THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS **1/2
DIRECTED BY Andy & Larry Wachowski
STARRING Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne
US 2003 129 mins.
CITY OF GOD ****
DIRECTED BY Fernando Meirelles
STARRING Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino, Phellipe Haagensen
Brazil 2002 129 mins.
In Portuguese, with Greek subtitles.
By Preston Wilder
IF YOU want to make money, goes the saying, give people what they want. Yet a Hollywood studio is about to make nearly $1 billion in the space of six months by giving people what they don’t particularly want.
We speak of course of The Matrix Reloaded and now The Matrix Revolutions, two unloved sequels which between them have reduced a respected franchise to a laughing stock. Yet they’ve made money – not as much as had been hoped for, but enough to make the exercise worthwhile, at least at the box-office.
How did they manage it? In a word, hype. Reloaded was of course so anticipated it had already made a fortune before people realised how dull it was (and it did have a couple of terrific action set-pieces in the highway chase and Neo’s battle with a hundred Agent Smiths).
For Revolutions, producer Joel Silver has publicly reassured the masses that the film is very different from its sluggish predecessor (it isn’t), and the studio has come up with the masterstroke of opening worldwide on the same day, shipping thousands of prints to 80 territories – supposedly to stem piracy, but also making the release a newsworthy Event. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve asked me the same question over the past few days: “Have you seen the Matrix yet?”
I have – though I can’t help feeling I’ve seen it before, six months ago when Reloaded came out. Same orotund verbosity, with characters who talk (and talk) like pompous headmasters. Same gulf between promise and delivery, with portentous build-up – “It ends tonight!” – leading only to fist-fights and karate-kicks (even the climactic battle between Neo and his nemesis turns out to be just another boring punch-up). Same compensation in big-budget set-pieces – the mega-battle for Zion, playing like the ultimate videogame – which are really all the film has to offer.
One thing has changed, though. Reloaded retained (or at least paid lip-service to) the Moebius-strip twistiness of the original Matrix, blurring the line between fantasy and reality; the original was the thinking person’s action movie, tying in with the millennial promise (it was made in 1999) of a new digital world, and Reloaded tried to hold on to that, albeit clumsily. We were introduced to ‘the Architect’, and learned there had been previous Messiahs before Neo, who turned out to be trapped between two competing control systems – the ‘prophecy’ on the one hand, the Matrix itself on the other. As Revolutions slipped into gear, I found myself trying to recall the details of the complex cosmology. Why was Neo in a train station? Why does Morpheus tell Niobe “I’m sorry”? What was real, and what was not?
I needn’t have bothered. The outrageous twists already seemed out of place in the turgid Reloaded, and have now been dropped altogether (this may be what Joel Silver meant when he said the new film would be more action-packed). Amazingly, what started out four years ago as a slippery cyber-update of Alice in Wonderland is now as square-cut and easily-digestible as a Star Wars sequel; people still talk of Choice and Duality occasionally – the series’ abiding theme ever since Neo had to choose between the red pill and the blue pill in Matrix 1.0 – but it’s just wallpaper, no more meaningful than mentions of the Force in Star Wars.
The plot of Matrix Revolutions is insultingly simple: the city of Zion is under attack, and Neo (played, of course, by Keanu Reeves) races against Time to try and save it. That’s it. No post-modernism, no blurring of the line between reality and fantasy. Along the way there’s one magnificent sequence (the aforementioned battle for Zion) and a few boring punch-ups. The rest is pompous dialogue, Monica Bellucci’s breasts, an annoying Indian moppet, and lots of scenes where people talk strategy and say things like “How much time do we have?” There – now you too can say you’ve seen the Matrix.
What’s especially frustrating is there’s another film this week which would blow the minds of the Matrix target audience – young viewers with a yen for stylish violence –far more effectively than the Wachowski Brothers’ limp threequel. Alas, City of God has no marketing budget, which means it doesn’t come with a barrage of posters and radio ads; worse yet, it’s in a Language Other Than English, meaning it plays at the Friends of the Cinema Society – where it’ll probably shock the staid cinephile crowd with its ferocity, and lead to mournful debates about the Hollywoodisation of world cinema.
There’s something in that. City of God got picked up by US giant Miramax days after its debut in last year’s Cannes festival, and certainly seems to have been influenced by Quentin Tarantino and the stylish American crime movies spawned in his wake. Like Pulp Fiction, it likes to rewind its chronology, telling and re-telling the same events from different perspectives; like Reservoir Dogs (and Martin Scorsese before that) it seems to take relish in its violence, done with a flashy – yet compelling – sensationalism. Unlike many of the films at the Friends of the Cinema Society, it bounds with restless energy, its handheld camera seldom still. There’s split-screen effects and quick cutting, slow and fast motion, expressionist colour filters, “even Matrix-style circling around combatants,” wrote Paul Julian Smith (with inadvertent irony) in Sight & Sound.
The film is a tale of the slums, following in the footsteps of other Latin American exposés like Bunuel’s Los Olvidados and the early-80s hit Pixote. It’s directed by Fernando Meirelles, who made his name in TV commercials and shot the film with actual slum-kids, trained through months of rehearsal and improvisation. Those who dislike the film call it offensive and exploitative; it’s certainly 90 per cent amoral, 10 per cent actively immoral (as when ‘Knockout Ned’s’ moral corruption gets played for a cheap joke). Yet there’s something curiously honest about its refusal to single violence out for judgment, treating it as part of the Carnival – it’s a Brazilian samba movie about violent death – just as it makes clear the gangsters are just a part (if the most visible part) of ghetto life, mixed in with “the Church crowd” and our nominal hero, Rocket, who wants to be a news photographer.
City of God is partly based on the life of Wilson Rodriguez, a real-life version of Rocket; it ends with documentary video footage of the film’s climax, which again is based on a real incident. This is virtuoso film-making, shot in burnished shades of brown and ochre, cut and framed for maximum impact, yet also built around a kernel of truth, ‘making you think’ about poverty and the causes of violence – which might be as large as social disenfranchisement, or as small as a teenage gangster who’s too ugly to get the girl of his dreams.
The film has the punch of tabloid journalism and the quicksilver style of the first Matrix – unlike that film’s latest sequel, which has neither punch nor style. If you’re young and looking for an awesome 129 minutes, you may have come to the wrong movie. The question ought to be: “Have you seen City of God yet?”
