THE MATRIX: RELOADED

There are several films I've been eagerly awaiting of late. A drooling comic book fan from way back, I was delighted to learn that Ang Lee was taking on the Incredible Hulk. A sequel to the excellent X-Men movie would be welcome. Of course I look forward to watching them crown Viggo Mortensen king this coming Christmas.

And then there's these two Matrix sequels.

I have approached these with trepidation. I loved The Matrix, but for different reasons than most. A long-time devotee of Christian and Jewish apocrypha and heresies, I loved The Matrix's blatantly Gnostic/Manichaean theme, its hip updating of an old belief that our world is a creation of malignant forces who have trapped the divine spark of humanity in a million tiny cells to be tortured and enslaved, bound by laws of physics, confined by fear and death and base animal instinct, and only a few enlightened individuals who awakened to the truth could ever set it all free. Instead of Archons and the Demiurge we have Agents and the vast and complex machine society that grows humans as crops and turns them into batteries. Etc.

Plus, the soundtrack kicked ass, and even Keanu Reeves, one of the most enjoyably mockable creatures ever to pretend he's an actor, wasn't too irritating even if I did think of Bill and Ted a little too often.

The messianic plot was also great fun, and I'm enough of a fan of, e.g., John Woo and his Hong Kong predescessors to have also enjoyed all of the silly wire-work kung fu and all of the other special effects, too.

But, since they'd pretty much already used up the entire "Hero With a Thousand Faces" plot in this first film, I wasn't sure the Wachowski brothers could really make two more set in this milieu, at least not without betraying their original achievement.

So I almost didn't go see this film.

I'm glad, though, that I did, because the brothers had lots of other goodies up their sleeves.

OK, I'm going to try not to completely spoil this movie for those of you who haven't seen it but plan to, but I can't meaningfully discuss this movie - or persuade a few of you who might not otherwise bother with it to go see it - without giving away a little bit. If you're a complete anti-spoiler fanatic (which I am; I deliberately avoided reading any criticism of TM:R so my initial experience would have as clean an impact as possible), you might want to stop here, but for most people a little foreknowledge can't hurt.