Ramming the spoon...

Rating: 1/10 (12 June 2006)

I was 11 when the first Star Wars movie came out. I wasn't mature enough to appreciate Harrison Ford's space-cowboy smirk or Carrie Fischer's sarcasm, much less the swagger of their respective deliveries. All I cared about was robots blasting other robots.
By the time The Matrix hit theaters in 1999, we had seen enough action-packed sci-fi over the years to make us cringe. Our demands had increased exponentially.
We now expect both a story as well as the actors' performance to retain some amount of integrity. If this is missing, no amount of kicking or shooting can rid us of the feeling that we've just been wasting our time in a way that was only acceptable when we were 11.
In light of all the negative reviews on Reloaded, I tried not to expect too much. Still, I paid a whopping $9.00 at the box-office of a top-notch theater equipped with the beefiest sound system in town. During and after, I felt embarrassed for having done so.
I was given the distinct impression that Andy and Larry themselves had never even seen The Matrix.
Reloaded is an entirely different film from The Matrix. It reeks of a sell-out, of board rooms filled with brainstorming marketing-scammers, of a colossal rip-off that seems to have forgotten what Generation X liked most about The Matrix: its atmospheric flair.
In The Matrix, we're taken on a post-modern coming-of-age journey with Neo. In Reloaded, it's not Neo, but CGI that's the focus of the film.
Reloaded is nothing more than a full-length feature COMPUTER GAME. So why not just go play one?
The Matrix was a slick and suspenseful FILM, in which the viewer identified with the underdogs' characters. We rejoiced when they overcame. But Reloaded lacks any treatment of the protagonist's development, or anyone else's for that matter, allowing the viewer to identify with the plight of no-one.
The Matrix closed out with a pounding tune by Rage Against the Machine, who scream "Fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy!!!" So what happened to this perspective?
It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The original writers were replaced by 14-year-old computer geeks more eager to escape into the arms of a voluptuous, blonde computer program than they are in making a film.
Reloaded is so pristinely sterile, odorless, emotionless, CHARACTER-less, and at times so pubescently vulgar, it's hard to believe these are the same writers.
This affects even the best of actors. It's disheartening to see the Othello of The Matrix reverse roles with Keanu in respect of acting quality.
Fishburne's droning recital of horrific, pseudo-intellectual musing is so stilted, you can almost hear the director urging him to be "More serious, Laurence! You've got to be more Morpheus than Morpheus himself ever knew he was!"
Further criticisms include:
---Actions sequences too clean (i.e. retouched) and drawn-out. Suspense is lost;
---CGI used far too often to smooth over gaps in bullet-time photography. The least trained eye easily spots Gumby-like cartoon drawings stretching across the screen;
---Acting and writing brutally stilted. Offends the most ill-equipped intellect. One has the impulse to ignore the dialog completely as a means of punishing it, like parents deliberately not reacting to a 10-year old who tries to shock them with foul language. Misguided attempts at 10th-grade level pop-philosophy add to superficiality;
---The direction the story takes views like a made-for-TV Stargate spin-off with an all-new no-name cast. Story and characters are hideously compromised, amateurishly convoluted;
---Nothing short of fury is generated by what sloppy writing did to Agent Smith (now a renegade evil hippie-bot on a soul-search, seeking revenge for reasons frighteningly lacking depth) and the Oracle (now trivialized by meandering, contrived oracle-speak, reduced to a pseudo-smarmy program, a side-act as opposed to the pithy element she was). These two key characters are robbed of their sovereignty and depth;
---Sets in Zion are too Hollywood, mat-drawing or CGI. Costumes are straight out of Star Trek the Next Generation or a Calvin Klein commercial for Woodstock-copycat wannabe ravers. This contrasts harshly with underdog Matrix-hackers all wearing moth-eaten sweaters on the Nebuchadnezzar vis-a-vis Zion mission control's immaculate, glaring white, state-of-the-art hi-tech garb. Overload of scenes with superfluous counsels and commanders who all have something TERRIBLY important to say;
---Twins are pubescently extravagant disco-albino Casper-the-Ghost punching bags. The freeway chase scene is among the most drawn-out sequences; leaves one addled, apathetic;
---We anticipated seeing "the minds Neo freed" and how Neo does this more than anything, far more than him rescuing himself and his pals. The writers completely ignore this.
In sum:
This movie has nothing to do with the original, where it left off, or its 'message'.
We overestimated the Wachowski Bros. when we hoped they would present a follow-up that would hold true to 'what it means' to be an underdog, hack a Matrix or rage against a machine.
The Bros. need to rewind to scenes where Carrie-Anne Moss delivers lines from the back seat of a suicide-door Caddy in the rain: 'You've been down that road Neo...', or Laurence Fishburne's 'I suspect that right about now you're feeling a bit like Alice ... tumbling down the rabbit hole'. The feeling scenes like those evoked is long lost. Instead, the Bros. just reload and regurgitate on us, CGI-style.
Talents of accomplished actors are squandered. The actors themselves come across brow-beaten by lousy script-writing until performances are all less than equal to Keanu's robotics.
Between 1999 and 2003, the Bros. seem to have forgotten what it means to rock like underdogs.
Maybe it's because the dollar signs on their eyes have blinded them. Reloaded not only abandons its own previously postulated truth ... that "there is no spoon" ... it now INSISTS there is one, and promptly proceeds to ram it down our throats.