THE MATRIX: RELOADED
Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving
Directed by The Wachowski Brothers
Warner Brothers
There was a very old man at last night's screening of Reloaded. He must have been almost ninety. Imagine that: imagine seeing Matrix: Reloaded in the context of a century's worth of cinema. Imagine going from Harold Lloyd hanging off a clock and giant apes tumbling from the Empire State Building to digital tulpa and a hundred Hugo Weavings. And then imagine how fast his wig must have been spinning when the cinema's first true superman launched into flight.
Moving faster than my unblinking eyes could see, soaring like an eagle, and slapping people around like they were made of paper, Keanu Reeves' Neo makes the Kryptonian Crusader obsolete. He moves like a superman, he looks like a superman, and he fights like a superman.
Indeed, you'd almost be forgiven for thinking that the whole film was just some flimsy pretext into which the Wachowskis have plugged their set pieces and technical flamboyance. You'd be right - they do the slow-motion thing once or twice too often for my liking - but only up to a point.
The first Matrix film was about a man who discovers that the world doesn't work the way he thought it did. In every important respect, Reloaded takes that theme, and runs with it. Flies with it. Whatever.
Reloaded makes a lie out of the first film. It answers questions that you probably hadn't thought to ask. All the pop psychology and prattle about the Nature of Control is just misdirection, contrived by the Wachowskis for a simple purpose:
To turn a human being into a gibbering wreck, in anticipation of Matrix: Revolutions.
Reloaded is a much bigger film than the first Matrix. While this is kind of an obvious thing to say, it's an important point. While the first film had a certain low-budget charm, with its tight cast and steep action curve, it had the luxury of being the first of its kind. Reloaded, in order to compete with everything from Lord of the Rings to Spider-Man (and its own prequel), had to be bigger. And it was. And it does. And it pisses all over the competition.
With a Big Elephant Trunk Cock.
While most of the performances are of a standard comparable to the first film, both Weaving and Fishburne pitch their characters with a great deal more self-confidence second time around. Not that they were exactly shrinking violets before, you understand, but there's a difference between having an unshakable belief in the Messiah, and actually sitting down with him for lunch.
Reloaded tries to be everything at once - a superhero movie, a caper flick, a love story, a revolutionary epic, and an existential mystery - and, amazingly, it more or less succeeds. It's sexy. It's funny. It will root you in your seat, when it doesn't have you on the edge of it, or leaping up and cheering. And, most important of all, it'll have you lining up around the block for tickets to Revolutions, this November.
And me and Oul' Ernie? We'll be at the front of the queue.
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist