Wading in the Velvet Sea

Now, obviously, I can’t talk about the merits of ‘Reloaded’ until next week, since I’m pretty sure at some point I’ll get to one of 8,300 screens in America that is showing it, but this idea of ‘too technological’ is interesting to me, especially in terms of ‘The Matrix’ as a cultural base. It’s no great overstatement, nor is it terribly original, to label the original movie as Generation Y’s ‘Star Wars’. I’d never been to a movie where so many times I thought, ‘OK, I’ve never, ever seen anything quite like this.’ The oft-copied ‘bullet time’ effect has become as much a part of the cultural lexicon as Obi-Wan Kenobi or ET; you can go up to pretty much anyone under the age of 30 and say, ‘I know kung fu’ and have them most likely whisper back, "Whoa". Or "I've got mace and I'm not afraid to you it on you, freak boy." That too.

What made ‘bullet time’ work for ‘The Matrix’, however, were the stakes involved with the effect. After the initial use with Trinity with the police officer, every bullet time had a specific life-of-death situation attached to it, whether it was the bullet-dodge atop the building or the fight in the subway station. Subsequent uses in cinema, television, etc, referenced the technology but not the stakes themselves. You can’t see ‘bullet time’ without thinking of ‘The Matrix’. It's the most self-referential effect since Anna Nicole's implants.

One would think that simply increasing the scope and capability of ‘bullet time’, or the F/X in general would only heighten the sequels’ ability to transfix and transform us. After all, ‘X2’ shows what the first movie could have been like with twice the money. More importantly, though, ‘X2’ had, for most people, twice the story as well. And therein lies the crux---people’s tastes for F/X have been so refined (or dulled, which is often the same side of the same coin) that they don’t expect to only see mind-blowing effects; they want to be drawn into the effects themselves. In other words, the F/Xs need to serve an emotive as well as aesthetic purpose.

The best example I can give lies in a contrast of the climatic battles of ‘Attack of the Clones’ and ‘The Two Towers’. When I first watched the last 20+ minutes of ‘Clones’, I was in sheer awe of what I was watching. The size, the scope, the sheer breadth of imagination that went into staging the biggest battle that never happened…I ate it all up. Heck, I’m getting decently excited typing about it now. However, it wasn’t until seeing ‘The Two Towers’ that I saw exactly was missing in ‘Clones’: any sense on my part of actually caring about what was happening onscreen. In ‘Towers’, we see a short but extremely effective montage of families being ripped apart by the upcoming battle at Helm’s Deep. We see people who will never, ever see each other again. What we have, in short, are truly high stakes for the upcoming battle. When people die at Helm’s Deep, there’s a sense of loss that 10,000 computer-generated clone deaths simply cannot muster.

Thus, we have two directors, in Peter Jackson and Bryan Singer, who essentially are adorning emotional stories with visual effects, whereas the Wachowskis, in many early reviews, have retreated into the Lucas territory they so successfully avoided the first time around. People love to appreciate the surface of cinema; what really sticks is when they can disappear into the movie itself. ‘But, you moron,’ you say, ‘The whole damn movie takes place inside a computer! Of COURSE the effects are going to look fake!’ I can deal with the fact that Keanu Reeves in real life can’t fly---I’m really OK with that. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them. Ask some of my college girlfriends.

What I want, even within this computer-generated world, is the human element that pervades computer-aided scenes such as Helm’s Deep. The effects there serve the story, they are not in and of themselves the story. And if ‘The Matrix’ trilogy is about humanity overcoming machinery, then damnit, I demand to see such a tale embedded in the effects I will be seeing this weekend. I want to see a very human Neo battle against the crushing mechanical world of The Matrix. I want to see major kung-fu battles, of course; but I want to see them fought with the life-or-death ferocity than Wolverine brings to his fight with Lady Deathstrike in ‘X2’.

To use the word one more time, the ‘stakes’ have been raised in the time since the original ‘Matrix’ came out. Audiences can have their computer-generated cake yet eat it, too. The Wachowskis have a lot to prove. And, so far, very few people seem convinced.