! -- a plot twist and we're right back in the realm of science-fiction, but on an entirely different and even more intriguing dimension. I've already heard the complaints about the movie's dimestore philosophy, but they ignore the fact that the Wachowskis deliberately inserted it to mislead us.

It should be addressed, though it has already been addressed to death elsewhere, that Reloaded is essentially half of a movie, the first part of a five-hour long sequel that will conclude on November 5th of this year. Interestingly, its ending isn't a cliffhanger in any meaningful sense, aside from the fact that the central conflicts remain unresolved... it flashes to the end credits at a more or less arbitrary point, as if it was pausing for an intermission. In a way, it isn't fair to review Reloaded on its own because it isn't meant to stand on its own; at the very least, it's something that should be taken into consideration.

I would prefer not to discuss the plot beyond saying that it involves an imminent invasion of Zion, the last human stronghold in a world taken over by machines. The film features action both inside and outside the matrix, though by far the most spectacular is the soon-to-be-famous 14-minute freeway chase scene that delivers on the long-touted promise that The Matrix Reloaded would revolutionize filmmaking. Nothing more should be said about it, but my jaw hurt afterward.

My biggest fear for the sequel was that the spontaneity and light-footedness of the original, its effortless blend of mind-blowing sci-fi and Hong Kong martial arts, would be replaced by a lumbering self-consciousness, an eager-to-please desire to give us more of the same, only bigger. I sensed a certain measure of that in the movie, but it is mitigated by two things: a) there is genuine innovation behind the stunt sequences and b) the crisp visual style of The Matrix has been retained, as the Wachowskis again succeed in creating the illusion that Keanu Reeves is a better martial artist than, say, Jet Li in his movies. The simple reason for the latter is that the fight scenes in the Matrix films aren't edited to death, and the camera is permitted to pull back and observe, rather than showing chop cuts of a leg here, a flying head there. It's much more impressive this way.

One can nitpick at The Matrix Reloaded if one wants, look for and find plotholes and logical fallacies. The movie is so intricate and multi-layered that it all but invites such an approach. It's an ungrateful thing to do. Many of us are usually willing to settle for well-made Hollywood product with no aspirations to be anything more; here is a movie that doesn't take the easy road, that thinks big, that shoots for the stars and comes up with an impressive hit rate. It's very frustrating to me when ambition begets derision, and it discourages filmmakers from taking risks.

Many want to offer up Keanu Reeves as the Achilles' Heel of this franchise. Not really. He's not very good, granted, but he's also not very relevant; in Reloaded, he is hardly even the protagonist. You may think, from the first film, that his Neo is The One, a hero destined to emerge victorious against the machines and save mankind from slavery. Don't get your hopes up.