The Matrix Reconsidered
“Reloaded” and “Revolutions” Are Mediocre Movies — But They’re Great Art.
Every moviegoer is, on some level, a cynical moviegoer. We are now more than a century deep into an art form that has been the dominant cultural force in most of the world for almost that long, and the blueprint of Western cinema — its tricks, its clichés, its wonders — is so consciously (and subconsciously) ingrained in the minds of even the most critically-disengaged viewer that almost everyone can claim some level of expertise. To wit: the same people who fall into hushed reverence at an art gallery or lecture hall will hold nothing back at the multiplex (or more likely, the living room): groaning at some absurd plot-hole, rolling their eyes at bad dialogue, or nitpicking the tiniest of tiny errors.
And why not? People know crap when they see it. In matters of skill, derision follows experience, and most audiences are by now so intimately acquainted with the language of film that, at least when it comes to typical Hollywood fare, there’s precious little that can truly surprise — let alone amaze — us anymore. For the most part, we know what we’re getting into when the lights go down, and even the boldest cinematic turns are usually just variations on a theme: winking reversals and twist endings that pretend to subversion while actually reinforcing convention. One might snarkily blame the Hollywood system (and the Marvel age in particular) for shoving aside innovation in favor of formulaic, reiterative product, but the deeper truth is that there are only so many ways to tell a story — or rather there are only so many ways to tell a story in a way that will engage a wide audience. Many bold iconoclasts have sniffed at hoary filmmaking conventions over the years, but very few of them have ever gone on to transform that contempt into lucid, satisfying art.
That’s why films that genuinely surprise us are so rare, and so welcome. And if they manage to entertain us too, well, all the better. The Matrix, Lana and Lily Wachowskis’ 1999 kung fu-meets-ontology masterpiece, was just that. What looked from early ads to be another bargain-bin cyberpunk action dud turned out to be an atomic bomb — a thrilling, tightly-constructed epic that combined a hodgepodge of contradictory impulses into a seamless whole, and cleverly concealed its subversive subtext of alienation and control behind kinetic fight sequences, black leather, and groundbreaking visuals.
Those visuals are now part of the lexicon of American film, long since the stuff of imitation and parody. But it bears repeating just how exhilarating they were in 1999. In a time when jaded audiences assumed that they’d reached the end of the line with visual effects — that everything that could be done had been done, and that images had lost their power to astound, The Matrix came along and proved everyone wrong. The film’s technical innovations were a canny synthesis that met a historical moment— marrying Eastern influences, like legendary Hong Kong director Yuen Woo-ping’s “wire fu” technique (at that time largely unknown to Western audiences) with so-called “bullet-time” effects — a century-old camera trick amplified with the aid of then-cutting edge developments in computer graphics.
Such physics-defying stunts and mind-bending visuals were perfectly suited to the artificial reality of the movie’s virtual world (and are one reason why they never quite worked for the bevy of American action movies that promptly tried to emulate them). The balletic elegance of the film’s fight sequences, in particular, look as gorgeous today as they did twenty-two years ago, and much of the appeal of The Matrix justly lies in its extraordinary visual power.
But if that were the only appeal, The Matrix might have ended up as just another innovative but forgotten action movie — a feast for the eyes, but not the head. It didn’t, of course, and the reason for that is down to its story — a philosophical excursion into the nature of reality that has continued to resonate with audiences through the decades. “What is real?” is a question straight out of a freshman dorm room, but it’s ubiquity doesn’t make it any less interesting. And in any case The Matrix engages with this idea in a novel way: it posits a virtual world that is a literal prison, but also a largely benign one, and uses that premise as a springboard to skillfully allude to a whole host of other, more subtle constraints — the city, the government, the workplace — forms of dominion that many of us are intimately familiar with. Worse still, even our own sense of self might be just another construct, delimited by forces beyond our control.
That said, The Matrix never quite gets where it wants to go, existentially speaking. The film is content to merely flirt with the darker aspects of its premise, and ends Neo’s journey with an exuberant triumph — he is literally reborn as the world’s savior.
2003’s sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, however, dive deeper into the mythology of the first film, and find the waters decidedly murkier. Both movies turn the relatively straightforward hero’s journey of The Matrix on its head, openly questioning the nature of that monomyth, and in their searching find not a resolution but a convolution — ever more sophisticated methods of control, hopelessly intertwined.
It’s this metaphysical hairsplitting that makes the sequels intellectually richer than their predecessor — and it’s also what makes them worse films. This was perhaps inevitable, given the trilogy’s always tenuous fusion of talky philosophical think piece with popcorn blockbuster — perfected in the original, things never quite meshed in the sequels. But give credit to the Wachowskis: far from shying away — or altogether avoiding — the many questions that the first film raises, they instead attempt to follow the thread through, uncovering in the process a sprawling labyrinth that first complicates — and eventually obliterates— the superficial mythos of The Matrix. Indeed, the sequels may be the greatest intentional deconstruction of a fictional universe ever made. Even if Reloaded and Revolutions are the poorer films (and even if, in the end, they can’t escape the desire for a happy ending) they are also the work of incredibly gutsy filmmakers, who eschewed an easy cash out for an exploration of ideas that were sometimes confusing and not always palatable, particularly given the movie’s target audience.
The Wachowskis surely realized that the ending of The Matrix, which saw a super-powered Neo blast off into the air (immediately followed by a rockin’ Rage Against the Machine closer) had created both a brilliant exclamation point for that film and a problem for any sequels to come: namely, now that you’ve created a living god, how do you make his story interesting? It’s the Superman conundrum all over again — a character who is practically invulnerable can be thrilling in the moment, but the longer the story focuses on them, the more boring they tend to become (and the more bored we become). Once you’ve introduced the idea that your character can easily repel any hint of mortal danger, you’ve excised a vital piece from the adventure narrative: risk. If our hero is more powerful than his foes, what’s the point of following along with his non-struggle? To see him shrug off one obstacle after another? It’s hard for mere mortals to relate.
Many of the best Superman stories have side-stepped this problem by either giving the character ever-more powerful enemies to fight, or — more interestingly — ignoring the “super” in favor of the “man,” exploring the burdens, for instance, of being viewed as a savior, of being an orphan on an alien world, or being the last survivor of a vanished race. In the sequels, the Wachowskis take both tacks. They reveal Neo’s newfound godhood as a moment of supreme isolation both physical (in the “real world,” he is overwhelmed by offerings, praise, and requests) and empyrean (his premonition of Trinity’s death, his secret knowledge of Zion’s history). They then promote the evil Agent Smith into a seemingly unstoppable computer virus — more than a match for our high-flying hero.
It’s a fine line to tread, and both sequels walk it to perfection. Neo isn’t diminished in Reloaded or Revolutions — he’s still capable of effortlessly punching stuntmen in dark suits through walls. But the sequels are quick to point out that this is no longer enough, and that despite his rousing ascension in The Matrix, he has not transcended the world so much as he has discovered it anew, trading in one set of problems for another, and taking on an existential burden that will test not just his physical strength, but his psychic fortitude. Neo is not quite back to square one in the sequels, but he’s also in an even more rarefied and dangerous sphere of influence, and he’s a little out of his depth.
All that is a one way to test a god, but another way is to dethrone him completely. The Wachowskis flirt with that idea in Reloaded, most pointedly with the introduction of the Architect — the Matrix’s ostensible creator. From a screenwriting perspective, the meeting between Neo and the Architect feels like a mistake: in the middle of an action movie, one character sits in a chair and calmly explains everything — it’s an info-dump of cosmic proportions. But within the context of the film it not only makes sense (what else would a machine do?) it actually works. The Architect summarily annihilates any romantic notions that poor Neo (and the audience) might have had about his origins. He is simply a pawn in a larger game, his entire life merely “the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation.” The Architect reveals that Neo, far from being special, is in fact the sixth “one” —and has not been sent to free humanity but to ensure its continued enslavement: the Matrix only works because it’s prisoners believe they have volition, but that same volition, left unchecked, will destroy the system, and everyone connected to it. Neo, as the “eventuality” of this “anomaly” is the only person who can bring the veil down again, thereby keeping the Matrix online. Far from being born to destroy the machines, he is in fact their puppet; a proxy for their will. Everything is a game within a game, another system of control.
