There was, perhaps, an unfair level of expectation for the Matrix sequels. This may have been the first instance—and was certainly the most notable early one—of the Internet totally fucking everything up for a movie. You have to understand the impact The Matrix had on a) nerds, b) potheads, and c) pop culture junkies. It was massive. A devotee of The Matrix could fancy him/herself cooler than Star Wars nerds because of all the mangled Baudrillard, capable of getting high and, thanks to The Matrix, finding deeper meaning in Alice in Wonderland than the actual gibberish written by a pedophile tripping on mushrooms (sorry, y'all, I know the truth stings), and due to to the immense new possibilities presented to solipsists by the exponential growth of the Internet, the Matrix fan could become a Serious Pop Culture Theorist on his/her “blog.” (Ed. Note: the hypocrisy of pissing on blogs on a blog is not lost on the author. He requests that you merely nod your heads and agree.)
So long story short, nerds who thought they were cooler than other nerds had spent about three and a half years feverishly discussing what was in store in the Matrix sequels, to be released months apart in 2003. We had worked ourselves up into such a state that the fucking Warner Bros logo got a standing ovation at the midnight screenings. I even—and I swear on the immortal soul of Alain Robbe-Grillet that it was an accident—went to see The Matrix Reloaded in costume as Neo: long black coat, shades, blank expression (mine due to coming down from something rather than Reevesian mental absence). But was it really an accident? I prefer to think of it as the universe reminding me what a fucking geek I was. Am. Ever shall be. Whatever, moving on.
The Matrix Reloaded starts off with an almost desperate stab at awesomeness: Trinity flying through the air on a motorcycle, a huge fucking explosion, and a slow-motion shot of Trinity's ass in those vinyl pants as she sticks the landing perfectly. Then she and an Agent are flying through mid-air with bullet ripples all over the goddamn place, and Trinity's plummeting through the air off a fucking skyscraper with the Agent firing and firing and firing and finally he hits her just under the tit, big blood spurt . . . HOLY SHIT TRINITY'S GONNA DIE IN THE FIRST SCENE WHAT THE FUCK????? And she wipes out on a car—and Keanu wakes up. Goddammit, you cocktease ass Wachowski punks.
Well, hey, it's not like we wanted Trinity to die in the first scene (see Fast and Furious as an example: killing off a hot chick main character, no matter how shitty an actress, in the first reel is a mistake). Next up we have a scene where we see some Agents crashing a summit of several ship captains. Morpheus makes his typical dramatic entrance. We're told that the machines are closing in on Zion and within 72 hours or something, arrivederci Zion unless Neo does something. First, the presumed-dead Agent Smith shows up and asks this guy to thank Neo for setting him free (whoops . . .) and then some actual Agents show up. Neo doesn't even take it seriously. He flexes his nuts for a couple minutes and then the Agents mysteriously vanish. Neo is troubled. Keanu's brow furrows. And he goes flying off to go see the Oracle, but she's not there. A promising beginning.
However, the next fucking forty years of The Matrix Reloaded (taking us to about minute 30, objective time) are goddamn torturous. It's all in the “real world,” for one thing. Oooh, they show us Zion. Ya know what? Fuck Zion. It's dirty, there aren't any stores for the girls to buy nice dresses, the people are all a bunch of humorless religious fanatics . . . it was one thing to hear the zealot techie guy (who, hilariously, is not back for the sequels due to excessive salary demands even though nobody knows him as anything other than the zealot techie guy from The Matrix) rhapsodize about Zion in the first movie, because you could imagine this cool place. I took one look at Zion and did not give a fuck about any of the people there, and by the middle of the third movie I was actively rooting for the machines to blast this ugly shithole out of existence.
Actually, let me rephrase. If we stopped off in Zion for like five minutes, set up the plot, then took back off to go fuck around in the Matrix, I wouldn't have minded Zion so much. Harry Lennix is awesome, and he plays a good right-wing tightass, and seeing Cornel West as one of the old hippies who run the place fucking rocked, and hell, Anthony Zerbe brought a good “fuck it, I'm slumming” vibe as one of the other old hippies who run the place. But Jesus fucking Christ, we had to learn about every single nuance of Zion politics in exhaustive detail, we had to sit through that ludicrous rave scene that followed Morpheus' “I am TALKING . . . very WEIRD and very LOUD . . . as though I am the black Christopher WALKEN and moreover haven't taken a SHIT in like a WEEK” speech, and put up with the complete absence of sexual chemistry between Neo and Trinity (apparently exacerbated by actual off-screen mutual loathing between Keanu and Carrie-Ann Moss) for one of the least sexy sex scenes ever filmed.
