A positive review, no doubt about it. I wasn’t sure at first that they could do justice to such a legendary movie as the first one, but these two sequels are good. Connected, so if you watch Reloaded you must also watch Revolutions, to finish the story. You will want to. Sure, they are not as cool as the first one, but they do right by it, expand the story to the end of the war. Good movies.
This second movie is about the very serious threat to the lives of all free humans, and Neo’s journey to fulfill the prophecy… or to learn what that prophecy really was.
The big difference is that Zion may be fighting against the machines, yes, but Neo is not fighting against the matrix as before, he’s fighting against Smith and against a new character that does not like him.
Smith is the biggest change, because we saw Neo destroy him… and indeed this is a new Smith, not the same Agent as before, but a sort of freed-Agent, who now acts for himself and can change other people into copy of himself.
It starts with what turns out to be Neo’s nightmare: Trinity attacking a building, setting it on fire butdying trying to escape the Agents. These dreams don’t let him sleep; Trinity tries to talk to him about it but he can’t tell her what it is, just that he doesn’t know what to do.
The next, great threat to all free humans is that machines have started digging, straight down to Zion, and Commander Lock has ordered all ships to go back and defend it. Morpheus thinks that the only way to end the war lies with Neo. He asks one ship to stay behind… in case the Oracle tries to contact them? When three Agents appear, Neo fights all three then flies away. Morpheus and all other ships go back to Zion. He would have stayed himself, but his ship needed recharging.
Apparently Morpheus and Lock do not get along… well, it’s Lock that can’t stand him, and that’s because captain Niobe was with Morpheus before him… but probably not just that, more like the fact that Morpheus is a believer, has been since he went to the Oracle and started searching for the one, while Lock does not believe in all that stuff.
Well, both have their reasons, but this time Morpheus is not as all-knowing as he once was. He tells Councillor Hamann of the Zion Council that they can tell people the truth without fear because “that army will never reach the gates of Zion”…
He also says “in the past six months we have freed more minds than in six years”, does that mean that it’s been six months since the end of the first movie? That would explain why Trinity and Neo appear so desperate to be finally alone :-p
Of course not everyone believes in the prophecy, but many people do, and they treat Neo like he was Jesus.
Link is their new operator on board. His woman Zee lives in Zion. Cas’ children call him uncle Link. Zee’s not happy that he works on that ship and is never home, but he made a promise to Dozer. I think Dozer was with Cas, and Dozer and Tank were Zee’s brothers… which means that Tank died, after all.
Zee is afraid to lose him too, because both brothers died on that ship, but Link assures her that he’ll be back, because Morpheus told him that it will be over soon. “Link, Morpheus is crazy” - “No doubt. But Tank and Dozer believed him, and I’ll tell you what, after being on that ship and seeing Neo do the things he can do, I gotta say, I’m starting to believe him too”
Morpheus sure does a heartfelt speech to the people of Zion, he’s quite good at convincing people.
Thing is, everyone is gathered to listen, talk and dance, so Trinity and Neo can finally have some time alone :-p
A man on a mission inside matrix, Bane, was caught by Smith and trasformed, so when Smith picked up the phone he got… inserted into the man’s mind? Like an actually living Smith.
That last ship came back, the Oracle did make contact. Before he can go, he’s also given a ‘gift’, from “one of the orphans”, and it is a spoon :-) The kid that worships him gives it to him.
Lock is upset that Morpheus is allowed to leave, but the councillor hopes/believes in Neo’s mission.
Neo enters Matrix to meet the Oracle, but first he meets Seraph and they fight… because “the Oracle has many enemies.I had to be sure”… personally I am not at all sure of how this fight can prove anything.
Anyway, reassured that Neo’s the one, leads him through “back doors”… a sort of long white corridor full of doors on either side, one of those doors lead him to a bench and the Oracle. Both she and Seraph are not humans but programs. They talk a bit about programs then she tells him he must go to the source, the machine mainframe, “where the path of the One ends”. She tells him that if he fails Zion will fall, that he can save it if he reaches the source, and in order to do that he needs the keymaker, who is “being held prisoner by a very dangerous program, one of the oldest of us, he is called the Merovingian”
After the Oracle goes away, Smith appears and they have a long chat - he’s changed, no more an agent, free and yet not free, without purpose or reason to be - so he’s still here because of Neo, to take his purpose away from him… Smith tries to ‘change’ him, but Neo rejects him and he starts fighting; it’s not just Smith though, there’s lots and lots of him, and when an Agent appears to check, Smith changes him too, one more Smith. Neo fights, but there are so many, Smith loves to say that “it is inevitable”, but Neo pushes them off himself and flies away.
