This is also highly interesting ... if you're interested at all ...
Not written by me, but by a friend on that board posted above (I'm just not that articulate I'm afraid), this sums up what every fan of the sequels feels.
The Matrix Reloaded (Summer, 2003):(Yes, of course there are spoilers
)
When is a sequel not a sequel?
When it's a follow up to the culture-defining 1999 smash,
The Matrix.
With a movie that's as clich? and yet surprisingly satisfying as
The Matrix, it's a wonder why any business-savvy filmmaker in their right mind would try anything new. Christ, when
The Terminator worked so well, why change the formula? It was replicated for three straight films, and it was entertaining.
The One:But the Wachowskis always maintained that
The Matrix was conceived as a trilogy over 10 years ago. A moving philosophy text book presented as an anim? and framed like a comic book, the concept of
The Matrix was surprisingly simple: pod-born human beings kept stimulated inside a virtual simulation (the Matrix) to allow for their servant-turned-oppressor machine masters to feed off of their bioelectric power supply. A few humans, freed by a man known only as 'the One', have been trying to overthrow the machines. After his death, the destiny of his prophecised return has become the life-goal of certain individuals. In this case, we focus in on one rebel, Morpheus, in his search for the One. He finds a man called Neo, who he believes is the One. The movie ends with the One being 'born', as it were, and here we stand -
The Matrix is about to reload...
Synopsis:Six months after the end of the first movie, Neo has been liberating minds from the Matrix at an incredible rate. The 100-year-old underground human city of Zion is now at its maximum capacity of 250,000 people. Word has reached Zion that the machines have amassed an army of 250,000 sentinels - one machine for each person - and are digging through the Earth's core. It's just 72 hours before the machines breach the city walls, and Neo - who is also troubled by dreams of his lover's death - seeks out the Oracle for advice. She directs him to an unscrupulous renegade program known as the Merovingian, saying that he has captive a program called the Keymaker. The Keymaker will allow Neo to reach the Source and save Zion. Neo doesn't know what's going to happen or exactly why he's doing what he's doing - despite finding out that the Oracle is herself a program, Neo has no choice but to follow the Oracle's instructions to the letter. Entering the 'door made of light' that has been haunting his dreams, Neo meets a program called the Architect - the program who programmed the Matrix.
Neo is, in effect, meeting God.
In this fateful meeting, Neo finds out a number of disturbing revelations. Firstly, he is not the first and only 'One'. Secondly, this means that there were previous versions of the Matrix. The Architect explains that the Matrix - being an environment based on mathematical logic - combined with the incomputable irrationalities of its human substituents, lead to the ultimate demise of the very first Matrix that was designed to be 'perfect'. Using the intuitive program of the Oracle for assistance, they created a new version of the Matrix that allowed for the human-created abnomalities to be isolated into one being...the One. The One's subsequent function is then to go to the Source (lead by the Oracle under the guise of the 'prophecy') and integrate with the Source to reboot the Matrix and begin the next cycle. This then reveals the purpose of the machine army: they are to wipe out all of the humans in Zion to make way for 23 people that Neo will choose to unplug and rebuild Zion (Morpheus talked of the One freeing the first humans - he didn't know it, but this is what was happening).
In other words, Neo's fate was determined before birth.
He was not some saviour derived from some obscure prophecy - he was merely a tool for the machines to keep their cyclic system running smoothly. After seeing his lover in imminent danger on the Architect's many TV screens, Neo is faced with a choice:
Either he takes the door on his right-hand-side, reboots the Matrix and sees Zion be destroyed. Or he takes the door on his left, returns to the Matrix, saves Trinity (if he can), and risks the Matrix crashing resulting in the death of the humans in both the Matrix and Zion - in other words, total extinction. Neo tries to call the Architect's bluff, saying that the machines need human beings to survive. But the Architects seeming lack of care sees Neo having to choose.
He chooses the door on the left.
He doesn't know what to do now. Their ship - now under attack from sentinels - is destroyed, but the crew get away in time. The sentinels come after the crew, but Neo does something extraordinary: he stops the sentinels dead in their tracks, emitting what looks to be some type of electromagnetic pulse from his body, and his own body also collapsing as a result.
Now in a coma, and having defied the machines' carefully-designed cycle of the Matrix, the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance.
Review:I remember sitting down to watch this back in 2003. I really liked the original
Matrix, but it wasn't the amazing classic that everyone made it out to be. At least not to me. Having been a fan of anim?, comic books, cyberpunk and Hong Kong movies - the very elements that are combined in the movie - it came off as little more than a highly entertaining rehash of all these genres. As a result, the opening sequence with the three-dimensional Matrix code had me enticed from the get-go. I was hoping that this movie would put the rather flat first film into three dimensions. And, Christ, it ends up verging on four (although, to be honest, the fourth and fifth dimensions of the trilogy are rightfully reserved for the awe-inspiring final installment).
The rabbit hole deepens as first we find out that the Oracle is just a program. Then we see - what we all knew from the trailers - that Smith is back...but "not...exactly as before". We see the 'skeleton' of the Matrix in the form of the programmers' maintainence passages. We find out that Neo still be killed in the Matrix. We find out that there are obselete programs that are hiding in the Matrix. We are given a tantalising glimpse into a hidden place within the Matrix where there exist inumerable secret doors - and behind door number 1? The God of the Matrix - the Architect. Here, we find out some rather disturbing revelations that suddenly explain and make sense of the candy floss exposition of the first film.
The 'Alice In Wonderland' motif is continued and made ever-wierder with the introduction of memorable characters like the Merovingian, the Twins and the Architect. Doors that lead everywhere and no-where? Rule-breaking programs like ghosts, vampires and aliens? Yes, it gets quite wierd, but the sense of fun and danger isn't lost. The whole mid-section of the film that usually attributes to be somewhat slow and boring is remedied with the Merovingian's chateau scenes and the freeway chase. The fun and anticipation for where Neo wll end up heightens, as the prophecy's climax gets closer with every gunfight, flipping car and exploding truck.
Compared to its predecessor, in terms of the story and visual design,
The Matrix Reloaded jumps from Dick to Kubrick in one fell swoop. Not as accessible as the first film, the makers try to balance the intellectualism with some extraordinary action sequences. But the story remains equally disturbing, swapping the gooey pods for eerily artifical corridors and mathematical systems designed to keep the pod-feeding system at optimal efficiency.
No, the love story isn't the most convincing, but one thing that we know from the first film is that the love was never anything more than a purely mechanical thing to serve the function of the movie. Being the detached cyberpunk as it is, and weighing the immeasurable pros against the few cons, this is more than forgiveable.
And, of course, it leaves an amazing cliff-hanger.
The Matrix Reloaded kicks much ass, and does something that the first film didn't: in a world where sticking to past successes is the path for a guaranteed success, it dares to become its own film.
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