In Defence Of The Matrix Sequels
Within The Much Maligned And Irredeemable Convolutions Of Reloaded and Revolutions Are Some Pretty Interesting Ideas
Tristan Young @talltristan
File this one under “no one cares” or “why are you doing this to yourself?” You probably don’t need to read this, and I certainly don’t need to write it, but fuck! I guess I feel compelled! Who among us hasn’t occasionally fallen under the hypnotic spell of Keanu Reeves and thusly refused to reconcile with anything even remotely resembling reality for most of their adult life? Perhaps I should back up a little (once again I’m sorry). With the recently released Matrix Resurrections trailer many of us have had the future of the franchise on our mind, since evidently it once again has a future. Of all the possible directions they could go with the cyber punk messiah complex of a story, what vectors would they take? Based on the reveal trailer and its concernedly samesy kind of vibe, I assume a fair bit of narrative misdirection is at play. Surely he isn’t just going to go through the exact same motions he did last time? Learn about the real world, fall in love with Trinity, do some snazzy bullet time stuff, say “whoa”? That seems like an awful narrative waste of time but really who the fuck knows! Not me!
Perhaps it’s the obtuse vagaries of the trailer that left me with an itch that needed to be scratched. Knowing that the new film won’t let see the light of day until December- unless a new covid variant that will invariably force us to learn yet another letter of the Greek alphabet rears its ugly head- I endeavoured to do something I haven’t done in almost 20 years: re-watch The Matrix trilogy. To those of us with fond memories of at least the first one, which truly was monumentally influential, this may seem like an only partly tedious undertaking. I however am in the vocal minority of people who think the first Matrix is over rated. What meritous constituent parts it does have are lifted from less platformed but far more sophisticated stories. The rest of the film is maudlin exercise in bland writing, over acting, and a still gestating commitment to obnoxiously obfuscated expositional dialogue. And that’s the one that I at least acknowledge is highly regarded. The idea of watching this and then the sequels seemed akin to a sadomasochistic exercise on my part. But who doesn’t hate themselves just a little from time to time?
It’s therefore with a profound sense of confusion that I didn’t hate the sequels. It’s been years since I last watched them, their acute and irredeemable deficiencies forever seared into the analytical part of my psyche, or considering how angry I would get about them, the analytical part of my pathology. My feelings about the first Matrix have not budged an inch, its incubating big ideas not withstanding. I acknowledge it is what it is, and based on my perhaps draconian criteria for a decent film, I just can’t get past some if its core issues on acting and writing. It looks cool though. What blew me away is how little I focused on those aspects for my viewings of The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions. Rather than be constantly irked by those same issues of the first one, now amplified by the misguided certitude of the Wachowski’s that their baroque cinematic flare was actually cool, I was fair less interested in such components of the film. Rather, the holistic point of the entire trilogy fascinated me, which was far more subversive than I ever gave them credit for.
To be clear, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions are not good films. In the former the leather fetishizing is rote, the Key Maker storyline is insipidly blunt, the Zion rave scene is embarrassing, and the Architect scene is infamous for its intentionally nebulous double speak and aggressively circular logic. It reads like an English student found a thesaurus and grossly misinterpreted the already pretentious idea of word porn. It takes what should be an intriguing and conceptually adventurous inversion of film tropes that we thought The Matrix franchise was indulging in but renders them indigestible. That fucking Architect!
Revolutions, the consensus rightly asserts, is even worse. At least Reloaded had several excellent fight scenes. The third largely forgets that what won audiences over initially were inventive martial arts sequences and excises them from the proceedings. The Oracle’s shrouded and vague prophesizing becomes dismissively obtuse and useless at this point. The opening slogs where Neo is in purgatory coupled with that pointless sojourn with The Merovingian gives off the idea that this story has no where to go. The big robot war takes up too much space in the second act, and by the time Neo confronts Smith in the Matrix it feels like the narration and the audience have completely lost the plot.
It’s bad story telling, however it actually just might be a great story. And herein lies the redemptive arc within The Matrix trilogy I totally missed in my youth. As no doubt many of us are sick and tired of chosen one narratives, oriented around someone whose destiny it is to vanquish evil or whatever, the first Matrix is a huge turn off for me in that regard. Few modern films lean as heavily into the story telling cliché of a chosen messiah as the first in the trilogy. What the sequels obscure with their needlessly convoluted to the point of disorientation writing is that the trilogy as a whole is a complete and utter refutation of a chosen one narrative. It’s the antitheses of it actually. I love this.
It’s hard to pick up because the biggest revelatory nuggets are contained within expository bouts with The Architect, Oracle, or Smith (after he’s gone crazy). In other words, it’s not easy to figure out what this film is trying to say, but what it’s trying to say is actually worth wild. Bare with me here: the narration initially suggests that Neo is the chosen one that will save humanity and end the war with the machines. But in the second Matrix film we learn that while he is indeed the chosen one and with a destiny to fulfil, saving humanity is not what the function of the chosen one is. Not in these films at least.