And the killing stroke: to save humanity, Neo must abandon his own freedom. He can revolt against his destiny, and destroy the Matrix, and with it billions of lives, or he can follow through with his marching orders — as his predecessors have done — and save it, a bitter deliverance that would condemn the entire species to continued bondage and persecution. Conformity brings safety, but the price is a life in chains, a cycle without end.
Neo rejects the Architect’s false dichotomy, of course, asserting the power of free will and reemerging as a traditional hero in the process, but the scene is still an astonishing moment, exploding everything we thought we knew about this world, and recoloring every relationship Neo has as another form of manipulation. Science destroys religion in an instant, and the scales fall from Neo’s eyes. He sees ethereal (and by proxy, filmic) myth-making transformed into a boring, tangible object — a prophecy made of ones and zeros. Every aspect of his life is revealed as a construct fashioned for him by others — even his apotheosis is a staid mathematical equation.
The hero’s journey, then, is just another form of domination. The Matrix films are flush with ideas, but while the original film is primarily preoccupied with the idea of that domination, the sequels are concerned with the dynamics of power —its origins and its consequences for the individual. There is something like teenage rebellion in Neo’s meeting with the Architect: the son rejecting the life that has been preordained for him, the idea that his choices are the extension of someone else’s desires. But there is the Architect too, the world-weary father, who warns of the high price of that rejection, of placing one’s own individual freedom above the social unit: schism, chaos, the unmaking of the world. He’s attempting to manipulate Neo, of course, but he’s also not completely wrong.
The Matrix, more confident in its visual élan than the significance of its ideas, prefers mesmerizing effects over such philosophical navel-gazing, and is perfectly happy to view rebellion through this teenage lens — seeing any hierarchy as a latent danger to the self, any form of control as an inherent evil. The sequels, taking a decidedly less sexy route, highlight the dangers of rebellion — not of its theoretical necessity, but of its utility in the real world. How does one effect fundamental change without endangering the thing you are trying to save? Destruction is seductive, and certainly effective, but only to an extent. Agent Smith, himself a victim of the Matrix’s subjugation, nearly succeeds in bringing the entire system crashing down — and threatens to kill the bulk of humanity in the process. The problem is indeed choice, as Neo says, but not of the act of choosing. The problem is grappling with the aftermath of choice, with choosing wisely. Even the nightmare world of the Matrix is deeply interconnected: either all co-exist or no one does, and unstudied violence, while it might indeed vaporize a problem, can never solve it.
While The Matrix, again, kept things fairly simple, following Neo on a journey of dissolution and rebirth, and ending with him awash in freedom, Reloaded and Revolutions dare to show us not just the prosaic origins of godhood, but the possible aftermath of deification. It is not an end, but a revelation — a struggle renewed. They hint that while the becoming is indeed transcendent, the hard work of being must now commence — and that we might slip one yoke only to see it replaced by another. Being a god isn’t easy, and the joy of standing on the mountaintop mirrors its agony: you can see far.
The problem with sequels, to put it snarkily, is that almost none of them should exist. Movies work because movies end. We leave the lovers in their bliss, the heroes in their triumph, the villains in their defeat, and then we part ways. To follow any story to its ultimate conclusion (i.e., further complication, death) would not satisfy our human desire for narrative completeness. Movies create a world in miniature, and in doing so they allow us to play God — to see that world entire, from beginning to end, and to comprehend it the way we cannot comprehend our own world, or our own lives: as something purpose-driven, meaningful, coherent.
The sequels to The Matrix are failures in many ways: aside from a handful of rousing moments, the effects are a step backwards, the pacing (particularly compared to the first film) is a slog, and the explication of the trilogy’s seemingly endless store of ideas and allusions is sometimes muddled beyond comprehension (if anything, it can be argued that the trilogy has too many ideas).
But both Reloaded and Revolutions are also bold cinematic statements, darkly revising the first film’s story line and in the process subverting its audience’s pat assumptions about what choice really means, and about who heroes really are. They are the rare sequels that work, not because they capitalized on a legendary film’s success, but because, to a large extent, they rejected it.
