Revisited & Remixed.
In the years since The Matrix (1999) was released, its impact on culture has extended from the popular to the political; its progressive motifs have been co-opted by real-world conservative ghouls; its sibling directors The Wachowskis have both come out as transgender women, and have had to explicitly state their film’s subtext as a trans allegory.
The balance of action and exposition nailed in The Matrix is absent in its sequels. The storytelling in Reloaded and Revolutions is both more ambitious and more muddled than the hyper-focussed original instalment. Like the multiplying Smiths, things escalate exponentially, until the execution buckles under the weight. At crucial points in the action, rubbery CGI which isn’t yet up to the task deflates what should be thrilling. Dialogue which is alternately pseudo-intellectual or clunkily basic undercuts the thoughtful postmodern theories it channels and its unexpected subversions of mythical archetypes. Unlike the lean, economical first instalment, in the sequels each hyperbolic sequence or overly verbose line of dialogue takes multiple runs at arriving at its point, as if several drafts of the script had been blindly copy-pasted on top of one another. The original The Matrix established a rhythm, and a mode of discourse, which is abandoned – or flooded – in Reloaded and Revolutions, obfuscating its expansion and subversion of its own ideas.
A neat detail which exemplifies the problem of intention vs impact: sunglasses in the Matrix sequels. Whatever the design intentions, sunglasses alternately obscure compelling performances (did you ever catch how often the cooly lethal Seraph is actually wide-eyed and freaking out?)…
… or distract from them altogether, by drawing attention to technical… mistakes? (More on that below).
But is there a version of these two sequels which works? Is it a matter of reconfiguring the pieces which are already there? Or are they simply made “better” by us reading them differently?
Story
Patrick H. Willems seeks to work only with existing elements (Reloaded and Revolutions, as well as cross-media properties including games, animation, and comics) to better structure, and better tell, the story in the second and third films:
That video’s guest, Sage Hyden from Just Write, offers his own thoughts On Finally Understanding The Matrix Sequels:
Ahead Of Their Time
Jean Baudrillard‘s Simulation and Simulacra “was the biggest philosophical influence on the [Matrix] franchise, and he actually had criticisms of the first film and where it fell short, and where he felt like it misunderstood his philosophy,” explains Sophie From Mars, which the Wachowskis returned to in the sequels and “re-did better”. Sophie and Sarah Zedig posit that Reloaded and Revolutions should be considered as a single film, and that that single film was ahead of its time, not least in predicting modern forms of fascism and the kind of figures it would produce. As an intersectional allegory about systems of control spanning class, gender, and media, they argue that The Matrix Sequels Are Good, Actually:
Bonus
Just leaving this promo photo from 2003 here:
Further Viewing
In case you need a reminder, here’s a bunch of breakdowns and behind-the-scenes which reveal the craft that went into the original 1999 film:
The Matrix Resurrections (2021) is a messy-but-heartfelt response to both the 1999 film and the influence it’s had on the real world in the two decades since: