I would say,
'Keanu, I loved The Matrix like everyone else when it came out, but in my mind those three films haven't all aged equally well. If you're able to come back to them in an unbiased or unself-critical way, do you still get the same charge out of them that you did back in the day? A lot of folks talk about the "ideas" in the films, especially the first - do those hold up as well as they seemed to when you read that first script? What were those films really about, to you?'
Then I'd drop on him exactly how they've aged differently, in my eyes, and he'd go all wide-eyed and then say 'I've never told anyone this, but I feel the same way!' End of interview. Happy Keanu.
* * *
So how have the Matrix films aged differently, Monsieur Banks? I'm so glad you asked, Disembodied Voice.
The original...
...is nowhere near as complex as it was originally made out to be. It's essentially a cyberpunk Star Wars with Luke the Gnostic hacker feeling his midichlorian oats and entering a literal 'larger world' with the help of Morpheus the Afro-Buddhist Jedi tutor (w/prequel-style millennial zealotry) and Trinity the post-HIV geek-fetish Leia. The Baudrillard is halfway there - Morpheus and company do have a real world to escape to, which despite its abjections is more ruggedly 'authentic' (not to mention sexually/racially harmonious) than the Matrix - and the culture-jamming netrunner madness of the final act is still no more sensible than the whole 'You can jump really far but can't "fly," and you can dodge bullets but still need guns to fight' conceit.
The Wachowskis' cinematic universe was a lot less complicated before the sequels, but that's precisely what people remember so fondly: the black-and-white ur-story, without all the weird futility-of-messiahs stuff in Reloaded and Revolutions. The ontologico-anarchist good guys were good because they were cool and vice versa (shades of those Brit-punk comics like Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, V for Vendetta(!), Sandman...); the bad guys were correct about the vileness of the human race but it didn't matter because they wore suits and killed civilians and so were Very Bad; the unit of cinematic currency was the Cool Image; the stakes were readily-understandable Free the Captives stuff; the idea of a Machine World was distant and cold and (thank our gods) easy to take as just an allegory for, y'know, non-conscientious consumerism or Internet addiction or something.
In other words, the first Matrix movie let us off easy. Like the first half of Fight Club, it made an interesting point amid flashy visuals, and didn't seem to press the issue too much.
But the Matrix sequels do to the original film's hero narrative what the Project Mayhem section of Fight Club does to that movie's streamlined, hilarious Fight Club story: they reveal it as hollow.
Reloaded
Everyone thinks I'm an idiot for liking Reloaded best of the three Matrix films. The marks against it are obvious: the 'Burly Brawl' is pointless in plot-mechanical terms; the Keymaster bit is as silly as the first flick's lobby shootout; the subterranean rave (which my friend Farhad calls the Endor Jam) seems ludicrous when played against the Neo/Trinity sex scene, which ends up seeming weirdly racist(?!); the ending makes no sense even after the third film; the dialogue is even more portentous and overwrought than in the original, particularly during the Architect and Merovingian(?!?!) scenes, and - oh yes - Monica Belluci's character makes no sense at all (except purely symbolically, about which more later). It's too long, too stuffed, it ends with a clear strong choice for the hero (save the girl or save the world?) that half the audience couldn't understand because of the insane sequence that preceded it, and it doesn't stand alone at all.
It is, in short, very much a middle chapter, and the Wachowskis allowed it to sag out of a desire to get everything that's ever interested them onscreen.
But.
Even if you're not talking about Meaning (which we're gonna), you've gotta give Reloaded credit for having:
* the trilogy's cleverest fight scene (the tabletop duel);
* its most jaw-dropping action sequence (the freeway chase/fight);
* its most interesting, varied kung fu (the villa fight);
* its most unsettling, morally complex revelations and allegorical material (the Architect scene);
* its most gleeful comic-book material (the Burly Brawl);
* the rapturously weird/sexy Endor Jam;
* its sharpest criticism of the viewing audience (the bowels-of-Zion talk about man/machine codependency);
* and of course the half-realized Zion, neither utopia nor dystopia, which squanders more story potential than most screenwriters will ever come up with.
