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And while, yes, we still pantsed, swirlied and found hilarity in the goth community, we also took the time to dish out this abuse with unspoken respect. Just when we'd thankfully started to abandon this respect, the sequel arrives to make us feel bad all over again. The Matrix Reloaded trailer opens the same way every trailer opens, with a severe-looking woman in a pleather catsuit jumping out of a high-rise building. (Look me in the eye and tell me you're not just sick to death of that.) We fade to black on the severe-looking woman, victim of an extremely poor recent lapse in judgement, in terrifying slow motion free-fall. Given the dramatic music accompanying this, I reluctantly guess it's not meant to be kind of funny. When we fade back in again, a well-dressed man appears briefly, then jumps out of the building after the woman. Before we can think to stop him and prevent at least one senseless death, the trailer fades to irritating black again, leaving only questions: Why, Well-Dressed Man? You had so much to live for. Being well dressed. Buying nice suits. Leafing through suit catalogs. Another question: What on Earth did the severe-looking woman have that was so important, you couldn't just take the elevator down and scoop it off of her pancake-flat corpse? We fade back in, again, to see the woman hurtling towards the ground at terminal velocity. Standing in the face of what anyone else would do in that situation, the severe-looking woman does not fill her catsuit with as much fear-poop as its tightness will allow. She instead uses her last few seconds alive to make Uzis materialize out of nowhere and fire up at the well-dressed man — in a crafty race against time, I suppose, to kill him before he plummets to his death. We fade out again, leaving more questions: Did she have those Uzis in her pockets before? I didn't notice them, and believe me when I tell you her outfit had my full attention. It's possible I was too busy reading the dates on the pieces of change in her pockets. Equally possible: these are those new foldable Uzis that fit comfortably into snug catsuits I've heard so much about. Just as we're getting confused and maybe even a little bitter, we fade out again, then fade back in on the well-dressed guy chasing/falling after the woman, bullets flying all around him. We pause, perhaps, to contemplate what a laughably bad shot the woman is, then fade out yet again. Then fade back in on the woman falling again. Then fade out again. Then fade in on the man falling again. At the rate we're being shown this, we won't see the pair hit the pavement for another twenty-six minutes; I can't speak for anyone else, but by now it's the only reason — save for a few more gratuitous slo-mo pans of the catsuit — that I'm even still watching this. I decide to hunker down and wait for the inevitable explosion of gore, and am just having some popcorn when, after the next fade-out, we are greeted to Keanu Reeves in bed with the severe-looking woman. Keanu says "Guh!" and snaps up out of sleep. Apparently that scene of the well-dressed guy and the woman plummeting to their deaths was — and once I tell you this all those random pieces are going to click together like a Swiss watch, I assure you — just Keanu Reeves's dream. Either that or it was Keanu Reeves's flashback. The severe woman isn't moving much, to be honest. I vote for the necrophilia angle as the most viable, as I don't put it past that sick hound Keanu Reeves for a second. I am now a good thirty seconds into a trailer that shows no sign of wrapping things up, and it occurs to me that this is the longest trailer ever made. I toy briefly with the idea that an error's occured at Warner Brothers, and I'm actually watching the feature film. I look down at the Quicktime progress trackbar and note that it's barely crept an inch.
