t is a dark time for the rebellion. The final flight of the Osiris has given the elders of Zion a grim message: The machines are coming.
All hovercraft have been recalled to defend the last human settlement, four kilometers below the ruined surface of the Earth. But Morpheus (Fishburne) wants to keep the Nebuchadnezzar behind to receive one last message from the Oracle (the late Gloria Foster) for Neo (Reeves), who Morpheus still believes can end the war once and for all.
In The Matrix, Neo's powers have become formidable. He can dispatch a team of Agents with virtually no effort. He flies through the virtual skies like a bullet. But even he can't foretell the future, which he fears may include the death of his beloved Trinity (Moss).
Back in Zion, Comm. Lock (Harry Lennix) argues that he can't spare a single ship from the looming war against the Machine Army. He believes Morpheus is deluded in his faith in Neo, The One. Trinity tells Neo that Lock and Morpheus are at odds in part because of Capt. Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) of the Logos. Niobe was once with Morpheus; now she's with Lock.
Nevertheless, the Zion Council, at the behest of Councillor Hamann (Anthony Zerbe), grants Morpheus leave, aided by Niobe and Capt. Soren (Steve Bastoni) of the Vigilant.
Back in The Matrix, Neo meets with the Oracle, who reveals that she is not what she seems. Neo must try to understand a choice he has already made, one that may seal the fate of Zion, she says. And he must seek the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim), who is in the custody of a shady character called the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and his wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci), guarded by the white-clad Twins (Neil and Adrian Rayment).
But before he can do this, Neo finds himself surrounded by a newly resurrected Agent Smith (Weaving). Surrounded in the sense that Smith has discovered a way to replicate himself into dozens of copies. "Surprised to see me?" he asks, before attacking.
A movie more Episode II than Matrix II
Without question the most highly anticipated movie of the year, The Matrix Reloaded not only returns viewers to the virtual world of 1999's seminal SF thriller, it also reveals the depth and breadth of the Wachowski brothers' fevered imaginings. The dense script of Reloaded works variations on the themes introduced in The Matrix, weaving a multipart fugue out of the relatively straightforward messiah theme of the first movie, ruminating not only on the nature of reality, but also on issues of control, power, fate and choice.
In this, Reloaded and its upcoming companion, The Matrix Revolutions, are extremely ambitious, aiming to be nothing short of a new myth for the modern age. The effort falls just short of complete success.
Reloaded suffers in part from being the second act in a three-act play, with a lot of setup, presumably, for the big payoffs to come. The early parts of the movie, mainly in Zion, drag on and on, with a feeling that is more Episode II than Matrix II. Once the movie returns to the big city, things pick up.
But the movie also strains under the weight of its graduate-school-seminar ideas, which allude to everything from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to the Grail quest legends to the arcane theories of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard (Princeton scholar Cornel West has a cameo). A key talk between Neo and the Oracle is all but incomprehensible, as is a catty encounter with the Merovingian and, especially, a climactic discourse between Neo and a mysterious character called the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis). It took two viewings before the movie's underlying rationale began to make sense to me, let alone its subtext.
Still, it's doubtful most fans will complain. The Wachowskis more than deliver the action and visual effects Matrix fans expect. As advertised, Reloaded raises the bar for all movies to come. Hundreds of visual-effects artists and technicians worked for months on the eye-popping sequences, and it shows.
A pleasant surprise is how the Wachowskis have gone against the short-attention-span conventional wisdom, allowing these scenes to play out much longer than usual. The big sequences accrete in layers, with rhythms that build like musical compositions to powerful climaxes. It's a new way to view action, and it works wonderfully—assuming that viewers sit still long enough to let them worm their way into their minds.
