Best Keanu: “The One was never meant to end anything. It was all another system of control.”

I have a bunch of random words scribbled on a page, meant to remind me of what I wanted to say about The Matrix Reloaded. They include, “oracle,” “military structure,” “Trinity on the motorcycle,” “purpose,” “Cornel West,” “dancing Zion,” “agency over the body,” “car chase,” “action scenes (short),” “programs hacking programs,” “prophecies/messiahs,” “choice,” “Niobe,” and “N/T in a relationship and fighting together.” Also, “N&T sex scene,” but I don’t think I’ll forget to talk about that.

I imagine I saw Reloaded not long after revisiting The Matrix, and as predicted by my post about the original film in the franchise, a year and a half later I’m more partial to Matrix part 2 than the first. It keeps what was good about the first Matrix and builds on it, adding some new elements, most of which work — although I’d be the first in line to say I don’t care much about Zion or its people or the war or whatever all of that stuff is. But it’s essential, all of that stuff, to support what I do like about Reloaded: the questions about choice and survival, agency over the body, commitment and love. There’s a lot about love here, a lot about free will, a lot about what it actually means to live a fulfilling human life. That makes up for the snooze fest politics in Zion and the battle scenes with the sentinels. Those scenes are the price you have to pay for the discussions about meaning.

Let’s start with the car chase. But this discussion likely won’t be about Reloaded as much as it’s about John Wick: Chapter 4. Because as much as I enjoyed Reloaded, the car chase put me to sleep — save the thrilling segment with Trinity alone on her motorcycle with the Keymaker. So it got me to thinking about why that is. Why is it that this car chase doesn’t do it for me, but I could watch the Arc de Triomphe scene from Wick over and over again without getting bored?

Not that the Wachowskis or Stahelskis of the world need or want my self-reflective analysis on this; and even if they did, it feels a little nasty to break apart what must have been a logistically incredibly difficult (and expensive) scene in a film made 20 years ago. But here goes: it cuts too quickly. You can’t really watch what’s happening. The music is standard soundtrack fare and not the distinct beat of rock/pop music which elevates every scene in John Wick. You don’t get a sense of the danger of the traffic like you do with Wick, with the exception of Trinity on the motorcycle, racing at a very high speed and dodging vehicles much bigger than she. What makes John Wick action so brilliant is the carefully selected, tiny moments. The reload (speaking of reloads) in John Wick (Chapter 1); the reach out of the door-less car to scoop up a gun that’s on the ground in Chapter 4. The fistfight on the street in John Wick: Chapter 4, not elevated above the road, on top of a transport truck, like in Matrix: Reloaded.

The action overall in Reloaded is, however, a great improvement over the original Matrix. I’ll even forgive the filmmakers for devising scenarios just to have an excuse to throw in another kung fu fight scene, because those kung fu fight scenes are so much fun to watch.

The council discussing war strategy in Zion is not so much fun to watch. Neither is the conflict between the ship’s commanders, most of whom apparently don’t share Morpheus’ belief that Neo is The One, or that there even is such a thing as The One, a messiah who will end the war. It’s an interesting juxtaposition that the Matrix films offer, between a world so embedded in technology and a natural human desire to seek out something more, something unseen. It’s a religious story, but one that takes it in the opposite direction of say Star Wars. Reloaded doesn’t ask us to believe in God, or The Force, or some strange spirit driving human behaviour. It does, however, ask us to think about choice and its implications.

Because choice, it seems, is a double-edged sword. It makes the Matrix easier to control; if the Architect is telling Neo the truth, without choice people wouldn’t accept the program, even if idyllic. With choice, they would comply, but that leads to the anomaly that means every cycle The One has to choose to save a few and allow most to be destroyed, so that the human race as a whole could survive. There’s something very practical about this philosophy, about exploring in this way the question of what it means to be human. To have recourse to a deity almost seems too easy; if all you have is what’s here, why do humans value choice, even if it’s an illusion, and even if it means being enslaved.

Agency is an important theme in The Matrix Reloaded; sex has a big role to play here, too. Freed humans dance ecstatically in Zion, and Neo and Trinity get naked and have sex in a private spot while everyone is gyrating in some communal space. These are freed humans, after all, who in the Matrix have no connection to their actual physical bodies. Their spatial experience when they are hooked up to the Matrix is nothing more than a sensory trick. It divorces them from the reality that their energy is not used for what it should be — for dancing, or eating, or sex — but rerouted to supply power to the machine race that enslaves them. This theme of the body, and what it means, what it’s for, and how it defines for better or worse who we think we are and how others see us, is important; it’s about race, gender, the very concept of what it means to be embodied. If we are not embodied, are we even alive?

Deep thoughts. It’s time to read some Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Frantz Fanon again, I guess, or give some thought to the body schema.

Niobe is underused in Matrix Reloaded, but that’s because her role is confined to the military/war plot, which is both boring and I guess necessary in a way. I found the military structure imposed on the civilians of Zion to be trite and boring and a little repetitive of every major space franchise. There’s a war, so there’s a military to fight it. So that’s all I have to say on that.

Last note: I met Cornel West once, years ago. It must have been in the late 1990s when I was visiting a friend in Boston. (The first time I watched The Matrix Reloaded, I was like, “hey! What is Cornel West doing in a Matrix movie?” Still a good question. What is Cornel West doing in a Matrix movie?). I am walking across the Harvard campus, in my own little world. I look up and there’s a man coming towards me. We both move to avoid running into each other; we both go left, then we both go right. Then the man steps grandly to one side, bows deeply, and extends a hand, as if to say, “after yooooooooooou….” It was Cornel West. Ever since then, whenever I think of Cornel West, I think of his theatrical bow, and I smile. I’m smiling now as I write this.

Really late note: Neo and Trinity. There’s a lot to keep one occupied in The Matrix Reloaded. There’s lots of interesting stuff about the nature of machine intelligence; it’s not monolithic, which somehow makes it less scary. That was hinted at in the original Matrix, when Smith tells Morpheus he hates this place and wants to be free. Machines have sentience; that means they are like humans, in that they have individual motivations, desires, and opinions about what’s right. It doesn’t take much for one, or several, to go rogue and to help humanity get out of this system that imprisons them.

But while we’re thinking about that, there’s still that love story at the centre of The Matrix. There’s still that pair with the deep, strong bond, which the films rely on but don’t exactly focus on. There’s a powerful, meaningful message here. Trinity loves Neo, but she isn’t at home waiting for him. She is fighting by his side. She is, as the later films show, perhaps even more powerful than he. Love doesn’t have to come at the sacrifice of equality, and love and mission, and purpose, can exist simultaneously.

Of course, it is a movie. And in the early scenes of The Matrix Reloaded we see at least one other woman waiting at home while her male partner Fights the Good Fight. Niobe, even, is reduced as an object caught between her former and current lovers, which is causing their working relationships to be fraught with conflict. But in Neo and Trinity, we see something ideal, something beautiful, something we all hope might be real. After all, as The Matrix Resurrections aptly reminds us, Love is the genesis of everything.

May 2023