What's most impressive about Reloaded is the Wachowskis' willingness to move the satisfying self-contained hero narrative of the first film forward, well beyond the triumphant (literal) Superman moment at the end of The Matrix, into a murkier realm. The key revelation of the Architect scene - indeed the entire trilogy - is that The One is no messiah at all, but a bug in an early version of the Matrix which the machines have repurposed to keep the human remnant hopeful and docile. The job of The One is to reset the social order to something more controllable.
In other words, the central problem of the Matrix trilogy isn't that the machines have enslaved the humans, it's that the whole Hero Will Save Us narrative is a load of bollocks. Neo can't 'save' the humans, he can only take part in the codependent (more diplomatically, interdependent) machine/human cycle.
The first Matrix sequel really did offer 'The Matrix but much bigger' - yet critics and audiences bitched and moaned about it, seemingly unable to make heads or tales of its story. More recently you saw something similar with Avatar and Dollhouse - admittedly problematic texts whose main goal was precisely to problematize familiar genre narratives. I think the hard part for audiences wasn't 'plot holes' (nobody gives a damn), nor muddled acting, nor silly dialogue; you find those everywhere. The hard thing for a summer-action-flick audience in this country is to walk into the theatre expecting violence/sex/thrills/reassurance and instead receive an ontological facepunch.
Revolutions
I won't defend The Matrix Revolutions in basic story-craft terms. The interminable 'defense of the dock' sequence, pointless fighting-on-the-ceiling shenanigans during the otherwise bizarrely enjoyable Club Hel sequence, and hand-wavey Bane-is-Smith-made-flesh material make thrill-ride pleasure impossible. At least Reloaded moves quickly down its spiral of eroticocinephilosophical lunacy; Revolutions is the only Matrix film that's incorrectly structured and edited. So I can understand anyone who had a bad time watching Revolutions, OK?
But it's a glorious mess - the most ambitious of the three films, the most unabashedly beautiful, the wooliest in metaphysical terms, the most unsettling, the one that crawls right up its own semiotic ass and sets off a Weirdness Bomb just because it can. It's the Southland Tales of the trilogy, the chapter that reveals the pair of sequels as a wildly ambitious maybe-failure, miles and miles beyond that tidy little gem of a first chapter. Together they're a flawed five-hour masterpiece.
Consider:
* The climactic fight - the all-time fistfighting-superhero-sequence champion in any medium - puts Neo in the position of trying to save the Matrix and preserve machine hegemony.
* Morpheus is wrong about the One and the Prophecy, and ends up just flying around with his ex-girlfriend and apparently sabotaging the defense of Zion.
* Near the film's end, Neo and Trinity fly up above the clouds in order to escape the squids; the resulting crash kills Trinity; it is the closest the movies come to religious rapture; that blissful escape lasts less than five seconds.
* Smith evolves (literally) from self-aware policeman (Man in Black) to suicidal demigod, and tries to destroy the Matrix because he doesn't know what else power could possibly be for.
* The 'happy ending' is a sunset made by a computer program, all unnatural purples, set to a weirdly morbid 'triumphant' orchestral cadence.
* The Oracle and the Architect end up hanging out, telling jokes, talking about the inevitable failure of Neo's bid for peace. This is the trilogy's last scene.
* Neo 'wins' by dying, not by winning the fight, and he's given a hero's burial...by a bunch of creepy flying robots.
* The defense of Zion is shown to be necessary, necessarily futile, and merely a repetition of a cycle the machines have planned for - yet the machines feel compelled to carry on with the charade of war.
* The movie opens with Neo in Limbo, chatting with three computer programs about the meaninglessness of the word 'love' and - get this - receiving a kind of panhuman (pantheistic?) enlightenment from applets named Sati, Rama-Kandra, and Kamala. (I've linked to that essay before. It's tremendous.) This scene is dead serious and absolutely necessary to the film; near as I can tell, pretty much no one cares about it at all, save for the Wachowkis (and the linked essayist).
