Matrix Reloaded


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

There is a book to be written, possibly by a developmental psychologist, about the role of brothers and sisters as cinematic collaborators, rivals or just going in different directions. There are a couple of dozen such relationships ranging from that of John Ford and his older brother Francis, who helped invent American cinema, to Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who strove together to dumb it down.
To what extent do creative siblings complement each other, act as critical sounding boards, hold back or discourage the weaker partner, act as restraining influences, egg each other on? In the case of Joel and Ethan Coen and Andy and Larry Wachowski - both pairs the product of the American Middle West, obsessed since childhood by the movies, and somewhat reluctant to reveal their methods - one suspects that there's some benign form of folie à deux at work. Certainly the three films to date by the Wachowski Brothers - the modestly budgeted gay thriller Bound, their expensive SF allegory The Matrix and its even more expensive sequel The Matrix Reloaded - share an obsessive intensity that verges on the oppressive. Their films suggest people inhabiting a private world.
The Matrix films (a third one, The Matrix Revolutions, will complete a trilogy when it appears this coming November) are, like George Lucas's Star Wars pictures, a mishmash of mythology, religion (Eastern and Western), philosophy, old movies and comic books. This indiscriminate intellectual mulch is organised into a traditional quest narrative, and the quest, in each case, is for self-knowledge and the salvation of mankind. Both series are deeply serious, not to say solemn. But whereas Lucas's films are at times comic and playful, The Matrix is entirely earnest in the delivery of its portentous messages about choice, free will and the nature of reality.
The Matrix introduced us to the office clerk Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a computer operator who discovers that the world he inhabits is a virtual reality created to keep innocent human beings quiescent in a dystopia ruled by machines. A band of lethal 'agents', dressed in black and wearing opaque sunglasses like Duvalier's Tonton Macoute or US presidential bodyguards, police the community. A small handful of other rebels - most notably the feisty Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and the charismatic Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) - recognise Thomas as a messiah, 'the One' prophesied to lead mankind out of bondage and as 'Neo' he demonstrates his special powers as leader and martial artist.
The movie with its state-of-the-art (or state-of-the-craft) special effects obviously appeals to a youthful audience looking for a cult object that combines spiritual uplift and the sort of thrills provided by destructive video games.
In The Matrix Reloaded (which will be unintelligible to anyone who hasn't seen The Matrix), Armageddon arrives in the form of a war to the death between the machines and the humans. The latter live - like the oppressed early Christians and the suppressed proletarians of Lang's Metropolis - in a giant cave in the centre of the Earth called Zion. Preparing for the imminent attack by a horde of kamikaze creatures resembling steel squids, the ragged inhabitants of Zion dance and engage in orgiastic sex in a manner that recalls biblical scenes from D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. When they're done, Morpheus looks down on the sleeping city and says sententiously: 'Good night, Zion. Sweet dreams.'
Neo, Trinity and Morpheus, their names like everyone else's in the picture directing us to supposedly deeper layers of meaning, flit between the real world and virtual reality in search of a way to defeat the machines. Along the way they meet a variety of emblematic folk - an elderly Japanese known simply as the Keymaker; a supercilious character called Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) who talks French because it's 'like wiping your arse with silk', and represents what Donald Rumsfeld would regard as Old Europe; and the Architect, a poised ironist who claims to have created the Matrix by which the humans are hoodwinked This Architect has a speech about free will and choice that is both interminable and impenetrable. It's the sort of thing that Kim Howells MP would call 'the higher bullshit'.
Merovingian is as near as the movie gets to humour, and the chief form of light relief comes in the numerous protracted fights in which the participants, with the help of special effects, perform increasingly impossible feats. The rogue Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) has the ability to replicate himself infinitely, so Neo on several occasions does battle with a battalion of Smiths. A chase on a crowded freeway is brilliantly staged but goes on forever (a quarter of an hour at least). It doesn't provide half the excitement of the car chases in The French Connection, Bullitt or The Driver. What the film lacks, among other things, is anything truly human. The planed, pristine features of Keanu Reeves seem as computer-generated as the creatures he fights. Once the wonder of the designs has worn off it's difficult to care about anything - the people, the story, or the ideas with which the Wachowskis flirt the way a pole dancer flirts with her audience. Marianne Moore spoke of her poems as 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'. The Matrix Reloaded is an imaginary junkyard populated by electronic toads.

VOCABULARY:
benign - łagodny, dobrotliwy, życzliwy
bondage - niewola, poddaństwo
to dumb down - odebrać mowę; wprawić w osłupienie
dystopia - przeciwieństwo utopii, miejsce największego nieszczęścia
earnest - szczery, poważny, przejęty, gorliwy
to egg sb on sth - zachęcać, podniecać, inspirować do zrobienia czegoś
feisty - pełny energii i determinacji
to flit - przemykać
folie à deux - franc: szaleństwo we dwoje, psychoza udzielona bliskiej osobie
gay - radosny, wesoły, barwny
handful - garś, garstka
to hoodwink - oszukać, okpić, zwieść, zasłonić oczy
imminent - (o niebezpieczeństwie) bliski, nadciągający
impenetrable - niezmierzony, niezgłębiony
interminable - nie kończący się
lethal - śmiertelny, śmiercionośny, zabójczy
martial artist - mistrz w sztuce walki (od Marsa, rzymskiego boga wojny)
mulch - a protective covering, e.g. of compost, spread on the ground to control weeds, enrich the soil, etc, nawóz
opaque - mętny, nieprzezroczysty,
planed - wygładzony, wyrównany
poised - zrównoważony
portentous - złowieszczy, złowrogi
pristine - dawny, pierwotny
quiescent - spokojny, nieruchomy, cichy
ragged - obdarty, w łachmanach, poszarpany
rogue - oszust, zbir, zabijaka, łobuz
sibling - rodzeństwo
solemn - uroczysty, poważny, namaszczony
squid - kałamarnica
to strive, strove, striven - usiłować, dokładać starań, walczyć, borykać się
supercilious - butny, dumny, wyniosły, lekceważący
toad - ropucha
unintelligible - niezrozumiały, niemożliwy do pojęcia
to verge on - zbliżać się, graniczyć z


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