So I saw The Matrix: Reloaded last week. Twice. I absolutely loved it the first time, and the second time I was pretty sure I wanted to marry it. I’m wondering whether to risk a third show, or whether so many repeated viewings within such a short space of time would somehow tarnish the magic.
I’ve heard all the criticisms, of course. The slow stuff at the beginning lasts too long. The first movie’s “wow” factor is largely absent until the end. The fight scene with the Smiths is drawn out, and looks fake. Why should Neo even need to fight, anyway, when he made it abundantly clear in the first movie that he can just blast those pesky agents into little fragments of code faster than you can type “format c:”?
None of this bothered me. And although, in my less partisan moments, I can sort of see the validity of some of the complaints, I really think they’re besides the point. Because the movie around the flaws, the story and concept and world in which these tiny insignificant problems exist, is almost perfect.
Now, I don’t throw words like “perfect” around lightly. But I really believe that, in creating the Matrix, the Wachowski brothers have built the perfect storytelling vehicle. Not only do you have a world with a built-in conceit that supports the most fantastic, improbable fight sequences you’ve ever seen, you have a perfect philosophical platform (a digital world within the real world) from which to spout the most outrageously cheesy profundities without sounding … well, outrageously cheesy. They’ve managed to dramatize the epistemological, existential issues that have troubled us since Plato started playing handshadows on cave walls, by actually creating a false world in which all of these age-old questions could play themselves out, in thrilling, tangible ways. What is reality? Is the manufactured reality of the Matrix different from the flesh-and blood world on which it’s based in any important way? How can we trust knowledge, when our primary means of gathering that knowledge is a sensory system that is so easy to co-opt and deceive? The movie doesn’t just ask those questions, it acts them out.
Plus, there’s all the Kung Fu, and the explosions, and Trinity in Latex. If Aristotle or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Sartre had featured more women in latex in their dull musings, I, for one, would have been much more inclined to pay attention.