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I think that Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an SF story or novel is an idea and not a person. — Philip K. Dick, "My Definition of Science Fiction," 1981

"I know why you're here, Neo. I know what you've been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer. You're looking for him. I know, because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did."
"What is the Matrix?" — The Matrix, 1999

Last week, I got up early to watch The Matrix Reloaded, with my friend

wjukknibs and my Dad. With wjukknibs because he enjoys seeing movies on opening night, and with my Dad because I saw The Matrix with him, four years ago. That first movie was fun, more fun for having Dad there. Both of us are science fiction readers, and both of us have a working knowledge of philosophy and world religion. Watching the first movie, we spent a lot of time annotating in our heads, catching references and precedents, and after, we compared notes. He had a stronger focus on the Eastern and mystic philosophies, I had a better grasp of the sci-fi predecessors. We enjoyed the movie. It was better than either of us had expected; we had been shielded from any sort of trailer or review that would have revealed the true arc of the film. But still, as sci-fi movies went, it was just a good sci-fi movie, and I don't think that either of us expected that it would have such a degree of mainstream impact.

Of course, this was 1999. The media was sowing distrust of computers in viruses and the Y2K bug. The populace was being told to brace for terrorist attacks from fringe groups. Many people believed, or at least had the sneaking suspicion, that the world was going to end very shortly. Everyone kept looking to the sky, expecting to find falling footwear.

The Matrix was kind of the philosophical catharsis that many people didn't know they craved. An old idea, certainly, but one that fit the times. Moviegoers left the theaters talking excitedly about artificial intelligence, artificial reality, and the presence or absence of silverware, regardless of how much or how little knowledge they had of these concepts just a few hours earlier.

Nobody really talked about Neo.

If one looks at The Matrix as the story of Neo, it's a pretty lame movie. He spends most of the movie bemused, people talk at him a lot, he says "Whoa," effects are had, and then he stops bullets. There's some sort of a love triangle thing going on, too, except that most of its members aren't aware of it.

But The Matrix is not about Neo, just as Neo's quest is not for Morpheus. It is about the question, "What is The Matrix?" The Matrix itself is the hero of the movie, and Neo, with his deep-seated doubt and his seemingly too-mature mind, is the method of its revelation.

This January, I participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt (and yes, I do intend to finish writing about it.) which gave me a first-hand experience of what The Matrix was like for Neo. I committed myself to finding an answer, and the process of doing so slowly became, not just harder, but more and more and more and more complicated and confusing. (Although we usually said, "Whah?" instead of "Whoa!"). The movie progresses similarly. Each scene stretches the reality of the world farther and farther until it snaps. The veils of reality are slowly peeled away, one by one. In the pivotal scene midway through the picture, Morpheus explains to Neo what The Matrix is, but Neo's journey to understanding continues. As it does, knowledge, very literally, becomes power. The more Neo understands and, consequently, the more we understand, the more that can be done in and to The Matrix. By the end of the movie, the last veil as seemingly been removed, and Neo no longer sees the surface of The Matrix at all, only code, the program that it is, a plaything, almost.

Quite a ride, and deftly done. So how does a sequel stack up?

It doesn't unfortunately. In some ways, The Matrix Reloaded suffers because the Wachowskis liked the ideas from the previous movie too much. Reloaded seems to want to dwell on the implications of a computerized world. Rogue programs masquerading as humans or monsters, "physical" manifestations of programming concepts, and the possibilities of a dangerous virus. But these are all ideas that were implicit in The Matrix, nothing new. Moreover, Reloaded doesn't seem able to dedicate the time it needs to these ideas. That's not surprising, since many of those same ideas are going supposed to appear in the various media tie-ins like The Animatrix, a series of animated shorts on themes related to The Matrix, and Enter the Matrix, the videogame designed to parallel the events of Reloaded.

These kinds of "media events" are slowly becoming more common, as artists begin to wonder about the possibilities of alternate media and as financial backers begin to speculate about the possibilities of consumers paying to view more sides of the story: pay to see the movie, pay to get the DVD bonus features, pay to get the game with more information, pay to read the companion book with the ideas the artist couldn't fit anywhere else, etc. The biggest problem in all of this is that each medium currently stands very separate from every other, and attempts to bridge all of them closely, in this way, usually leave a viewer (who has to ingest each one in sequence, there being no magical pass that will allow him to move from one medium to another) feeling unsatisfied, possibly even insulted that he has to shell out more to get the rest of the story. I sure felt insulted, and I intend to shell out more for most of these related items, even if I'm going to wait until the price drops a bit.

