Matrix Reloaded starts some undefined time after the end of the first movie. The last transmission from a ship called the Osiris warns Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the other "real world" captains that the machines are digging through the earth's crust straight down toward Zion, the last remaining human city. Morpheus' Nebuchadnezzar and the other ships are ordered home to Zion to defend the city, setting off a series of internal political battles of strategy that constitutes the slowest part of the film. The problem is that there can be no direct connection to the Matrix from within Zion, and as in the first film, almost all the interesting stuff happens in the Matrix. Luckily, the Wachowskis have contrived a reason for Morpheus and the gang to leave town, so the fun can begin again.
Once jacked in, Neo (Keanu Reeves) and crew receive instructions from the Oracle (the late Gloria Foster) that resemble a virtual-reality computer hackers' treasure hunt: Find this character/software module, so you can get instructions to the next character/software module, who will have information that will help you find this other crucial character or locale, which will tell you how to protect Zion. Or something. It's all very bring-me-the-broom-of-the-wicked-witch-of-the-West, with the fate of the world at stake.
Some of these developments increase our knowledge of what the Matrix is and how it works and what the hell is really going on, but others feel like gratuitous plot embellishments, without the sense of necessity and inevitability that marked everything in the original. With the November release of part three, The Matrix Revolutions, these cavils may turn out to be incorrect. But so far, some of this stuff is reminiscent of Back to the Future 3, a perfectly OK film that still felt like an unnecessary tag-on.
Fight director Yuen Wo Ping provides his usual dazzling choreography, but that too feels both a bit compromised and a bit "been there, done that." It's a great thing that CGI frees stuntmen from doing some really dangerous stuff now. But injudiciously applied, it can rob an action sequence of all power. The best action scenes, even in sci-fi and horror flicks, are somehow rooted in reality.
Many Hong Kong movie fans disdained the use of wires and harnesses as unauthentic or even cheating. But even those tricks are not as far from reality as supernaturally sped-up CGI simulations. The further we get from reality, the less thrilling the effect is. There simply is little genuine suspense in these scenes; the excitement is more the result of a physiological reaction to fast cutting, camera movement, and sound effects than it is of empathetic investment in the characters. The film's best action moments involve a motorcycle dodging in between speeding cars, because these at least look real. The worst action moments involve Neo swooping down from the sky to pull someone out of harm's way. That Neo could be considered a deus ex machina may be a conscious joke on the Wachowskis' part, but it grows old.
Aggravating this is the more general "rule" problem: Who has the power to do what? And why? Why does Neo fight and fight the Smith army and almost lose several times when we know, from the first punch, that he could have simply done his Superman act and flown away? Why can he beat them? "Because he's the One and can do anything" isn't a good enough answer. If his powers are unbounded, then there's no suspense and no point to the entire thing. If they are bounded, we need to know how.
The answers to some of these questions may be implicit in the computer mechanics that the Matrix represents: A fight could be two cyber-entities -- a software module and the neural impulses of a jacked-in human -- "punching" to infect each other's code and "parrying" by mutating into immunity from that punch. The end of the first film suggested that Neo's power stems from his newfound ability to see the code, i.e., bits and bytes, behind the Matrix's "reality" and to therefore respond to what's really there rather than to the image.
But can anybody keep all this stuff in his or her head in a useful way while watching the film?
Be warned that Matrix Reloaded really is only half of a two-part story. Unlike The Matrix, it ends with a cliffhanger and represents less of an independent whole. (If you sit through the nine or so minutes of closing credits, you'll see a preview of The Matrix Revolutions.)
Meanwhile, for all these problems, big and little, the Wachowskis still hold the current franchise on intellectually engaging action films. It's not like I won't be heading back for a second (or even third) look.
