A future worth fighting for

What's that you say? Of course Neo is the One, right? (I mean, easiest anagram ever, dude!) It sure looked like that way at the end of "The Matrix," when he had developed powers heretofore only known to Superman, the deities of various religions and super-enlightened monks in Hong Kong movies. Remember, however, that he had developed such powers within the Matrix, which complicates matters more than a little, since nothing in the Matrix is what we would call real and the very existence of the Matrix, as Morpheus is all too eager to point out, destabilizes the nature of reality so much that it never quite seems stable again.

(Is now a good time to bring up the fact that a line spoken by Morpheus to Neo in the first film -- "Welcome to the desert of the real," which itself draws on a trademark Baudrillard phrase -- was borrowed by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for the title of a brilliant, troubling essay about Sept. 11 and its aftermath? And the fact that, in the scene where Morpheus speaks the line, as he shows Neo the all-too-real ruins of 21st century civilization, destroyed in the losing war against the machines, the burned-out hulks of the twin towers are clearly visible in the background? There is no spoon.)

So yeah, Neo appears to be the One. When Neo, Morpheus and Trinity, along with a new supporting crew, plunge back into the cool, blue-lit realm of the Matrix -- carefully distinguished, by cinematographer Bill Pope, from the ruddy earth tones of Zion -- and pay a return visit to the Oracle, she more or less tells them so. (Mind you, she more or less told Neo he wasn't the One in "The Matrix," but let's keep moving.) The Wachowskis, true to their nature, want to grapple with bigger questions than that one. What does being the One really mean -- and is it such a good thing? Where does the powerful myth of messianic salvation come from? Isn't it, in its own way, just another system of control?

Along the way to these quandaries, of course, Neo must confront a baroque array of Matrix-villains. Something very strange has happened to Agent Smith, who thanks Neo for "setting him free" from the Matrix but clearly has his own, highly unfriendly agenda and can replicate himself like, well, a virus. In perhaps the movie's wittiest scene, the Oracle sends Neo and company to visit a decadent rogue entity called the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), who amuses himself with orgasmic-chocolate software programs and is guarded by dreadlocked demonic albino twins (Neil and Adrian Rayment) whose nifty superpowers almost match Neo's. (The Merovingian's disgruntled wife is played by the pulchritudinous Monica Bellucci, who gets a small but seductively significant moment.)

It seems the Merovingian -- and I promise I'll stop short of giving away anything major here -- has under his control a guy called the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim), who can offer Neo and friends access to secret back passages that lead outside the Matrix but aren't in the so-called real world either. (I was reminded, perhaps inevitably, of the institutional-looking corridors beneath and behind Disneyland.) Then there are Neo's troubling dreams, and the promise he extracts from Trinity that she won't come into the Matrix after him if he's in trouble. (Will she keep it? Duh!)

Keanu Reeves is regularly abused for his granite-faced acting, and I understand what people mean, but I actually find his presentational style in the Matrix movies highly effective. Neo is a guy who has gone in some relatively brief timespan from being a disaffected computer geek, awkward around other people, to a near-omnipotent superhero with a wicked-hot girlfriend who wears vinyl catsuits. His amazement at the pilgrims camped outside his door in Zion, or at the alarming, almost exponential expansion of his powers (I'm not telling!), or even at watching the "little death" of Trinity's orgasm as they make love feels completely legitimate.

That moment of orgasm, coming at the end of the extraordinary dance-sex sequence described earlier, essentially made "The Matrix Reloaded" for me. In fact, I trusted the Wachowskis after that, in a way I've never quite trusted them before. No, I'm not sure where they're going or quite how they're going to get there, but I know I want to take the ride. I've lost all sympathy for the flocks of chicken-robots who will gather around this franchise trying to peck holes in it, complaining about this or that problematic stunt scene or red-herring character. They are the agents of the Matrix; ignore them. Finally I understand that the Matrix movies are striving for a massively contradictory epic about love and hope, a grand and maybe impossible vision of living in a world of technology and escaping it at the same time, of being truly alive in a dead or dying society. They kick major ass, and they show us a future worth fighting for.

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