The Matrix Reloaded vs Silent Running

This is a website, so by law, someone has to write about The Matrix.  You should know up front that I’m not exactly the most pro-Matrix guy in the world.  If you’re gonna give me grief about that, then you should probably stop reading now.  Seriously, I’m stressed out enough as it is; I don’t need you dissing me because I make fun of The Matrix.  Or because I said “dissing”.  We can still be friends, though, right?  Right?

There’s something about The Matrix Reloaded that bugs me.  It’s too clean, or something.  There’s a Colorforms quality to The Matrix Reloaded, as if the characters are all placed on top of pre-existing backgrounds that they can never really be a part of.  And, no matter how close you place the characters together, they never truly seem to interact.  After a while, you’ve moved them too much, and they won’t stick, and you have to lick them to make it work again, and that’s when you begin to think Colorforms isn’t really a toy at all: it’s just meant to shut you up for a couple hours.

Thankfully, The Matrix Reloaded picks up essentially where the last one left off (The machines are tunneling to Zion, Keanu can fly. There, you’re caught up).  We’re spared over-exposition and recapping from the previous movie.  Not that we’re spared exposition entirely. The characters in The Matrix Reloaded do a lot of talking about their plot.  Not one word of dialogue is uttered in reference to character or any individual storyline; it’s all just words to advance the plot. The actors in The Matrix Reloaded seem exhausted from lugging around the plot all day, and as a result, most of them—especially Carrie Ann Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Jada Pinkett Smith—speak in this detached, robotic monotone.  It’s especially frustrating watching Fishburne, normally such a dynamic, forceful actor.  The only time he gets a chance to act at all, he’s saddled with a blustery, shouted speech to the people of Zion.  It’s meant to call the people to action, but comes across instead like The King and I rewritten to include Michael Moore’s Oscar speech.  Fishburne, by the way, officially graduates to that exclusive club of actors—including John Travolta and Michael Douglas—who need to put on a shirt right now. The only actors who manage any variety in their performances are Gloria Foster, as the Oracle (who only gets one scene), and Harold Perrineau Jr. as Link (who only gets to sit there and react to everyone else’s heroics on a computer screen.  Wait, is he playing Link or is he playing me?)

The Matrix Reloaded opens with Neo’s nightmare of Trinity’s death.  Is he having a premonition, or is he just nervous? (Dude, she’s in the third movie.  I totally saw pictures of it on the ‘net.  Relax.) Or, is it a cool stunt, so the Wachowski brothers want to show it twice?  It’s that kind of movie.  Five minutes later, Neo and Trinity are acting like they haven’t seen each other in months and trying to find a place to have sex.  Even though they just woke up together.  It’s that kind of movie too.  Eventually, our heroes head down to Zion, the last city of humans.  They have to rally the troops and prepare for the incoming machine invasion.  By “rally the troops and prepare for the incoming machine invasion”, I mean, they have a weird 1980s Coming to America /Club MTV party where everyone wears see-through clothing and gets all sweaty and has a PG orgy, while Neo and Trinity go into a soft-focus room and have a Red Shoe Diaries make out.  How is it the guys who directed Bound can’t stage a sex scene?  Weird.

Besides furthering Neo’s relationship with Trinity, Keanu’s character has been altered somewhat.  First of all, in the Matrix, he now wears a more priest-like robe, instead of the black trench coat.  This is cool, I think, because

a. It looks better.  Neo has a more distinctive look to go with his new powers, and

b. It’s a sly dig at the censorship wags who blamed the behavior of trench coat wearing school bullies on Hollywood and showed endless footage of Keanu in a trench coat to prove their point.

In case you haven’t noticed, in The Matrix Reloaded, Keanu stars as Jesus Christ.  Keanu is the one who will lead us to peace.  Keanu can heal.  Give up offering to Keanu.  Keanu is gonna kick it in Zion.

No, of course Keanu doesn’t play Jesus Christ.  He plays Keanu (and that’s not the insult it sounds like.  Sean Connery has been playing Sean Connery for decades and nobody says shit about it.  Same with Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford.  Maybe Keanu is the strong, silent type, huh?  Ever think about that?  Well maybe you should.  I hope you feel  terrible.  Poor Keanu.)

People give Keanu a lot of crap about his acting, but he’s really just like anyone else:  he’s made good movies and bad movies.  I find him especially believable when playing, say, a moron or a robot.  In other words, in The Matrix movies, he’s just fine.  Before anyone goes writing me to correct that Keanu doesn’t play a robot in The Matrix, I say of course he doesn’t.  At one point in the movie, Keanu is surrounded by tons of monitors with himself on nearly every screen.  They’re each supposedly from different incarnations of Neo visiting the Architect (it’ll make sense when you see the movie.  And, by “it’ll make sense” I mean either it will or it won’t, but you’ll pretend it does) and they’re all basically the same.  In one, he’s flipping the bird, but instead of the usual “fuck you” sentiment, it seems more like Keanu is thinking “this is one of my fingers!”

People get angry when I criticize The Matrix, so let’s take a moment to appease that side, shall we?

The Matrix Reloaded has two scenes that I think kick ass.  One is a massive car chase/Kung-Fu throw-down performed at like a hundred miles an hour.  The best part begins with Fishburne climbing on top of a semi and ends when it wrecks and collapses like an accordion.  That’s cool no matter what the context.  The other is when Neo’s nightmare becomes a reality.  Trinity, inside the Matrix, jumps her motorcycle from one building to another (with the camera looking on from behind, like in a video game, which gets on my nerves, but I digress).  She proceeds to whup ass, using her motorcycle helmet as a fist.  It’s the only organic and natural-feeling fight in the whole movie.  Her punches, and the ones she receives, actually cause damage.