* When Neo leaves Limbo he's no longer 'human'; this is a necessary step for him to become the 'hero' required of that moment (every moment, really) in human/machine history.
* One last tiny thing: the third film also includes the gnarliest couplet in the trilogy. ORACLE: 'You're a bastard, Smith.' SMITH: 'You oughta know, Mom.' man, when I first heard that call and response I just about jumped out of my seat.
* * *
Like Avatar (or American Psycho, and to a lesser extent Fight Club), the Matrix series sets out to work with familiar action-thriller cliché, but eventually drifts into a new kind of story, far less comforting and familiar than what was advertised in the theatre lobby. Avatar is the most deeply, unsettlingly transhumanist film yet made; American Psycho exempts its serial killer from blame so as to damn the happy worker bees he consorts with (i.e. us); Fight Club viciously criticizes the male-empowerment/adbusters sloganeering it starts out praising, then gives over to delirious, irrational (and so authentic) self-dissolution and -transformation. The Matrix and its sequels look like comic book hero narratives with Japanophile/cyberpunk shadings, but their 'Gnostic Tao of Baudrillard, leather-clad' bricolage gives way to total immersion and subversion. The Wachowskis weren't messing around - the story of The One was never just in fun.
The negative reaction to Revolutions had something to do with its overt (pan)religious symbolism - the cross of light, the sun, Hades, Rama-Kandra, all of it. As we walked out of the theatre, one of the people I first saw it with called it (if memory serves) 'another Jesus myth.' It does look that way, doesn't it. But you needn't quibble with the specific sectarian affiliation (Jesus is the usual scapegoat for criticism of the 'Oh look, another messiah' variety) to see that the Matrix trilogy as a whole is very much about 'normal' humans becoming superbeings. 'The One' is just a role that someone has to play, and to enter that role requires radical self-awareness (and then self-dissolution); it's a mindgame, not a genetic inheritance.
(Folks who complain about the 'hereditary kingship' stuff in Star Wars forget that for all Luke's gifts, he still has to undergo training from Level Zero in order to become a warrior-monk, and even then he's barely able to defeat a crippled old man in a plastic diving bell in a swordfight. His birthright still has to be earned, to some extent, even if it's still (y'know) a birthright. In any case The Matrix goes a lot further to dispel any such notion.)
Not for nothing is 'The (Final?) One' a computer hacker. That was part of the appeal in the first Matrix film - his hipster nerdiness - but by the third installment audiences had completely forgotten about Thomas Anderson ('Doubting Son of Man') the coder. That's a shame. Reloaded is all about a geek-turned-golden-boy accepting his new responsibilities, then finding out the game is rigged; in Revolutions he realizes he can never begin to meet those responsibilities on his own, that his best friends are counting on him to go quietly on their behalf...and as a final indignity, in order to do so he has to foreswear every idea he has about the universe, except that it deserves (for some value of that word) to keep going. It sure isn't an 'empowerment' story in the banal, familiar self-help sense.
* * *
The ending of Avatar is a good deal Weirder and more ambitious than it's been given credit for. Avatar might not have deserved the Best Picture Oscar - particularly given its pedantic, hamfisted screenplay, which totally loses its nerve at a crucial point - but its story is a lot deeper than its familiar plot. As I wrote in an essay elsewhere:
The prominence of the transformed Jake Sully in [the climactic combat scenes] is a necessary dramatic fiction - protagonism, hero-fixation, is a shared feature of every human culture's stories - and it leaves the impression that the climax is about Jake doing great things (on behalf of 'natives,' as it happens). It's the film's most disappointing feature. Yet in the end, 'Jake' (willingly) disappears, is revealed as a fiction, a provisional identity. The best and noblest thing Jake can do, in Cameron's world, is be part of an extended biological family that extends beyond visual resemblance or (blah) ideological affinity. He is very definitely not a 'steward' of his new environment - a thumb in the environmentalists' eyes, there - he's simply a participant in it, with no illusions about 'self-sufficiency' or human destiny.
[...]
