Matrix Reloaded, the bitter truth

The plain and probably inevitable fact is that Joel Silver has taken over the enterprise and left poor Keanu in the cold. Keanu looks sick and confused for much of the movie, which is perhaps within the parameters of his characterization, but then again, perhaps not. All the recent photos i have seen of Keanu show him unshaven and dark-eyed, apparently suffering from depression or sickness, or both. Well, wouldn´t you be if you had invested three years of your life into a multi-million dollar project, one that you now had to publically endorse all over the world, and stood to earn tens of millions on, but frankly knew to be a pile of steaming horse manure? Oh Keanu, cui bono?

Actually, the movie isn´t THAT bad. There are several decent scenes (those with the Oracle and the Merovigian, for example) and one plain excellent one (the dialgoue with the Architect, which could have easily been spun into a whole movie). It seems, judging by these scenes, that the Wachowskis had ideas a-plenty from which to make a decent if not superb movie, but that they delegated them to the lower ranks and focused their energies on action, special effects, and quasi-religous sentimentality. Or perhaps more likely, that Silver and Warners edited a movie they felt delivered the necessary action and spectacle to justify the expense and the hype. In which case no wonder Keanu looks so sick, now he´s seen the finished product.

Basically, MATRIX RELOADED fulfills our worst fears and totally Hollywoodizes the original movie, stripping it of its darker, more sinister and surrealist underpinnings, and bringing all its lesser qualities to the forefront (the bad acting, hammy dialogue, sentimentality, gratuitous violence, etc). The movie actually looks pretty lousy, too, more like an autmobile commercial than an art work. The effects have taken over to the extent that they no longer seem to require any justification, so far as plot or character goes, and there is zero emotional involvement in watching them: they are devoid of excitement (the awful, superhero music score doesn´t help either). Not only this, but they aren´t even that convincing, compared to the first movie. Like everything else in this film, they have been overcooked to the point of falling apart, and for much of the movie it´s like watching an animated video game.

Since i want to make this piece spoiler-free, so you can all go judge for yourself, i won´t talk about what makes the Architect scene so great, save to say that it´s the only scene that has the mind-bending wangus properties that informed the first movie and made it worth writing about. MATRIX RELOADED is THE MATRIX for humatons: cotton candy exploding cars and flying bullets, with some Dune-like religious undertones, a few Braudrillardian nods to keep the Gibson/Dick sci-fi fans happy (it was they who made the first movie such a success, after all), and a flying Neo who, besides that, doesn´t develop in prowess or power since the end of the first movie, and is a lot less interesting a personality besides.

If i were to get into what´s really wrong with this movie (besides the obvious), i´d have t o go into how it really COULD have been great, and how i, or someone else, WILL do it, if and when we get the chance, and with or without Keanu and HW bucks. My main concern for now is personal: yes folks, my heart goes out to poor Keanu. A potential matrix warrior has been force-fed the blue pill and swallowed up whole by the HW matrix. Be warned: The road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions. Is this why Keanu looks so sickly and palid now? (Like Thomas Anderson in the first movie?) Alas, i fear that Keanu has joined the humatons in their slumber and been fully recruited by the matrix itself. The first movie may not have been made by sorcerers, but this one has definitely been made by humatons, and maybe even by Gatekeepers. Determined to keep the mass from stirring in its slumber, something the first movie actually threatened to do for a while, THE MATRIX franchise has now become just one more Blue Pill. Ah well, it at least spawned an interesting book... (Buy it now, and take away some of the bitterness of this movie!)

Somehow the message was hijacked: it no longer emanates from the lucid real world but from the matrix itself. Ironically this is, in part at least, the message, or at least the central twist, of Matrix Reloaded: that being the One is just another of AI´s tricks to keep us under its control, a way of harnessing and diverting that “rebel gene” and preventing it from doing any real damage to the program. Just so, in bygone times, a King, leery of a possible uprising amidst his people, had his agents start an underground revol,t in order to attract all potential dissidents to it, and so separate them out and eliminate them. The matrix, according to the Architect at least (who may well be lying), creates a series of “Ones” in order to similarly isolate that rebellious quirk of human nature that forever threatens to undo the program and bring down the reign of AI. Presumably Zion and the so-called real world will turn out (in Matrix Revolutions) to be another matrix, designed to ensure that any matrix warriors drawn towards unplugging who might some day escape the matirx, never really do, but only enter into another dream world, under the illusion of having escaped. This would be a handy explanation for just why the Zion scenes in Matrix Reloaded are so flaccid and hollow. But nothing can change the fact that the movie is basically medicore. The Achitect scene is doubly disturbing because it makes us aware just how great the movie might have been, just how disappointing it really is.

But in a weird way, the movie may be proving its own argument after all. The “real” resistance (the Wachowskis et al) who made the first movie have now clearly been infiltrated and replaced by matrix agents (Joel Silver and the Time-Warner executives) who, it turns out, only allowed the first movie to be made as a means of consolidating their hedgemony in the realm of entertainment media mind control. Put another way, the Gatekeeers, aware that the truth was beginning to filter through their web of control, decided that they would assist it in doing so, if only to be in control of the means by which it did. The Matrix only APPEARED to advocate unplugging, as a means for AI (the military-industrial-entertainment complex) to incorporate such ideas into its own (commercial, but also political) agenda, an agenda which is of course dependent above all on keeping its audience “plugged in.” After all, if the Matrix movies were as good, as subversive and as inspiring, as they ought to be, we might stop going to movies altogether, start studying Gnosticism and cybernetics, and working on unplugging in real time, instead of wasting time in darkened rooms eating popcorn.

Something is rotten in Hollywood, we already knew that much. The real horror is in realizing that, via the movie screen, this rot has now encroached not only into our homes but our bodies and brains too, and finally, into our very dreams. Matrix gave us the possibility of lucidity in mainstream cinema, and in the entertainment industry as a whole, and promised to change everything. Matrix Reloaded wastes no time nipping that particular flower of hope in the bud. It gives us instead, to the secret satisfaction of humatons everywhere, the victory of the Gatekeepers. Instead of really being the One, or at least grokking the nature of such a challenge, we get to plug into an overcooked, bloated and lifeless fantasy of the same. The Architect was right. Prophecy fulfilled, game over.

It just goes to show, if you want to unplug, you can´t do it by halves. All or nothing, baby. The first matrix was a red pill for the masses, and only a very few of us had the speed and desperation to take it as such. You know who you are. And of course, the red pill only ever comes once. Everything after that, however well it may be disgusied, is just more blue pill for the humatons. And you know who you are, too. Enjoy your victory while it lasts, Hollywood. Real life is no movie, and the real One is just getting started. Some of us are not so easily fooled.

Jake Horsley, June 2003

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