But I've digressed. The ideas that Reloaded does have, it simply doesn't present as well as The Matrix. To carry a long philosophical or pseudo-philosophical monologue, something more needs to be present than just the words. (Recently, I saw this in effect while reading The Lathe of Heaven. One character drones for pages about the most idiotic pseudo-psychobabble. It's in character, and well done for what it is, but it's still a pain to read.) Occasionally, a strong actor can grab the words and run with them. Hugo Weaving did it in the first ("It's the smell!"), and Gloria Foster pulls it off twice and the Oracle. But Laurence Fishburne's monologues in The Matrix were accompanied by strong visuals and atmosphere. When he offers Neo two pills, the entire world seems sympathetic to Morpheus' every nuance. A similar effect occurs when he dumps a whole bunch of exposition about "The Real World." The twists and turns from location to nonlocation, intercut with footage of huge machines harvesting fetuses, bolster the weak monologue.

In Reloaded, though, Fishburne is forced to regurgitate prophetic platitudes and messianic bromides accompanied by, well, nothing. With the words and ideas appearing as bald as Fishburne himself, it's unsurprising that audiences don't want to follow it. Morpheus is not the only character saddled with this problem. The Merovingian has a yawnfest of a screed on the subject of Hedonism (which, I suppose, is meant to be highly ironic for a computer program in a virtual world), but in a movie with a huge effects budget, it is accompanied by Matrixified animation from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Earlier, a stereotypically old and wise councilor takes Neo to see the mechanical workings of Zion. But instead of bringing that dark, dangerous, foreboding apparatus into the foreground, taking Neo and the audience through its superlative magnificence, the councilor and the Wachowskis are satisfied merely to wave at it, over there, in the distance.

Instead of shoring up the threadbare philosophy, the Wachowskis directed most of their vision and pocketbook to three sequences that, though breathtaking, don't really have much to do with the ideas or plot of the movie. A really, really long chase scene in a freeway is really cool, but not much happens, really. The same is true with the Burly Brawl, Neo's fight with Messrs. Smiths. But, again, there's little that wasn't implicit in The Matrix.

All of this boils down to the Wachowskis losing site of their star, their thesis: "What is The Matrix?" In The Matrix, the question takes center stage in the center of the movie, but in Reloaded it's kept far to the rear until the very last scene, when Neo meets The Architect.

None of my critiques of Reloaded applies to this scene. Finally, the central idea of the movie bursts to the foreground. Morpheus revealed in the last movie that The Matrix is Control, and The Architect reveals that Control extends beyond the realm of the virtual world, encompassing Zion itself. It's true that this idea may have occurred to audience members already, but then so might have the idea of our world being nothing more than a simulation. What is important is that, just as Morpheus destroyed Neo's world and set him adrift by revealing the existence of The Matrix, The Architect destroys the world that Morpheus and everyone around him believes, setting them adrift.

Presentation matches the ideas here, as well. The Architect sits in a room with an uncountable number of screens, each capable of portraying one of a near infinite number of possible reactions from Neo. When The Architect drops his bombshell, we see fear, rage, and denial swirling around a single screen of Neo's rationality, which then resolves itself into actuality.

But this scene, though possibly enough, still comes too late in the movie to save it. It's possible, too, that its postponement till the end of this movie may lessen its impact in the next movie. When Neo tells Morpheus the truth, Morpheus is shattered. The audience has been treated, ad nauseum, to Morpheus' unshakable faith, faith in what is now seen to be a horrible lie. Because it happens so late in the movie, I, for one, was glad that Morpheus would now have to shut up, instead of taking part in his plight. Further, since viewers will have months to digest the information before the story picks up in The Matrix Revolutions, there's very little chance that anyone's going to to be in the same mindset as Morpheus and the rest of his Zionistas.

There's more to be said, of course, on subjects like Neo's delicate status as a hero, since his main attribute seems to be doubt or Agent Smith's strange connection to humanity through Neo, but I think I'll finish up by doing what many have done before: prophesy. "What is The Matrix?" we will find, I believe, that The Matrix is Balance, to an extent greater than either Neo or The Architect suspects. This is augured not only by the text in many places (most notably in the strange symbiosis of Neo and Smith, and their abilities to affect machines and humans, respectively) but, more importantly, by the attitude that the creators have for their creation. The Wachowskis love their Matrix too much for it to be annihilated by victorious humans or victorious machines.

Next year, the "media event" will reach its climax when The Matrix becomes a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where people can create personalities inside The Matrix and take part in story lines designed and shepherded by the Wachowskis themselves. They will become, in a sense, The Architects, while the players become, each in a small way, The One. So perhaps, for the Wachowskis, The Matrix will be another attempt in redefining that space, once a page or a canvas or a stone, that links the creator and the viewer. Like all of the Matrices that redefinition will undoubtedly be far from new, though not all that old, but still, I hope, quite a ride, and deftly done.

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