Remember that the Na'vi don't win the film's epic final battle; they're nearly wiped out in a foolish headlong cavalry charge. Then the birds and rhinos arrive, taking orders from dandelions. The moon itself defeats the humans. The Na'vi aren't even 'top predators'; they're just part of the system. They don't 'like' it that way; they simply accept it, as we accept air and hunger and time. In Cameron's rendering they are correct in this acceptance...
In other words: the glowing dandelions are characters in the film, the Na'vi are only one small part of the Pandoran ecosystem, and Cameron really does want us to take the notion of continuity-of-consciousness seriously. These aren't just pantheist notions, they're transhuman ones, anti-anthropocentric in the unfamiliar extreme.
Naturally our 'brave' film critics - who'd rather analyze than create, for the most part, even if they can convince readers they're creators - felt the need to complain about the 'familiar' plot of Avatar, reducing its strangeness to 'dippy Eastern/environmentalist platitudes' and the like. It is indeed a platitudinous film, but its story isn't.
Here's a little thought experiment:
Imagine a version of Avatar set, not among the Na'vi, but among the dandelions.
Same story. Same morality. Same 'theology.'
Somewhat lessened commercial appeal, though, wouldn't you say?
* * *
I mention Avatar to illuminate my broad argument from a different angle: truly Weird filmmaking makes mainstream audiences uncomfortable, but we're willing to accept some degree of radically anti-essentialist material in our movies so long as we don't have to think about it at all. The spectacular visuals of Avatar and the Matrix sequels are reason enough to go see (and enjoy) those films, but viewers are uncomfortable with intimations of life's absolute meaninglessness (or more diplomatically, its dramatic inadequacy). That's why we get the love stories and endless macho breast-beating in those movies - or the kid in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, or such a high dose of boys-makin'-trouble hijinks in Fight Club, or so many killings and product descriptions in American Psycho. The messages of these films are too unsettling to be administered directly; they require extra genre-comfort and spectacular padding.
The same goes for Spielberg's extraordinary A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which ends audaciously with a tribe of telepathic anthropomorphic TV sets making an imaginary Mommy for the robo-child protagonist to hop into bed with as compensation for him waking up in an arctic hellscape devoid of hope or life. Audiences weren't exactly over the moon about that film, but the kid sure was cute, wasn't he! And my, isn't that Jude Law in a zoot suit?!
The Matrix films depict a world in which: our messiahs are the puppets of machine-masters who really just want to reach an 'acceptable' balance of human slavery and illusory freedom; the You Are Awesome prophecy of the first movie turns out to be hokum; love not only gets you killed, it's not even strictly 'love'; the only authentic humanity left on earth is dark-skinned minorities having underground techno-orgies to celebrate/dismiss their impending deaths at the hands of the whiter-than-white Architect (sidebar: has any action film ever celebrated African-American actors and energies like the Matrix movies?); the robots and computer programs end up having lives just as complex and beautiful as the humans they've enslaved; happy endings (remember the sunlight) are unattainable because they're (1) not really happy and (2) not really endings.
This world is explicitly an allegory - or rather a computerized simulation! - of our own.
And in the end, the good guys give up their essentialist anthropocentrism to either live alongside the machines and computer programs or (in Neo's case) become one.
Oh, I guess we didn't notice on account of all the exploding and karate kicking and the techno soundtrack. Well. So you can hardly say it's our fault, right?! Right!
* * *
None of this would matter if films like The Matrix and Avatar weren't making points about 'human' existence that are correct and important, i.e. worth thinking and fighting about. It's not like they're the only films that do, of course - Jesus! - but when millions and millions of people are hearing and watching stories and most of them are either innocently missing or explicitly rejecting the scary points they raise, we should be concerned. Textually speaking, this is the low-hanging fruit: these movies are out there, everyone's seen them, they're easily read. They're a lot of fun.
Ideawise: what could possibly be more important? We're talking about what 'human' means and suggesting that nearly all our answers are not only wrong but dangerously insane in consistent, even programmatic ways.
* * *
I've got no Big Finish here, sorry. Maybe there's a Big Continue to come?