REBOOT:

MATRIX2: Bullet Time was just the beginning. F/x guru John Gaeta reinvents cinematography with The Matrix Reloaded. (Steve Silberman, May 2003, Wired)

I'm sitting in a former naval barracks in Alameda, California, watching the digital assembly of a human face. Bones, teeth, glistening eyes. Layer upon layer. Finally the hair and skin, the creases and tiny scars that make us who we are. The face blinks and breathes. Then it snarls, and my skin crawls.

Agent Smith is back, and he's pissed.

You'll be seeing a lot of Agent Smith this year. Neo's man-in-black nemesis returns on May 15 in The Matrix Reloaded, the continuing story of a young hacker who learns that the apparently real world is an elaborate computer simulation. In November, a second sequel, Matrix Revolutions, will take up where Reloaded's nail-biting climax leaves off.

Things have changed since 1999. In the last shot of the original film, Neo, played by ex-slacker Keanu Reeves, flew up out of the frame, demonstrating that his mental abilities had become stronger than the enslaving delusion of the Matrix. Now he's a full-fledged superhero, soaring over the skyline at thousands of miles an hour and making a rescue as trucks collide head-on. The bad news: Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, is a rogue virus in the Matrix, able to multiply himself at will. And the last free human city, Zion, in a cave near the Earth's core, is under attack.

What hasn't changed is the dark, richly nuanced aesthetic of brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, a pair of Hollywood outsiders who wrote and directed what became the most successful movie in the history of Warner Bros. The Wachowskis had always conceived of Neo's odyssey as a trilogy, but to release both sequels months apart - plus the videogame Enter the Matrix and an anime series called The Animatrix - required a year of intense collaboration, as the scripts, sets, and shot designs all evolved together.

The Matrix raised the bar for action films by introducing new levels of realism into stunt work and visual effects. For Reloaded and Revolutions, the Wachowskis dreamed up action sequences that were so over-the-top they would require their special-effects supervisor, John Gaeta, to reinvent cinematography itself.

It's been strange to have three different film cycles going that you're actually anxious for the next entry in--Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. It would seem germane that all three tap into fundamental Western themes and come at a time when we're anxious to recall those themes, to better comprehend what is at risk in our struggles with Islamicism and European nihilism. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2003 7:34 AM