The Matrix Reloaded
Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers
Written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski

Bruce Almighty
Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures
Directed by Tom Shadyac
Screenplay by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe

The Matrix Reloaded, the second film of a projected trilogy, could hardly be more disappointing.  Four years ago, The Matrix reinvented the science-fiction movie with an unparalleled blend of messianic allegory, visual artistry, and acrobatic stunts.  The film’s narrative told us nothing new, but—like art in general—it made us see the familiar as if for the first time.  

Sibling directors Andy and Larry Wachowski had drawn from many sources to remind us that we all need to be saved from the quotidian haze that blinds us to what is central to our lives: the destiny of our freely choosing souls.  The conceit the Wachowskis used to raise this issue has its provenance in Plato’s myth of the cave and the disturbing news of the Gospels and, jarringly, a smattering of gnostic mumbo-jumbo.  

To make this theme popularly accessible, The Matrix deployed a typical science-fiction convention.  Machines have taken over human life and plugged everyone into an elaborate software program that simulates a reassuring, pacifying reality.  Why do they not simply destroy mankind altogether?  Human bodies serve them as a perfectly renewable energy source.  So the metallic villains have us cocooned in glass capsules from which they can harvest our electrical impulses as we live placidly in a digitized virtual reality.  Calderon de la Barca was right: La Vida es Sueño.  

Needless to say, we humans needed awakening, and it was given to a young rebel named Neo (Keanu Reeves) to sound the alarm.  Neo was the messiah who would shake us from our mechanical dream.  

What riveted audiences was not the premise alone but its unique presentation.  Nearly every frame of the film has a painterly composition.  In an early scene, Neo stands on a rain-swept city street before an arched overpass.  On his side, the avenue is in deep night shadow, but, through the archway, a streetlight shines, making the rainwater that cascades from above shimmer incandescently.  You did not have to pick up on the scene’s baptismal imagery to appreciate its luminous beauty.  In other scenes, power relations are cued by the placement of characters in the frame.  When programmed policemen come to capture Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), a young woman resisting the Matrix, she stands facing us in the extreme foreground, her hands laced behind her head in seeming compliance with the cops’ command.  As the officers approach her from behind, we see them in distorted perspective through the giant triangles formed by her crooked arms.  The men in blue look like six-inch-tall action figures.  We know who is in charge well before Trinity unleashes her high-kicking martial arts on her would-be captors.  

Then there are the much-touted special effects.  They are almost always subordinated to the film’s larger design, which is unusual in a film of this genre.  My favorite was Neo’s final showdown with his nemesis, a nasty piece of software code capable of assuming human form (Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving with a weird stony-faced intensity).  Smith shoots Neo dead only to see him revive after Trinity plants a well-timed kiss on his bleeding lips.  Risen under the power of love, Neo sees through Smith to the programming that constructs him.  The agent is nothing but a flow of vertical computer code, all zeros and ones.  It turns out that Thomas Aquinas was right: Evil is, after all, a lack of presence.  Rushing Smith, Neo dives into his simulated body and explodes it from within.  He then steps forth in his own fierce glory.  Hell has been thoroughly harrowed.

There was an infectious undergraduate headiness about all this.  The Wachovskis seemed to have created a video-game version of the human search for redemption.  I do not say this disparagingly.  While I could have done with far less of the film’s martial arts and high-tech violence, the production seemed to exhibit a healthy metaphysical giddiness.  However naively undertaken, speculation on the nature of ultimate truth is one of our more civilizing pursuits.  In fact, it was once thought to be the primary purpose of attending a good university.  Of course, this faded in the 20th century, when higher education was urged on the young not as the path to enlightenment but the yellow brick road to wealth.  Speak-ing of which, The Matrix Reloaded is an object lesson.

The disappointing difference between the first and second installments can be told in financial numbers.  The Matrix was made on a not-inconsiderable but, by today’s elephantine standards, not-extravagant budget of $63 million.  When the film grossed nearly $600 million within six months of its release, producer Joel Silver and his investors decided to put $127 million into The Matrix Reloaded.  The original film was released with minimal publicity and without toy-manufacturing tie-ins.  The second has been hyped relentlessly for the past two years, and the tie-ins are flooding the market as I write.  With The Matrix Reloaded, however, the financial inverse proportion of filmmaking exerts itself.  The bigger the budget, the worse the film.  The more money at stake, the more tampering by the producers and their investors.  They want return on investment, and the iron law of big-budget productions is that special effects, regardless of their relevance to theme or plot, fill the theaters.  That is what we get in Reloaded.  It is loaded to the hatches with gravity-defying acrobatic fights, car and motorbike chases, and explosions galore.  Watching this fiery farrago, I was reminded of the priceless skit John Candy and Joe Flaherty used to perform on Second City TV.  As two yokels giving their weekly Home Farm Film Review, they had but two criteria to assess a film’s success: how many and how big were its explosions.  When a movie rose to their standards, they would hoot their formulaic accolade in unison: “Whooey!  They really blowed ’em up big in that one!”  Were the Home Farm reviewers still in business, Reloaded would detonate their fancy to nuclear proportions.

