Ray Pride

We are talking up the matrix and "The Matrix Unloaded" and how not to talk about it while talking about it.

It's a couple hours after the first local screening. Susi crosses her long legs across a barstool, a gentle swoop of flowing black pant legs that suggests the dreamy gyroscopic slowed-motion of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in his Dries van Noten-goes-clerical garb or her feral PVC slink-suits in "Unloaded." I scowl at her joke. She responds by leaning backward in lolling sway, evading invisible bursts of movie gunfire.

Funny, we're in a dark tavern on a Chicago street corner, and yet it's an instinctive pop-cult reaction, feeling like we live day-to-day within the reigning metaphor that makes the Wachowski Brothers' strikingly multiracial, religion-steeped allegory so memorable. A construct of media and data surrounds us, streaming past, never to be stemmed, and we react to its flow instead of more considered instincts. Ask the big questions. Dress in the good stuff. There's what we've taken from the first movie.

My friend's like every Tom, Dick and Harriet I've talked to since seeing the first of the Wachowski Brothers' sequels to 1999's "The Matrix," wanting to know nothing but if it gets a nod or a nay.

Are you kidding?

Neo (Keanu Reeves, at his lean, earnest, monosyllabic prettiest), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, battling for cheekbone supremacy with her perhaps-otherworldly lover) and Morpheus (Larry Fishburne) still battle against the big sleep of all humankind. Did I ruin it for you?

Early reviews have been dotted with spoilers, and this space allowed won't do justice to the plot, themes, or the visual vocabulary that the Chicago-based Wachowskis have formulated. There will be ever more tiresome exegeses of thematic elements drawn from mythology and religious history, yet I'm more concerned with the way the movie feels, the way it looks as it rushes past, barrels confidently across tens of millions of dollars of computer power on ever-expanding pixel frontiers.

With their sleek appropriation of the flow of interactive videogames, I feel older than the not-yet-40 pair of brothers. Yet their gargantuan ambition, to make popular entertainment that bothers to examine questions more weighty than the dulling range of cultural product and propaganda, has been held in contempt by several critics. Notable among them are Time magazine's Richard Schickel, at least approaching his early seventies, who dismisses the movie as "philosophical tosh" with its good guys "basically, terrifically buff liberal humanists." (Dick? You're old.) Similar, too, to Adam Gopnik, the bitterly disappointed New Yorker critic who condescends to "Reloaded" as "a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie."

My largest reservation from thirty-six hours distance is the slow-dawning realization that what is on screen is merely the first half of a four-hour movie that you can't "conclude" until November. The grunge of the begrimed Industrial Age compound of Zion is a little disappointing, yet its intricately etched embellishments on the machine-world of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" impresses. Don Davis' score, in collaboration with other musicians, is important as well, combining postmodern minimalist notions with an intense style of electronica.

There's a lot of setup, a bit of exposition that leans scarily (but not too far) toward the kind of bureaucratic gibberish that George Lucas laces his latter-day releases with. But the look is as convulsively watchable as slapstick. The Wachowskis elaborate on variations of screen action drawn from many sources, particularly Hong Kong "flying" wirework. Silent comedians had a name for all their bits, such as the moment where you have to escape the Kops: spreading one's legs, leaping in the air, then running for dear life. (That's called the "spread-eagle and scram," an equivalent to Neo's flying to the sky when the film's battles open out from aggravation to exponential mayhem.)

There's a scene indicated in the coming attractions and commercials where Neo battles legions of Agent Smith. It's generous and beautiful and, at times, insanely detailed. It's not dramatically suspenseful, however, and that makes up a large part of what others have been writing. But the film itself offers a key insight into martial arts: the repetition, the formal play, the intense threat of losing face or footing, is in fact a form of honoring your opponent. "Why couldn't you have just asked me," Neo asks one apparent opponent. "You actually do not know someone until you fight them," the fighter responds. Overkill becomes the point of the film's sustained setpieces, the effortless thrust and parry of struggle that take place in imaginary space, dreamed time.

Hackers have often declaimed that information wants to be free. So, too, signifiers and metaphors. Stories within stories, stories outside of stories. Are movies dramas or dreams? "Why am I here?" is Neo's key question, one he knows that has no answer. In six months, an answer. Or, perhaps, larger questions.

"The Matrix Unloaded" is now playing. Duh.

(2003-05-14)

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