The Matrix Trilogy – Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo

I want to love The Matrix. I really do. But on my first viewing of it as a trilogy (My fifth time watching the original, third time for Reloaded, and second for Revolutions, for those of you keeping score), I’ve decided that I just can’t do it. At one point I became acutely aware that I was reaching my maximum tolerance for philosophical doublespeak… and then I realized that I had a whole other movie to go.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you’re reading this, you know the story. Well, let me try and encapsulate it in a few sentences: A computer hacker named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) learns that the real world is really an illusion, a virtual reality fed into our brains by a massively intelligent computer that has taken over the world, turned humans into living batteries to power itself, and has created a fake world for our minds to live in so that we continue to survive and produce said power without knowing anything’s wrong. A small group of human rebels “unplugs” the hacker, and he tries to lead them to victory in a war against the machines, hopping back and forth between the blasted wasteland of reality and the “normal-world” illusion of the Matrix, where – if you know that it’s all fake – the laws of time and space can be bent to produce some spectacular action set pieces. How’s that?

The first film, as a stand-alone, holds up just fine. The prospect that the real world is only what a computer is telling our senses really cranks up the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy paranoia. It ends with the main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) realizing that is some sort of Messiah, and has more control over the machines than any other person in the world. In effect, it’s a superhero origin story. The idea, it seemed, was that we all could be living in a Matrix right now, and maybe if we simply allow our minds to accept the impossible, we can actually change the world.

But in the second and third films, we learn that’s not really the case. Things start happening that couldn’t happen in the real world, not without people noticing. People start flying, others get randomly taken over by agents of the central computer that runs the world, gigantic fight scenes take place in broad daylight in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses. By the end of the third film, everyone in the world has been possessed by a man who is technically a computer virus. Okay, so this is some other world, not ours. The empowering idea that we have more control over our world than we think has been effectively snatched away. I suppose it’s something like how people felt when we learned that a Jedi gets his ability to channel The Force through some kind of cellular symbiote called midichlorians. Suddenly, this idea that we can mentally affect the physical world isn’t the product of the right focus and training. People don’t like it when their superpowers are promised, then suddenly pulled back out of their reach. The Jedi thing I’ve somehow been able to forgive, but the Matrix’s back-pedal seems somehow more underhanded to me.

On top of that… In between all the wire-fu and bullet-time special effects, the whole subtext of the movie is put forth in lines that go by so fast you’re still thinking about what was just said when you realize you’ve missed five other things. Outside of the first film, there’s not a lot of overlap between the action and the words that explain what’s actually going on. You’re sometimes forced to endure interminable stretches of dialogue that are full of lines like this:

Neo: I have come here to ask some questions.
Oracle: I know.
Neo: What are those questions?
Oracle: The questions you wish answered are irrelevant.
Neo: If that’s true, then why am I here?
Oracle: That’s the question you should be asking.
Neo: Okay, why I am I here?
Oracle: That question is also irrelevant. The bigger question is, why did I want you to come here?
Neo: I came here of my own choice.
Oracle: So you say. But what about the choices you made earlier? You decided to come because of a series of choices you made in the past, which began long before you knew who I was.
Neo: I’m going to go punch many things very fast now.

Scenes like this seem rigged with what video game designers call “replay value”, which they use to describe elements that make you want to undergo the experience again. It’s stuff you will either miss or not fully understand the first time around.

Another thing that bugs me is the fighting. And there’s a lot of it. With a catalogue of kung-fu styles available for direct download into the human’s brains, the weapon of choice in the Matrix is their fists. But most of it seems oddly slow and bloodless. Maybe it’s in the editing… the Wachowksi brothers (who wrote and directed all three films) clearly took pride in extended takes of sequences of karate moves, but the result is that it looks like most of the punches weren’t designed to land, or wouldn’t cause any damage if they did. A lot of it looks like choreography. And I can understand that… as much as they may have trained for the films, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving aren’t primarily physical actors.

There’s also no real understanding of the film’s main antagonist, Agent Smith. He starts as a computer “agent”, a program that is intent on finding the human resistance inside the Matrix and wiping them out. He hates mankind with a passion, and has a famous monologue proving the theory that humans are, technically, a virus. However, once Neo “destroys” him he goes renegade, and eventually becomes a virus himself (why?), taking over every human presence in the Matrix. While it’s clearly established that he is a computer program, he’s inexplicably found a way to take over at least one human in the real world. Both those things don’t make a lot of sense to me, and kind of feel like acts of convenience, especially when there’s no explanation given. And there’s also no solution put forth about why he immediately self-destructs after assimilating Neo at the end of the trilogy. I think it’s a mistake for a film that has been building up to a final confrontation between two characters end so ambiguously.

In the end, it’s mostly the philosophy of the trilogy that I find hardest to plug into (like I said, the original takes its stand and sticks to it. However, since it’s widely held that the Wachowskis conceived of the entire trilogy as one piece, I’m not sure how that works.). To me, it seems kind of disingenuous for a movie to put forth a philosophy that is so heavily rooted in the idea of fate, and yet trumps it with the importance of personal choice at the same time. It’s like they’re purposefully throwing so many motifs and methods of faith at you that, no matter what your spiritual persuasion, you’ll find something that matches up with yours. Like the Matrix itself, it somehow smacks of self-conscious design.