I have no way of knowing what decisions and compromises lie behind this film, but I cannot believe the Wachowskis are happy with the results—not artistically, anyway.  I am sure the brothers stand to make truckloads of money from it.  I hope they do; there is really no excuse for selling out unless you are indecently rewarded.

Reloaded has been shorn of all the filmic ingenuity that made The Matrix so startling.  While the first film broke from the matrix of Hollywood conventions, the second reloads them.  Only the most perfunctory attention is paid to the film’s compositions and lighting.  The screen has become a relatively still canvas on which the computer-graphics wizards have digitized a brain-freezing blizzard of stunts.  The one that best expresses the film’s failure of imagination is the multiplication of Agent Smith.  In The Matrix, Weaving somehow managed to make the character—or, more accurately, the program—robotically soulless while simultaneously conveying its sneering contempt for the human race.  He was one of the movie’s best features—at once frightening and funny.  So what happens to Smith in Reloaded?  He is multiplied hundreds of times over, so he can fight Neo en masse, piling on our hero, who then bowls the duplicates over as if they were so many ninepins.  The Smith duplicates are unwittingly explained elsewhere in the narrative.  Learning that the machines are unleashing a force of sentinels—one for every man, woman and child—a character sententiously observes, “It sounds like the thinking of a machine to me.”  Reloaded itself thinks as a machine.  Worse, it runs on suboctane imagination.  I could not help feeling depressed as I watched the whole contraption sputter and explode through its interminable 138 minutes.  

 

Amidst the stunts and fireballs, we get bits of disconnected plot delivered in a carelessly scrambled montage.  It seems the evil machines are boring their way through the earth to the underground city of Zion, the last bastion of humanity.  To stop this calamity, Neo returns to the oracle we met in the first film, the marvelously droll Gloria Foster, who gives this film one of its few moments of genuine energy.  (Unfortunately, Foster died shortly after her performance, so she will not be able to leaven what may prove an even duller conclusion to the trilogy.)  She tells Neo he must go to Merovingian to find the Keymaker who will take him to the Architect who will . . . But why go on?  At this point, the script is filled with the kind of thumping banalities that resonate so richly throughout the Star Trek series: “To be looking for the Keymaker is not an end but a means”; “We are victims of causality”; “You don’t really know someone until you fight them [sic].”  My favorite is Morpheus’ reply to an adversary who reminds him that not everyone believes as he does.  “My beliefs,” he stoutly asserts, “don’t require them to.”  Now there’s tolerance worthy of Mr. Spock.  

The Matrix Reloaded includes a nearly nude love scene between Neo and Trinity, a nice touch in a film sponsoring action figures for children.  I suppose that—this being a machine-made production—it would have unduly upset the gears of commerce not to include a shot of Ke-anu bare-assed.

 

Bruce Almighty is another film with theology on its mind, although it plays its heavenly scale in an entirely different key.  Since it stars my least favorite manic comedian, Jim Carrey, I went to see it with bargain-basement expectations.  To my surprise, I found the film both amusing and, at times, thematically deft.  

 

Although the narrative often turns sappy, Bruce is anchored by yet another magisterial performance by the incomparable Morgan Freeman.  He plays the Almighty in the only way humanly possible.  Wryly bemused with his own authority, this film deity radiates a generous but demanding goodness.  Freeman’s performance and the script’s surprisingly sound moral theology will undoubtedly make this the unlikeliest film of the year.  

Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a terminally ambitious Buffalo, New York, television journalist.  He is approaching 40 and still has not achieved his dream of anchor-manhood.  Relegated to doing remote feeds, he finally has an on-air meltdown that gets him fired.  He goes home to his live-in girlfriend, aptly named Grace (Jennifer Aniston), who consolingly reminds him that everything happens for a purpose.  This is too much.  Nolan brays to the heavens, “Come on and smite me, Almighty Smiter!”  In response, God shows up in a white suit to hand over His job.  “I’m taking a vacation,” He casually informs the incredulous Nolan.  (That’s smiting indeed.)

What does Nolan do with his powers?  Suffice it to say, some of his antics are irresistibly hilarious.

I cannot think of another American film that makes the case that answering every prayer affirmatively might be a thoroughly bad idea.  This one does so in spades.  Petitioned endlessly for blessings, Nolan thoughtlessly says “yes” to them all, with consequences that could hardly be more dire.  Finally, God asks him what he thinks he should be doing with his powers.  Nolan responds with programmed earnestness, “Feed the hungry and bring peace to mankind.  How’s that?”  Freeman smiles indulgently.  “Great, if you want to be Miss America.” 

Choosing between what he thinks he wants and what he should want is the film’s difficult moral issue, and, despite all the schmaltz, scriptwriters Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe manage to challenge their audience—albeit briefly—to face up to the decision.