Trying to see the bigger picture

Rating: 8/10 (22 June 2005)

*** This comment contains spoilers ***
It's a pity Reloaded looks and feels so much like a bad sequel, to so many. Even to me to begin with even if I kind of enjoyed parts of the ride, a lot. But to me it helps looking at it as a bridge between beginning and end. As a part of a whole. The concept is so promising. I haven't had the chance to see the Animatrix yet, but surely I will. I guess I will spend hours with the game too. In Matrix I just love how interwoven and in balance the storyline is with the way its told. It reached out and grabbed almost everyone. This time around it seems as if there was too much to tell and too many dollars to play with in too short a time. Less balance. Still.. I'm thrilled.
Spoilers ahead. (You might need them) Matrix is so wonderfully mythological. Instead of being ethnocentric it puts the light on eternal religious questions in such a universal way. At the same time it formulates the original reason, philosophical questions. It is about knowledge and faith, belief. Controll through both sense and sensibility. The conflict between gnosticism and Judae-Christianity if we look in the rear mirror.
At the same time it is so biblical to a westerner like me. I won't bore you with all the name symbolism but with Neo himself. His actual name is Tomas Anderson and he is caught in the system (like everyone else in the years leading up to Y2K). In the bible Tomas is the disbeliever, and Tomas also means twin. Anders means man, as in Andros- (android). He is the doubtful son of man who is like the rest of us, who becomes Neo, the new one. At the same time it mirrors the first of Christianity and how it focused on the individual. There is no need for priests or churches (system) for the individual to reach the transcendent, for man to reach God. (And our heroes are individuals in small groups that fight the system, like viruses in a computer. (I just love that Nebukadnessar looks like a bug.)
In the first film we see the creation of (the believing) man. In Reloaded the religious theme takes a step back. Instead it is Free will vs. Determinism which is the main conflict. Thereby the existential perspectives which were planted in the first film can be developed. Here it is amusing to relate to the first existentialists that focused so much on free will and choice, Friedrich Nietsche and Soren Kirkegaard (one atheist and one Christian. The first captain to enroll freely in the final battle is called Soren).
Knowledge and faith remains as a conflict in Reloaded here represented by Lock and Morpheus. John Locke is called the father of The age of enlightenment which is the time of reason in our history. To me it looks like as if the Wachowski brothers are writing a mythological history of ideas for our time. Finally they might embrace even time after the postmodern.
There is a hint of a cycle here. Matrix is about birth, Reloaded about life and Revolutions about death (rebirth). Matrix is the becoming of man. Reloaded is man as a builder of theories and civilizations. Power and control is formed and developed. The Merovingian (400-600) are called the first kings of Europe and are known for their writing and the characters in their written language. (I am sure that you can find parallels to this "code" in the Matrix-code.) Anyway Merovingian is the one who has the 'key master' (the key to power and control?) The middle ages with its mystery and ghosts (lack of reason and empirical method) follows and can be seen in the set design, armor and weapons.
The middle ages were followed by The renaissance with all its use of Greek mythology The wife of Merovingian is Persephone who actually emphasizes on the rebirth theme because she gives our heroes a second chance to get to the 'key master', and as a goddess she is symbolized by a grain that can sprout.
Then comes The age of enlightenment with reason and empirical method which created the necessary conditions for a new conception of the world and industrialism. The living-conditions thereby changed radically for people which resulted in the revolutions of the 19th century and ideologically in the first existentialists, Soren and Friedrich. (Existentialism had a new upsurge when God had left us all alone once again and the world fell apart, during and after WW1 and WW2 during last century. ) The myth can be said to have survived by fleeing into the music and later into film via melodrama. Which leads us to were we and Matrix are right now.
I guess I just had too high expectations when I saw Reloaded the first time. It got better when I saw it a second time and right now it is one of my favorite friends, or bedtime stories. Too bad Reloaded is made in such a way that most people seem to (eventually) enjoy and point out the cinematography at its best. The saga deserves more.
Anyway The Matrix concept is already a classic piece of art, the latest transcription of the bible, a new history of mankind, the steepest roller-coaster and much, much, more.