Somehow politics always leaves me baffled for some reason; if anyone could explain one thing: the council wants news on Neo, Lock doesn’t want to let another ship go away, and to his objection that “it could take one ship days to find the Nebuchadnezzar” a councillor replies “then send two”… I mean, I understand he said ‘find’, not ‘reach’, like the problem is not that it’s too far, but that they don’t know where it could be… and why is that? They just need to reach a place where they can broadcast and enter the matrix, right? Morpheus didn’t even leave a simple direction before he left, like I’m going east or something?
Anyway. When the council asks for volunteers, Soren of the Vigilant is the first. ‘Bane’ tries to get his captain to volunteer but he won’t. Bad choice. Niobe of the Logos is the second.
(I found it really annoying that they kept repeating that some things never change and some do, well duh, there’s no nobel for that discovery, it means nothing)
Neo, Trinity and Morpheus go to see the Merovingian. His wife Persephone appears fed up with his nonsense, and for being a program, he appears to enjoy the same things human men enjoy.
He is very annoying, “a trafficker of information” so he knows everything; the only thing h doesn’t know is exactly how fed up with his attitude Persephone is. He tells our heroes to go back to the Oracle and tell her that “her time is almost up” and then he stands and goes to meet a woman that he caused to be aroused with something in her cake. Our heroes go away but Persephone stops them, with a deal: she says that he was different once, and she knew how it felt to be loved back then, so now she wants Neo to kiss her as he she were Trinity, as if he loved her, because she wants to remember what it felt like. He manages on his second try, and she leads them to the keymaker as promised. She kills one of her husband’s men with a silver bullet - a much older program - and opens the keymaker’s cell. Of course he and his men catch them before they leave, and Neo satys back to “handle them” while Morpheus and Trinity take the keymaker away. “Your predecessors had much more respect”, he says, and it’s peculiar that nobody questions these statements. None of them apparently could stop bullets like Neo, though.
Neo fights the most of them, but the two guys in white, the ones that can appear and disappar like ghosts, go after the others. Once they reach the car park, Morpheus fights them a bit then they drive away…
Neo can’t find them, he opens a door and he’s “all the way up in the mountains” so he flies to reach the others.
Niobe is in the matrix too, and wants to help. There’s a long car chase on the freeway, with the twin ghosts and the Agents trying to get them, until the car can’t go on so she takes the little man and jump down where bikes are being transported somewhere so they take one, he has a key that works, being a keymaker and all that. Morpheus stays behind to stop the chase and he goes all Goemon on the twins car. Trinity starts a wild ride, on a Ducati, and riding against traffic too! I guess she eventually reaches where she left Morpheus because he takes the little man off the bike so the Agents might follow her for a bit… but no, soon an Agent is on the same truch as they are - on the top of it, not inside - and Morpheus has no other choice but to fight him. He’s great, but that’s an Agent. Morpheus falls off but is caught by Niobe’s car, so he jumps back on and pushes the Agent off instead. There’s a bad car crash where their huge truck crashes onto another one just as huge and they fly off, but a flying Neo comes to get them right in time.
The keymaker explains of a building with a level where no elevator can go, and no stair can reach, filled with doors that lead to many hidden places, but one door is special, it leads to the source.
That “building is protected by a very secure system” because “every alarm triggers the bomb”, but no electricity no alarm, so they need to destroy a power station that will cause a blackout in 27 blocks, and they also need to deactivate the emergency system, and Neo can’t do it because he must be at the door, he’d only have 5 minutes to open that door. Captains Soren and Niobe will help.
Neo is so plagued by his nightmares/visions that he asks Trinity to stay out of it, to stay on the ship and out of matrix, and she agrees.
