On The Matrix

I, like many others, loved The Matrix. Then I saw the sequels.

Like fewer others, I didn’t outright hate them, or see them as a destructive waste of a brilliant first entry. They were obviously–I thought–mishandled, and seemed to lose the unbreakable grip the Wachowskis had on the first film. Still, I liked chunks of them, and appreciated moments, like the Cave Rave, others hated. I thought they stumbled hard, but still crossed the finish line with some semblance of being satisfying, if nowhere near as gracefully or as swiftly as we all thought they would.

I just finished this thematic interpretation/apology for Reloaded, and, as soon as I finish this post, will dive right into the followup for Revolutions. It’s…amazing. Suddenly the sequels are entirely coherent. Even the bits that made no sense at all, or made sense, but felt like philosophical wankery.

At the very worst, given this dude’s read on them, you can accuse them of being thematically satisfying while remaining narratively unsatisfying. (Unsatisfying as a modern Hollywood blockbuster, anyway; as myth, well…) It’s brilliant.

Best of all, it feels like a web throwback, like something from 1996 (or earlier–that’s just as far back as my firsthand web usage goes; this kind of reads like old Usenet stuff, too), when the tech geeks Neal Stephenson writes about would post essay-length, intelligent analyses to their personal sites with no motivation beyond “Hey, this is interesting, and here’s why.” Sometimes, I miss that internet. With absolutely every aspect of the internet commercialized at this point, this reminder of the past is deeply refreshing.

And fucking brilliant.