``...once you wake up from the fantasy of the hype to the reality of the film, you'll feel like Neo in the original, when his pretend world fell away and he discovered he actually lived in a tiny pod with one tube in his mouth and another in his ass. Mr. Cranky
------------
I saw Matrix Reloaded last night and have to agree.
But there are more difficulties involved than just a disappointing sequel. Consider some of the possibilities it would have taken to reach previous levels of shock and awe. For one thing the entire climate of the domestic US world has changed in more or less the same general direction as the original Matrix. We live in an make believe envelop of normality as before. The world we experience is maintained through a complex series of manufactured illusions and a great deal of deliberate material misery extracted as bio-energy from and exercised as play-back on the lives of other people we will never see or know. What has changed however is the pure viciousness of this pretend world. The normal has been enormously amplified in its unadorned nastiness and it no longer takes either disaffection or the disaffected to see it.
The whole equation has changed in the sense that many in the US must maintain their illusion of the normal on their own volition and consciously create arguments to support themselves in this pretend world. Of course they are using the ready made excuses provided by various officials and the media while shoring these up with their own increasingly meager pretenses.
But after the election fraud 2000, the Enron and other corporate frauds, the frauds of the Patriot Act, the frauds of war on Afghanistan and Iraq, the frauds of re-constructing Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with the ever lasting peace fraud of Israel and Palestine, plus the always present fraud of the US economy, and the large scale fraud of neoliberal progress in general, and of course the fraud of choice between Democrats and Republicans, my mind begins to stagger with wonder at the sheer capacity of human beings to sustain mental balance amidst such monstrous and storm tossed duplicities. Not only that, but consider the rest of us, who live and work right next to each other and pretend those who believe these frauds are still okay people, but somehow they just don't get it.
So against the enormous totality of experienced duplicity, deception, fraud and illusion, the construction of a movie about deception and illusion, begins to pale by comparison.
The question, is it live or is it Memorex is no longer sufficient to shock and amuse. The premise of a sequel has to move to another dimension and begin to question how far into the nested parenthesis of reality and illusion or intersecting dimensions are we at present? The question is no longer how far into this particular illusion can we go, because any illusion in itself has only one level, its own surface labyrinth. What is needed is the intersection with a perpendicular lattice with its own differently constructed labyrinth.
Now Matrix Reloaded does pose something like the above question, but it takes its bloody time as we are forced to wade through too many neat fight scenes to get there. It turns out that according to the architect of the Matrix, Zion the last remanent of the human world has already been destroyed five times. Neo is from the sixth version of the Matrix. Neo is assured by the system architect the human city will be destroyed again in this version. So the architect presents Neo a choice of two doors. The choice is between destroying the Matrix and all human life attached to it, but saving Zion, or trying to save Trinity who is fighting it out with one of the upgraded agents and will die in the process. Neo chooses to save Trinity of course and does, thereby theoretically insuring Zion's doom. Well, to be continued, naturally.
Returning to reality so to speak, we already know we live in a world of mass deception and fraud, which has recently been taken to newer depths of shabbiness in what seems to be a ceaselessly devolving testing lab. How shabby, how ridiculous, how irrational, how fast can the established order exchange one false premise and fraud with another? How many of these exchanges of one fraud for another can be manufactured without bothering to erase their previous and contradictory antecedents? How far can this game progress before those who expend most of their intellectual resources to keep from being deceived much of the time, begin to come to the conclusion that their compatriots who seem to be almost always deceived just as easily as ever before, are finally unmasked as more than willing, perhaps even eager accomplices in these mass deceptions?
In other words the US polity appears to be splitting unevenly between about a third of those who spend most of their time dismantling the deceptions and frauds for those two-thirds who consciously ignore these pro-offered de-constructions as reality. It is beginning to appear that the latter two-thirds prefer their illusions no matter how often these change, no matter how ridiculous their premise, no matter what the material consequences are of playing this game.
But of course that is just one level. At its intersection with a whole new lattice which is mirrored as an endless de-compression of the parenthesis of illusions and realities we arrive at the idea that the one third of perpetual critics are actually the problem for the other two thirds who have been willing to grasp the fabrication that the true clear and present danger to reality as they know it are the critics themselves. So the political farce becomes a game between the critics who believe the dupes are the problem and the dupes who are convinced the critics are the problem. This is also known as the neoconservative end game, making the critics of the system of illusion, the actual and material embodiment of all the problems with the system that will magically go away the very minute these malcontents and their delusions are erased from the program.
Now getting back to the other fiction. So, if I were writing the sequel to Matrix, I would have reloaded Reloaded for editing first off. I would have erased about two-thirds of the current feature up to the architect scene, and thereby compressed out most of the irrelevant fight scenes keeping most of the development following Neo to the Oracle, the Key Maker, then to the back doors, skipping intermediary whats-his-name and the long freeway fight, except for some of the truly spectacular truck crashes and flipping cars. So dot, dot, dot we get to the architect and the doors.
Neo chooses the door to save Trinity and returns to have their ship destroyed in the tunnels by the Sentinels. In the tunnels, as a surviver from the wreck Neo discovers he can stop the Sentinels because he can turn off their cybernetic matrix by an act of his own imagination. From the view of the primary premise of the movie, this should be impossible, since at this point Neo is not connected to the human Matrix. This sets up the return to Zion as the makings for a civil war between the majority who believe the machines are boring down to locate the last city, and a minority who think this version of the machine world and Zion are simply another version of the Matrix playing in real time and creating illusions for the real and unhooked humans.
For a nice action twist, we could have the battle for Zion by the believers against the Sentinels conclude with the foretold destruction apparently helped by the civil war against the non-believers. We leave our heros and their diminished minions among the smoking ruins of Zion in civil war and Sentinel conquest, in which the non-believers have succeeded in wiping out many of their own fellow humans in apparent self-defence, which has aided the Sentinel side. We end with the discovery among our heros that everything but the human bodies and destroyed city was also an illusion, their primary illusion. The glass reflections of the burning ruins momentarily turn to liquid with a shuttering ripple and only the wrecked Sentinels, their weapons and boring machines disappear, leaving the apparent reality of a destroyed city and mass death intact.
Switching back to Reality reloaded, it seems we are beginning to face an equally difficult choice. We who claim insight into the makings of these illusions, continue on with the unmasking of one nasty deception and fraud after another and ignore the possibly that we are only working ourselves closer and closer to a stand off with the apparently self-deceptive heartland of America who seem to support these atrocities no matter what.
Evidently Agent Smith in the disguise of Ari Fleischer is being replicated as we speak into his clone, the deputy Agent Smith.
Whatever. So where is the other door?
I have no idea.
Chuck Grimes