I think Soren’s ship got attacked by sentinels and that’s why they’re all dead; Niobe did her part, but Soren’s group couldn’t, so Trinity has no other choice, giving up is not one, doing nothing will mean the building will explode with Neo inside it, there’s not much time but “in five minutes I’ll tear that whole g+ddamn building down”, she reaches her destination and is once again called “little lady”… not for long.
Neo and is group are stopped by Smith and all his copies, but he seemsto ignore enough the keymaker that he manages to sneak past them and open the right door, so Neo and Morpheus hurry in, cutting Smith out. Still, the keymaker is shot and dies, having fulfilled his purpose. He points Morpheus to the door that will take him home, and gives Neo the key: “you will know which door”.
The door with the bright light leads into a room with many tvs showing his face and just one man, the Architect, who created the matrix, and this is when we learn the shocking truth. “An unbalanced equation”, an “anomaly” in the matrix causes all this over and over, and finally Neo asks “what others?”. There has been five before Neo, basically the matrix’s way of controlling the situation, every time there has been a resistance, the One, the whole fight, and for five times already Zion has been destroyed. After the one returns to the source, he will select 23 individuals, “sixteen female, seven male, to rebuild Zion”, and if he doesn’t it will cause a “cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix”, and since they’re already destroying Zion, that will “result in the extinction of the entire human race”. As much as the One knows that the machines need humans as batteries, there is also the fact that, as a human being, can he accept to be the cause of the extinction of the human race? Can he risk it?
Now, thing is, it is the Architect now that talks about love making Neo think of Trinity, and it is the Architect that informs him that Trinity entered the matrix to help him, he had no way of knowing because inside that room he is not connected to the others anymore. The Architect shows him two doors: one” leads to the source and the salvation of Zion”, while the other “leads back to the Matrix, to her and to the end of your species” and it is his choice which door to choose… and I’m not sure I understand here what he means by “salvation of Zion”, I guess he means that he’ll choose 23 people to rebuilt it again?
I understand the ‘extinction’ dilemma, but has it never happened before that someone fell in love? Oh I see, he chooses the second door because he knows from his dreams that she’s going to die, and indeed things are going exactly as in his dreams, while if she wasn’t in danger, the other door would save her… it would cause everyone to stay in the matrix and things to go back to what they were before… is this right? Have I got it right?
So, his love and fear for Trinity lead him to overcome “logic and reason” and not realize that “she is going to die and there is nothing you can do to stop it”. No matter, he goes to save her: she’s indeed fighting an Agent and falling down the building, and Neo flies Superman-style to reach her, faster than ever, and he does catch her midair before she hit the ground, but the Agent shot her. He takes the bullet out with his powers, she tells him that she had to and that she’s sorry, and then she dies… just like Neo did in the first film, and now it’shis turn to talk to her after she’s died. He can’t let her go, so he puts his hand inside to touch her heart and restart it, I mean, he sees the world encoded, as green lights and stuff, so he does it and she comes back to him.
Morpheus is confused, the war should be over, the One reached the source and it should be it, the end, but it’s not. Still, Neo says that if they don’t do anything, Zion will be destroyed, he tells them that the prophecy was a lie.
They evacuate the ship because of a bomb, and then run away from sentinels; Neo can feel them, even if they’re outside the matrix, and so he raises his hand like when he stops bullets, and the sentinels stop and fall. Neo falls too, from exhaustion. Another ships picks them up and they learn that someone ruined their defence, activating an EMP that took out five ships at once, and it that mess only one survived, the Bane that nobody knows is not Bane anymore.
Thi is how the first movie ends, with Neo still sleeping and Bane as well.
P.s. The oracle is “an intuitive program initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human mind”.
The Architect spoke in a weird way, so I think I got it right but am not 100% sure.
I really like that the credits at the end show the cast ordered alphabetically by the actors last name.
Neo is Keanu Reeves
Morpheus is Laurence Fishburne
Trinity is Carrie-Anne Moss
Persephone is Monica Bellucci
Seraph is Collin Chou
The oracle is Gloria Foster
Zee is Nona Gaye
Link is Harold Perrineau
Niobe is Jada Pinkett Smith
Smith is Hugo Weaving
Hamann is Anthony Zerbe
Ghost = Anthony Wong … ? I thought Seraph was what they called the Ghost…
ITA Matrix reloaded
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