When The Matrix was released in March of 1999, it seemed to come out of nowhere, an under-the-radar surprise blockbuster no one was expecting. An intriguing marketing campaign that asked the question “What is the Matrix?” piqued national interest at a time when all eyes were on the first of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels.

And, as it turned out, Andy and Larry Wachowski’s inventive blending of cyberculture geekdom, martial-arts mayhem, Japanese anime, leather-chic fashion, and revolutionary digital effects took the world by storm. It was the kind of film that so many strive to be: in a word, influential. The Matrix was creative, it was different, and it was smart; it took several viewings to really get all the complexities and philosophical musings the Wachowskis built into their narrative, which proved to be a boon for eventual DVD sales. Now, when historians look back at the late 1990s, The Matrix will forever stand as one of the pivotal moments in Hollywood cinema.

Thus, saying that The Matrix is a hard act to follow is something of an understatement, especially given the massive amount of calculated hype and advertising chutzpah that has preceded the first of the two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded. After all, how do you follow up something that broke the mold? Everyone will expect the mold to be broken again, and that’s no small task.

Unfortunately, The Matrix Reloaded (which was shot simultaneously with The Matrix Revolution, the final installment of the trilogy due in November) doesn’t break the mold. Rather, it fits quite comfortably into the contours of the mold created by The Matrix and its many, many imitators. Granted, there are some nifty new special effects that required the development of new computer software, but it’s nothing that will flatten the cinematic landscape the ways the original film’s “bullet-time” slow motion and vivacious genre blending did. That’s the bad news. The good news, though, is that The Matrix Reloaded is still a vivid and exhilarating ride. It ups the action quotient from the first film, but still maintains a delirious mixture of high style, dark humor, and undeniable smarts (many critics are chiding what they perceive as the shallowness of the film’s philosophical musings, but any high-concept summer blockbuster that dares to touch a topic like free will should be given some credit).

Lacking the bite of answering the question “What is the Matrix?,” The Matrix Reloaded must settle for exploring how the enslaved human race will defeat the machines that have taken over the Earth and imprisoned them in a computer-created delusion. The hero of the first film, a computer hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves), has fully moved into his prophesized role as “The One,” the human who will lead others in the revolt and eventually free the human race. By his side once again are Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), his mentor and greatest believer, and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), a fighter who has now become Neo’s lover.

Like its predecessor, The Matrix Reloaded opens with a calculated, jaw-dropping special effects sequence, but then it bogs down for nearly half an hour in the city of Zion, an enormous cavern miles under the Earth’s surface where 250,000 free humans have organized themselves into a society bent on destroying their machine captors. Necessary as this section is for narrative purposes, it is entirely too ponderous, as if the Wachowskis decided to front-load all the plot information so they wouldn’t have to bother with it later on. We learn that not everyone agrees with Morpheus that Neo will be the savior of the human race, which adds a hint of doubt to his convictions that wasn’t present in the earlier film. We also meet a number of new human characters, including a captain named Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), who was once Morpheus’ lover.

The vast majority of the film, though, takes place within the Matrix itself, as Neo attempts to work his way to the core of the computer system in order to destroy it. Tracking him once again is the preternaturally nefarious Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), a computer program bent on destroying Neo. Since the first film, Agent Smith as broken loose of the system and become a rogue agent, able to multiply himself hundreds of times, which leads to one of the film’s most talked-about sequences, in which Neo battles 100 Agent Smiths. The idea is intriguing, but seeing it is an exhausting disappointment. For one thing, despite the incredible advances in CGI technology, the scene as a whole has an undeniably cartoonish feel to it that belies the intensity of the battle. On a more fundamental level, though, Agent Smith’s character is diluted through multiplication; vicious as an individual, he doesn’t seem as threatening in a hoard. Far more intense and menacing was his speech in the first film in which he intoned with rising disgust how humans are like viruses.

The other gigantic setpiece in the film is the 15-minute high-speed highway chase for which a 1.5-mile stretch of highway was built expressly for the film’s production (at the cost of a cool $1 million). In what is clearly an attempt to steal the crown of coolest extended chase sequence ever from George Miller’s The Road Warrior (1981), the Wachowski Brothers stage an impossible series of camera movements that rush under and around 18-wheelers and other vehicles while Morpheus and Trinity try to save a mysterious program named The Key Maker (Randall Duk Kim) from a pair of wicked, dreadlocked twins (Neil and Adrian Rayment) hellbent on destroying them. The speed and intensity of this sequence is mesmerizing, as is the sheer audacity of the mayhem—dozens of cars and trucks flip and spin and crash and roll over each other, and most of the time the boundary between real stunts and CGI work is imperceptible.

As for the characters, the Wachowski Brothers attempt to build on the basic cartoon dimensions they offered in the first film. Neo, although he has essentially become a cyber-Superman (he can fly through the air and stop hundreds of bullets simply by raising his hand), is still wracked by doubt about his place in the revolution and whether he is truly “The One.” His relationship with Trinity also adds a level of romanticism that only emerged in the last third of The Matrix. Morpheus, once a paragon of confidence, is given new dimensionshere, as it is suggested that his belief in the prophecies about Neo may be completely wrong.

The last quarter of The Matrix Reloaded throws a new kink into the idea of the Matrix itself, floating the idea that everything we learned about it in the first film may be just another computer-simulated veneer. The questions raised by the film about the nature of reality and the extent of control available to those who can manipulate it are truly frightening if you give them enough thought, which is what makes this film and its predecessor surprisingly unique in the annals of action movie-making. Considering the cliffhanger on which this one ends, we can only hope that The Matrix Revolution will continue to, if not surprise us by breaking the mold, at least exhilarate us and give us something for our minds to chew on in the aftermath.

Copyright © 2003 James Kendrick