Fortunately, at the exact moment when I'm always tempted to pick up the remote and throw it through the TV screen, Morpheus rounds up his crew—now including the criminally wasted Harold Perrineau in the stead of the dude who wanted more money; how's that for irony, ya whine about your contract and they replace you with someone more famous—and they take off to go hack into the Matrix and talk to the Oracle. And things start picking up quick.
First, Keanu makes his way through a virtual Hong Kong, and encounters a small
Chinese man named Seraph. (Phillip Chou, who although cool, is not capable of making the viewer forget that this part was written for Jet Li; oh, what might have been . . .) with this weird golden glow about him, not the typical green Matrix source code. Hmmm. He then apologizes to Neo for having to do this, which is to say he starts throwing rather deft kung fu at Neo. Wait, what's that, Neo?
“I know kung fu.”
Exactly. They fight to a stalemate, and it turns out that “the only way to truly know someone is to fight them.” This was how Neo needed to prove he was really Neo. So they go through a literal back door that is, in fact, a back door in the code of the Matrix, and Seraph brings Neo out into a housing project courtyard to talk to the Oracle.
Here we get a bunch of fairly cool exposition, written in patented clunky Matrix dialogue, about how the Oracle is a program serving a purpose in the greater Matrix. (Vampires, aliens, werewolves, and ghosts are all buggy software, which I kind of got a kick out of). After a bit though, Seraph hustles the Oracle out of there, which Neo soon sees is because the resurrected Agent Smith is approaching (after Smith has “possessed” one of the other Zionites). Hugo Weaving gets to do a bit of declaiming about the nature of purpose (sounding hilariously like an Australian Ayn Rand on Valium in so doing) and reveals to Neo his latest party trick . . . he can make copies of himself. Lots of copies.
Let the record reflect that I find the ensuing fight scene to be one of the coolest fucking things I've ever seen. I will have none of your lip about the CGI looking fake (especially if you're gonna trot out some argument about the CGI being better in Lord of the Rings; the difficulty curve is higher CGIing a person than it is Gollum or anthropomorphic trees and shit, because Gollum isn't real and trees stand still) and I'll certainly have none of this balderdash about “why doesn't Neo just fly away?” Look, people, I said it before—having shamelessly stolen the phrase from my friend Greg—The Matrix Reloaded is a movie about Keanu flexing his nuts. That's it. Bottom to the top. Flying away is not the act of a testicular being. Neo could fly away, sure, but he could also beat the shit out of 100 Agent Smiths at the same time. And that's what he does. And holy fucking shit do I enjoy this scene. They spent like two years doing the effects for this one fucking scene. Sure, at the end of the scene Neo does fly away, but that's because he flexed his nuts, he had his fun, now it's time to go. It's kinda like when you're having a battle of wits with a male cat. Eventually, when you've bested him, the cat will pretend to have never given a fuck about the battle of wits and walk away with his tail in the air. Which is exactly what Keanu does, except with a lot of Hugo Weaving clones in suits walking away and adjusting their ties afterwards.
Next up, Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity have to go negotiate with a French computer program for the release of “The Keymaker.” (Ghostbusters flashbacks permitted, encouraged, and endorsed). Not a computer program written by a French person. A computer program so nefarious, oily, and devoid of scruples that he has decided there is no other option but to be French. Welcome to 2003, where Francophobia briefly supplanted even the time-honored hatred of Negroes and Jews! Actually, Lambert Wilson is so great, and is clearly having such a blast, as the French computer program, that it's hard to complain too hard about the prevailing political climate at the time (which was terrifyingly right-wing that spring and summer) especially since the Wachowskis were such insular wackos that their thought process was actually “We really like the sound of the word 'Merovingian' . . . the Merovingians were French, so I guess we gotta find a French guy.” And the computer program has that loose, “I guess it makes sense, but then again I'm high” connection to the historical Merovingians shared by nearly all the Wachowskis' forays into academia.
Anyway. The Merovingian tells Neo and company to go fuck themselves, but his wife catches them on their way out and promises to help them if Neo will kiss her. Trinity is not amused, but Neo takes one for the team. Oh, right, the Merovingian's wife is Monica Belucci! Right, my bad, Monica Belucci is so hot Keanu actually looks hetero for a second when he's smoochin her. Fuck, I forgot. So yeah, Trinity is staring death at this Eurohussy even as she's sneaking them all into the Merovingian's mansion to go grab this little Korean guy with a gajillion keys all over the place.
