I’m glad I waited until Elijah and I had seen Matrix Reloaded to read Adam Gopnik’s article about the movie – otherwise we might have expected a documentary about an undergraduate philosophy course, not a smart sci-fi action flick that kinda makes you think.
Gopnik is clever as hell, of course. His tour of Zion is well-observed and the history lesson on the Cathars is sharp -- “It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.” And it’s hard not to like a discussion of brains in vats.
But he’s so taken with the life-as-illusion theme that no other interesting ideas need apply. He doesn’t want the story to progress. Gopnik pretty much ignores the religious allegory that continues to unfold in Reloaded, although he could have followed the Cartesian link between it and his favorite theme.
He brushes off the interesting developments of the new movie, such as the agency of certain rogue programs within the Matrix. “They are explained as defunct programs that refused to die, but they seem more like character ideas that refused to be edited,” he writes with misdirected wit. These programs with lives of their own -- including God the creator as machine -- are answers to one of the two great Dickian questions Gopnik cites (robot consciousness), but apparently the Wachowskis are only supposed to address the other one.
Reloaded probably has one fight scene too many. The unbeatable Neo is now dull the way Superman is dull. And like The Two Towers, it’s the middle part of a trilogy, so the ending isn’t an end. But it had that cool Keymaker and the rave and a head-on truck crash and Elijah thought it rocked, and I did, too.
12:36:22 PM 
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