In these films, the Matrix itself is a composite of trillions and trillions of lines of code; something so vastly complex that even sentient beings as sophisticated as the omnivorous AI machine villains in the films couldn’t balance every single mathematical formula perfectly. Imagine doing long division and getting one of those annoying fractal remainders. Now imagine that equation being a trillion digits long and you have to figure where to put that decimal remainder. You couldn’t, even the Architect couldn’t. So with the code in the Matrix there was always a couple anomalous digits out of place. This manifests in the code of a person who will be able to manipulate the Matrix in unpredictable ways- this person is obviously “the one”, or Neo.
The films show human resistance fighters like Trinity and Morpheus assiduously searching for this chosen one so as to have a figurehead to lead their quixotic revolution, with antagonistic programs inside the Matrix- the agents- trying to thwart their progress. In actuality, the Matrix and its Architect have just as much of a vested interested in finding this chosen one. The errant code that manifests in the chosen one eventually will destabilize the Matrix more and more to the point of inoperability, like a tumorous growth. The only way to mitigate this inevitability is to identify and dissolve the errant code down into its most base matter, or digits. This is what the Architect is explaining to Neo in their little therapy session. Neo’s destiny is to be identified and then rendered into raw code that is to be decimated throughout the Matrix. Such an update to the Matrix is so encompassing and vast that it requires being completely restarted. Think of downloading an update to your computer and then having to restart it. This is why it’s explained that there have been six versions of the Matrix, each one catagorized by the emergence of a chosen one. Every time that chosen one is found and “returned to the source” as the film somewhat erroneously describes it, the Matrix starts over.
It was the program called the Oracle that figured this out. Back in the earliest Matrices the Architect designed the Oracle program to efficiently identify and bring in this anomalous chosen one; and it’s here that things get especially sneaky in the story. The Oracle surmised that this world bending chosen one could serve as a rallying cry for humans trying to fight against the Matrix, so she nurtured these insurgent revolutionaries into believing errant fantasies that he would be their saviour, thusly getting thousands of humans across the Matrix to help her in the job of finding the chosen one. They believed the Oracle was helping them search for their hero when in fact they were helping her hunt down malignant code. This is why the AI allows the human city of Zion to exist for much of the war; it’s these free humans basically doing the Architect’s dirty work. It’s no coincidence that Neo is firmly established as the chosen one by the end of the first film and right at the beginning of the second film the robot army is coming for Zion. The human resistance has no function anymore. This leads into, albeit inelegantly in the form of an oblique info dump, the Architect telling Neo his code is to be disseminated and Zion destroyed, but he gets to choose a small group of humans to survive the cataclysm. The AI and the Architect knows that the anomalous code will pop up once again in the next Matrix iteration (or revolution as it were). They will once again need to find the one that code metastasizes in, and it will once again be useful to have a controllable number of humans around to help them in their search.
Neo’s roll wasn’t to save humanity, but just to restart a ruinous cycle. This is very cool I think! I also find it interesting that the story focusing on the sixth iteration finds narrative reasons to differentiate it from proceeding ones. Partly that the Oracle, always a stealth agent of sorts, had grown to actually develop an affinity for these humans, and maybe had become invested in actually helping them. Perhaps that’s why her dialogue is so inscrutable, no one can really lay claim to her motivations, be they autocratic or anarchistic, because no one really has any clue as to what the fuck she is talking about. The more important subversion of this systemic, and therefor institutionalized and controlled apocalypse is of course Agent Smith. By going crazy after his weird bonding with Neo in the first one (what the heck was that all about?) he becomes so malignant, in the technical sense of the term, that he can destroy the Matrix, the human world and the machine world. Suddenly the Architect’s plans of iterative identification of the chosen one’s code through manipulation of human hopes and dreams don’t seem so functional anymore.
I find all of this engaging because it redeems some of the more rote and prosaic writing throughout the film, all of the idioms about choice to be specific. If a lot of stories are over reliant upon chosen one narratives, well a lot of others lay it on a little thick with the choosing to be your own person spiel (Terminator 2 did this marvellously, a lot of other movies less so). But by having Neo constantly saying things like I choose to save Trinity in the second one, or I choose to go through the other door, he is specifically not fulfilling his role as the chosen one. He is not fulfilling his destiny. By doing so he completely breaks the iterative cycle of the Matrix and creates a situation for, if not true human salvation, at least re calibrates the terms of the conflict as completely unpredictable, and therefore potentially winnable.
Like I said all of this is messy and convoluted and could have used a harsh edit before release. But The Matrix trilogy’s audacious repudiation of chosen one story lines is surprisingly refreshing. Coupled with some picturesque and excellent art direction in the third one, even during the much maligned robot war sequence and I’m startled by how good I time I had watching these still fairly terrible movies. I hope the new one keeps this subversive spirit alive, preferably sculpted with a finer narrative tool set. If not at least we can see Keanu Reeves do, well, anything really.