Naturally, the Merovingian is pissed, and sputters Gallicly, before sending these two albino Welsh rastafarians who can walk through walls after Morpheus, Trinity, and the keymaster while Neo gets into a pitched battle with an all-star team of stuntmen (the DVD featurette about this fight was almost as much fun as the fight) which ends with their sloppy deaths and the Merovingian saying something cryptic about Neo's predecessors. Hmmm. Neo chases him through the castle, but the Merovingian gives him the slip and he ends up hundreds of miles away from where Morpheus, Trinity, and the Keymaster are.
Where they are is In The Shit. They get into this spectacular car chase involving a suspiciously high number of late-model Cadillacs that eventually takes Morpheus to the top of a tractor trailer (after blowing up the albino Welsh rastafarians) and Trinity onto a smokin-hot Ducatti (the only thing my mom remembers about any of the Matrix movies, which I find hilarious) and Keanu, at the very last second, grabbing Morpheus and the Keymaster off the top of the tractor trailer just before it explodes in flames. As Harold Perrineau says before collapsing on his computer monitor in exhaustion: “YES!”
(One note: Jada Pinkett Smith, as Niobe, a character introduced in a shitty Matrix video game, figures large in this car chase and in a bit of the story so far as a love interest for Morpheus, which would work if she and every single other woman in Zion—including, of course, the legendarily androgynous Trinity—wasn't motherfuckin Butch Patrick, dude. I guess the femmes all died out due to natural selection . . .)
So after this rather satisfying climax, there's still another 45 minutes or so of movie (Ed. Note: the structure fucking sucks) and the Keymaster gives this allegedly expository speech that's more math than text, and Morpheus gives a typically fanaticism-on-Quaaludes speech about fate and the nobility of dying for a cause, and through a series of weird events, Trinity ends up having to hack into the Matrix to save Neo, and that scene from the beginning where she gets killed starts to play out exactly as it did before.
Meanwhile, Neo's fine except for the dozens of Smiths who turn up to get in his way and plug the Keymaster just as he's opening the door he was “meant to,” and since the Keymaster's purpose is served, he dies. Thus begins what is, simultaneously, the most interesting and most incomprehensibly dense scene in the whole trilogy: Neo's conversation with The Architect, the creator of the Matrix.
The upshot of the scene is that there have been other “One”s and that they're part of the system, just like everyone else. The purpose of The One, according to the Architect, is to keep the system from crashing, but even though The One thinks his purpose is to save Zion, Zion always inevitably gets destroyed. And they've done this six or seven times so far. This is, of course, assuming that you can trust this guy. Anyway, Neo is given a choice—he can save Trinity or save Zion, even though the Architect tells him there's no way around the fact that Trinity is going to die, or around the fact that Zion is fucked. Neo chooses to save Trinity. He flies in, so fast that he destroys half the Matrix, and grabs Trinity, reaches inside her chest and starts her heart again. Sigh. Shame they ain't go no chemistry cuz those kids sure are in love.
So the Nebuchadnezzar blows up. Neo telekinetically stops a whole bunch of those stupid looking robots even though he's not in the Matrix and goes into a coma. And the ship that comes to rescue Morpheus, Trinity, Harold Perrineau, and Sleeping Beauty has found someone . . . THE GUY WHO SMITH POSSESSED! Kthxbai see ya in November!
Boy, if the anticipation for the first one was intense, May to November 2003 were ridiculous. The entire Internet slowed to a crawl as nerds freaked out about where the story was heading. Everyone had their own pet theory. I didn't really, I was willing to wait and see where the Wachowskis were going with the whole thing, because as much as Reloaded was clunky and overstuffed with crap I figured that the best was yet to come. Or at least a resolution.
There are a couple cool moments in The Matrix Revolutions. The whole bit where Neo is trapped in the train station talking to the Indian guy and his family (all computer programs, not real people) is okay, or would be if it had anything to do with anything (the fact that we briefly glimpsed the Indian guy in Reloaded getting frogmarched out of the Merovingian's restaurant doesn't make him relevant), and if it made any sense whatsoever that a computer program would be religious. Bruce Spence is always welcome to the party, but he has nothing to do. When Morpheus, Trinity, and Seraph swagger on into the Merovingian's nightclub and negotiate Neo's release at gunpoint, that's cool. (Ed. Note: All these things happen in the first 20 minutes of the movie) After Neo gains his release—and we've had no good explanation as to why his powers as The One now carry over to the real world—the rest of the movie is one gigantic turd. The whole rest of the fucking movie takes place in the boring, derivatively designed “real” world, including the most mind-numbing, interminable waste of a ten-figure FX budget in the history of the cinema, The Battle of Zion, which has no dramatic stakes, no reason to care whatsoever about any of the people under attack (since Neo and Trinity are flying a hovercraft out to talk to the machine mainframe, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, the actual drama in the narrative). If you completely excise The Battle of Zion, you save probably $50 million bucks at the minimum, the most boring 45 minutes in the history of cinema, and stop your movie from grinding to a halt and never regaining its momentum.
When Neo finally gets to talk to the machine mainframe (following the “tragic” death of Trinity), he asks to be plugged back into the Matrix, which is now populated only by copies of Smith, to keep it from crashing (in exchange, the machines agree to let Zion be). And, for some reason, despite the fact that only 100 Smiths managed to fight Neo to a draw, one of the Smiths throws down one on one. More overblown special effects. Smith kicks Neo's ass, and Neo gives his life to save the Matrix, by letting Smith absorb him. But Neo's code makes Smith's code untenable, and the whole Matrix has to do a system reset. So Neo's dead, Smith's dead, Trinity's dead, Morpheus is “fucking” Jada Pinkett Smith again, Zion's full of robot and human corpses, and in spite of the fact that there's no reason whatsoever to trust the machines, who can still wipe out Zion whenever they feel like it, the remaining Zionites are convinced that the war is over and all shall be peace forever after. There's a final scene inside the Matrix where the Architect and the Oracle talk about the coming peace, and the Architect crankily concedes that the Oracle was “right.” The End.
Unfortunately, the last movie being such a worthless piece of shit for the last hour and forty-five minutes casts a shadow over the whole trilogy. It makes the clunky narrative of Reloaded seem worse than it actually is. It casts all the dumb stuff in the first movie that you can ignore most of the time in very sharp relief. There comes a point, usually during the credits of Revolutions, where you, as a nerd, chastise yourself for wasting so much time and energy geeking out about this bullshit when the creators clearly cared so little about making a good movie. The myth, repeated endlessly by the ardent defenders of the series on the Internet, that the Wachowskis had “planned it all out ahead of time” was laid bare; they may have had a plan for three movies before the first one, but had to put a whole bunch of stuff originally intended for the sequels into the first one at the behest of Warner Bros. Then come sequel time: “Oh, shit, what do we do now? [scramble to meet deadline]”
In the interests of full disclosure, I've periodically talked myself into liking the sequels more than the above would indicate. It helps to be high, and in a really generous, sentimental mood. Even with that caveat, I always skip the stupid fucking Zion battle scene. That scene has always sucked and will always suck. The frustration I have with the sequels is that they could have been so much better, so much easier. If we can, for a moment, step into a parallel reality where Warners immediately greenlit three movies and gave the Wachowskis final cut, here are a couple quick fixes that would solve everything:
Keep Joe Pantoliano and the rest of the original crew around for the whole trilogy
This makes us care more as they all die off one by one, and makes Joe Pantoliano's betrayal in the third movie have more dramatic impact, since he will have been at odds with, befriended, been at odds with again, and so forth, Neo for the whole trilogy.
Edit the Zion time down by 90%
The series is, after all, called The Matrix. Because it's about the fucking Matrix. The fact that they have to hack in to best the machines highlights our protagonists' underdog status, and also spares us the intelligence-insulting sequence where somehow, even though the combined forces of humanity have never gotten within 100 miles of the machine mainframe, one ship piloted by two unarmed dumbasses is able to get through.
Hire a script doctor to fix the fucking dialogue
Because, ya know, I joke about the shitty dialogue being an aesthetic choice, but man there is some shitty dialogue in the Matrix trilogy, and by the third movie, that shitty dialogue is completely taking us out of the movie. While Carrie Fisher/William Goldman/Callie Khouri/Richard Price are at it, they can beef up some of the characterizations, too. The audience needs to care about the characters, not be told they do.
Still, when all is said and done, the Matrix trilogy is an impressive achievement. Not necessarily because the movies themselves are so great, but getting three movies this weird, arch, arcanely literate, and violent made within the studio system doesn't happen very often. For that, we should applaud the Wachowskis. It's a shame the movies weren't better, though, they could have started a trend. Instead, the trend is toward geeking out on TV. This decade, we've seen that large, complex narratives work better when you have 65-100 episodes over which to tell your tale. If some lunatic had greenlit The Matrix as a TV series, the Wachowskis could have had enough time to pack all the mythology in and still have their characters be more three-dimensional. But considering the pilot to Lost cost $15 million and that gave TV execs heart attacks, the idea of someone giving the Wachowkis $300 mil to make The Matrix TV show is a little unrealistic. The great thing about the “what might have been” game though, is that all it costs is the whiskey.
No comments:
Post a Comment