It is the most eagerly awaited sequel of all time. Yes, they said that about Star Wars episode whatever, and they said that about The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. But The Matrix Reloaded really is the most eagerly awaited sequel of all time. The first of the three new Star Wars movies made it clear that we were facing a total of some eight hours of lumbering non-action in jumped-up 1950s sci-fi style. So expectations died down. As for The Lord of the Rings, it was reassuringly understood from the start that the three films would come out in December 2001, 2002 and 2003, evenly spaced like Baby’s mealtimes. When it comes to the sequel to The Matrix, however, we’ve been waiting some time. We’ve seen two whole Lord of the Rings movies go by since Andy and Larry Wachowski had their massive, unexpected hit with The Matrix in 1999. They have been tinkering quietly with the special effects for the second and third parts of The Matrix trilogy. Now, number two, The Matrix Reloaded, opens across the globe this week, starting with the Cannes festival on May 15.Confused by all the numbers in the preceding paragraphs? Never mind. What we know as reality is in fact all reducible to the endless series of zeros and ones that constitute the mind of the computer. That’s the key to The Matrix. In the first movie, a young man called Neo discovers, with the help of others, that everything he thought was real is in fact a vast simulation, fed into the brains of comatose humans kept in vats while the computers who now rule the world feed on their life-force or something. These machines have constructed the Matrix, the vast virtual-reality system that most people think is reality.Neo (Keanu Reeves) also discovers that he’s The One, the messiah destined to return humanity to the real reality. Which is where it starts getting conceptually complicated, as do all discussions about what’s really real. But we’ll get to that later. All you need to know at this stage is that Neo’s discovery allows awesome screen battles between the humans and the machines. They are especially thrilling because they take place in cyberspace, where almost anything can happen. The kung fu fighting effects that The Matrix shares with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance, are more elaborate than any before. In The Matrix Reloaded, we are told, the battle will be extended to the last bastion of humanity not in vats — the settlement of Zion. (Now how did they think of that name?) Neo and his sidekicks/mentors Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) have to stop the machines and their numerous, indestructible avatars destroying this last reservation of true humanity. The rest is skop, skiet en donner — of the most sophisticated possible sort. The Wachowski brothers demonstrated in their earlier movie, the excellent, twisty lesbo-thriller Bound, that they can weave a mean, mind-bending plot. Bound just about made sense; The Matrix is not so simple. But never mind that. The important question is: what does it all mean? Much has already been written on the philosophical issues thrown up by The Matrix. American university students are writing theses on this as we speak. The Observer quoted an Internet exchange between a fan and the Wachowski brothers, who were asked: “Your movie has connections to Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Arthurian and Platonic myths … How much of that was intentional?” “All of it,” they replied. And The Matrix, like Star Wars before it, does pilfer its ideas from all over the place. The most obvious one is the messiah/saviour myth. The notion of all we can see being illusion goes back to the ancient Hindu concept of “maya”. The idea of cyberspace, and the word itself, were coined by William Gibson in 1984, before the Internet even existed. Neo lives in Room 101, an echo of the torture chamber in George Orwell’s dystopia of universal oppression and doublethink — though probably, more simply, it is just a wink at all those ones and zeros of computerspeak. You can’t be sure what comes from where in The Matrix — what the original is. Most commentators agree, though, that a central notion used by the Wachowski brothers is the very old ontological idea of Plato’s cave. In the 4th century BC, Plato averred that we are metaphorically trapped in a cave, able only to see the reflections cast on the wall of the cave from outside. All of us except the brightest philosophers deludedly believe those reflections to be reality. So far so Matrix.But The Matrix, as the movie itself makes clear, has more in common with the post-modern thought of Jean Baudrillard; Neo, in fact, is seen in the first movie reading the fashionable Frenchman’s 1983 essay Simulacra and Simulation. For Baudrillard, living in the age of overwhelming electronic media, the endless barrage of advertising, movies and other images, means that there is no longer anything real behind such signs. There is no “representation”, only “simulation”. Signs no longer represent real things or ideas; they are “simulacra” — there is no original to refer back to. This hyper-reality substitutes “signs of the real for the real itself”, all the while producing a convincng “reality effect”. All that’s left is what Baudrillard calls “the desert of the real”. This all ties in very neatly with a movie that is itself made of computer-generated imagery as much as it is of real people in real spaces. The Matrix movies themselves are a spectacular triumph of the machines. And, for the Wachowski brothers, it seems there is, after all, a real behind the reality effect: isn’t that what Neo et al are trying to get back to? Isn’t that what Zion is? We’ll have to wait and see whether the brothers can provide a sensible ontological resolution to all this as well as construct thrilling cyber-action. I think it’s here that The Matrix has a reality problem, or at least a conviction problem. Can we believe for a second that most of humanity would rather be “free” than happy in their vats? Would any of us reject a seamless, soothing, satisfying fantasy for the desert of the real?
The Matrix Reloaded opens in South Africa on May 21