Unfortunately, the most celebrated aspect of The Matrix—the CGI special effects—is exactly what turns me off the most.  One of the set pieces of the movie occurs about a third of the way in.  Keanu fights Agent Smith on a playground.  Of course it’s an immaculate area, with plenty of space and a smooth fighting surface.  As Keanu punch-block-punch-blocks Agent Smith, more and more Agent Smiths join the fight.  Of course, everyone has their sunglasses on, and everyone wears black, so it’s easy to concentrate on the fighting, and not be distracted when, for example, Agent Smith appears to be played by about five different actors, or when Keanu’s face takes on the boxy digital look of a video game character.  When the fight reaches its peak, Keanu flies away, not having defeated Agent Smith.  Okay, so I understand the point of the scene is that it’s fun for the audience to see ass-kicking, and it’s important to establish that Keanu has new powers.  It’s a shame though, that it couldn’t happen in a scene that doesn’t come out of nowhere, and that might actually lead somewhere else.  Another fight, before Keanu meets with the Oracle, is completely arbitrary and meaningless.  It’s like if Keanu stopped to run on a treadmill for five minutes.  Yes, people are moving, up there on the screen, but can they please do something?

Monica Bellucci makes a brief appearance as Persephone, and promises Keanu access to the Keymaker in exchange for a kiss.  She gets two.  This sequence is bound to lead to something in the next movie, but I thought it was silly here.  First of all, Bellucci sounds like she’s got about ten cough drops in her mouth.  The stuff with her husband slipping Matrix codes into desserts was fun, in a way, but kind of…wait, she slipped Keanu some Matrix when she kissed him, didn’t she?  She’s programmed by her husband from whatever she was eating, and she tongued some information over to Keanu.  Maybe it has nothing to do with her husband—he’s annoying as hell, by the way—but at the end of the movie, Keanu can do something I didn’t think he could do, and I bet that’s why.  What the hell am I talking about?  I’m becoming one of those guys.  Is this even a review anymore?

Anyway, after The Matrix Reloaded, I felt defeated by CGI and monotone speaking.  I needed simple effects and emotive acting.  I needed…Silent Running.

For the uninitiated, Silent Running takes place in the future, in a space station containing Earth’s last forest.  From what I could tell, hardly anyone works there.  One is Lowell, played by Bruce Dern.  He’s the station’s horticulturist, and takes his job quite seriously.  His co-workers, meanwhile, make like Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis, cracking jokes and wearing their caps too tight.  They spend their free time riding these hybrid dune buggy/go-cart things around a makeshift track.  It looks fun and all, but what is their job?  They’re obviously not horticulturists, cause they constantly mock Lowell, but they don’t really appear to be anything else, either.

No matter.  The funding for the mission is cut and they’re going home.  Good news, right?  Not to Lowell, who has been ordered to destroy the forest.  Saturn’s just up ahead, and times a wasting, so you better get to work destroying that forest, Lowell.  Unless…unless you love the forest, and think maybe you could, oh, I dunno, wipe out the crew and then reprogram those cute little robots to do your bidding (and surgery—in a wacky scene I shouldn’t have been sober during.).  Yeah, Lowell, that’s it:  just float on past Saturn like nothing happened.  Just you and your robots and your trees.  Go on, you know you wanna.

Silent Running was directed by Douglas Trumbal, and has a constant tone of dread and paranoia.  It’s a trip.  A long, weird trip, with fantastic special effects with models and miniatures, and with Joan Baez music, where not so much really happens, and what does is…seriously, don’t watch it sober.

Listen, I’m not trying to say Silent Running is better because it’s older or anything.  If I was that big a purist, this would be a newsletter.  Silent Running is rightfully a classic, to be sure, but it’s also cheesy as hell.  First of all, the Joan Baez soundtrack is painfully disruptive to every scene it touches.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll be singing back at the screen every time she chimes in.  Seriously, see if Dark Side of the Moon fits and fire that up instead.  Also, what’s with the massive plastic drums of soil, just piled up everywhere?  Is that the safest and/or most practical place to put them?  And the little go-carts…what purpose do they serve?  The space station looks enormous from the outside, but the humans walk everywhere, leaving the go-carts in the makeshift track.  And Bruce Dern.  You know, he’s a good actor.  He really is.  But his performance seems like one that maybe could have used a few less readings of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and a few less bags of weed.  He’s all over the place. He portrays the frustration and paranoia perfectly.  Maybe though, and this is just me thinking through my keyboard, maybe he could have played something besides frustration and paranoia.  His performance lands somewhere between Robert Hayes in Airplane! and Michael Richards in the Seinfeld episode where Kramer puts on jeans and can’t get them off.  He’s fun though, and he better be; a good 45 minutes or so is just Bruce and those robots. The robots, by the way, were ripped off ten ways to Mos Eisley by George Lucas.  I’m just saying.  So were the long tracking shots of the space station.  And the crap.  He ripped all those things off.

If you look close enough, you can see definite moments of The Matrix that began in Silent Running.  What’s that?  The Matrix is a complete original?  Please.  If you’ve seen 2001, Star Wars, Aliens, Total Recall, Terminator 2, Strange Days or Dark City, you know that’s just not the case.  It might seem a little far-fetched, but the relationship between humans and machines is just as concretely tackled—perhaps more so—in Silent Running as in The Matrix Reloaded.  Plus, in one scene, a go-cart crashes into one of those plastic soil drums, and dude, it looks totally real.

The Matrix Reloaded: C+
Silent Running: B