Once behind the sun-dimming shelter of his sunglasses, Keanu is emboldened enough to confront three more well-dressed men in suits. It's about now I begin to sense a theme at work here. Perhaps the filmmakers were beaten up as children by men in suits. Maybe they just think neckties chafe. Either way, the well-dressed guys get themselves a beating. "Hiya, fellas," Keanu says in a friendly way, putting the men completely at their ease before punching them through a brick wall. We then fade to black, and fade in on Keanu Reeves once more in bed, snapping up in horror. This sequence, it seems, was also a dream. Beside him in bed are the three well-dressed men in suits, spooning calmly while Neo looks on. Laurence Fishburne bursts in suddenly. "We'll be late if we don't hurry," he says, then puts on an enormous pair of novelty sunglasses and jams a handful of knitting needles into Keanu's temple. I glance down at the progress trackbar. It's still only an inch or so along. I take a look at my watch, and drum my fingers absently on my desk. Morpheus bends Neo over the headstand and produces ten more long poles from the recesses of his jacket. "Hold on, this will only take a second," he says soothingly, patting Keanu's hair. I decide to leave the trailer on and go run some errands. I get back some forty-five minutes later, and notice that it's now almost halfway through. In a bold new direction for the trailer, Keanu Reeves fights two hundred well-dressed men in suits. I wonder if this isn't actually beginning to get offensive, and wonder what the well-dressed, suit-wearing community will have to say about the stereotypes this film propogates. Yes, some well-dressed men in suits enjoy chasing women out the windows of high-rise buildings before replicating themselves. But not all well-dressed men. Many just buy coffee with expensive-sounding names — mocchachino, expresso Italiano, tendollarino — and talk business babble into cell phones with the express purpose of annoying the piss out of everyone around them. Granted, it's a pain; but it's not actually illegal, and while they might deserve a beating for it, only an uncaring monster would suggest it be at the hands of Keanu Reeves. While I consider this, the cycle of hate continues, as we cut to Laurence Fishburne in a parking lot attacking two well-dressed albinos in white suits. We then cut again to the severe-looking woman, who's now on a motorbike. Sitting behind her is a man in a cheap-looking suit. She squeals off on the bike into oncoming traffic, presumably to secret the man away before the well-dressed guys catch him, take his measurements, and fit him for a better suit. The pair race into the path of a tractor trailer and only narrowly avoid it. This doesn't even mildly distract the severe-looking (and, I'm now convinced, thoroughly dog-barking insane) woman, and she continues to go the wrong way up a busy superhighway. I sense another theme at work here: the severe-looking woman is an idiot. When not jumping out of buildings, she's driving headlong at oncoming transport trucks. Why they don't chain this poor creature to a chair so she can't hurt herself is beyond me. Maybe they tried once and she only swallowed her tongue, then hopped out a nearby window. We cut to another attractive woman in sunglasses, with small tufty afro things sticking out of her head. It's not a hairstyle you see much on attractive woman, making them resemble as it does a Chia pet with mange. I vaguely recall hearing once that she was married to Will Smith, the poor woman. I suspect the tufts must act as some kind of sonic absorbant so she can spare herself having to hear tracks from his albums. I take a look at my watch again. The progress trackbar tells me I'm a little over halfway through. I decide to fix my closet door, and leave the trailer running to go buy some hinges.
Outside my window, the sun sets. I check my watch again, then decide to just skip forward to the end. The Matrix Reloaded logo jumps out at me as the music hits a thumping crescendo. We are then greeted to a closing image of Keanu Reeves flying out the window of a Dutch castle before scooting off over the horizon. It is the most singularily ridiculous image I have ever seen, and I say this after having devoted an entire day to watching the former star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure beat up Hugo Boss floor managers while Will Smith's wife watches. What rating to give
this, then? If I gave out Billy Crystals based on the sheer number of
images given to me in a trailer, Matrix Reloaded would get 917
Billy Crystals for length alone. And it certainly zeroes in on its target
market with pinpoint accuracy: I can therefore safely say to every suit-hating
necrophiliac who likes the Pile on Top of Keanu Reeves game, your movie
has arrived, and it's apparently a near-infinite number of hours long.
Enjoy. RATING:
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In
1999 a small independent low-budget documentary called The Matrix
challenged Hollywood with its honest bravery, and theater-goers with
its brave, brave honesty. Previously dismissed as rake-thin, stanza-writing
effeminates and frumpy art-witch airheads, The Matrix opened
our eyes to the truth about emaciated goth hackers: all this time, they'd
been laying their lives down in a secret slo-mo kung fu war with sentient
machines from the future, and no one knew. Holy crap.
Laurence
Fishburne suddenly arrives in Keanu Reeves's bedroom. He says "Here
we go" in a suave manner, dons his rakish clip-on sunglasses, and
inserts a long metal pole without warning into the back of Keanu Reeves's
head. Keanu's reaction to all this — actor Laurence Fishburne breaking
into his bedroom in the middle of the night, making ominous comments
about the two of them 'going', then attempting to jam a knitting needle
into his skull — is to put on sunglasses himself, then turn into
the Warner Brothers logo. It deviates a great deal from my strategy
in the event, which would have been to beat Laurence Fishburne to death
with an aluminum bat in a fit of screaming night terror. When my heart
stopped beating like a jackhammer, a proposed back-up strategy would
have been to quietly scoot the corpse under the bed, then get back to
whatever hot sex I'd like to be having with the severe-looking woman.
An
hour later the door swings freely, and I trudge back to my computer
to see how the trailer's coming along. Fifty well-dressed men in suits
pile on top of Keanu Reeves in a playful game of Pile on Top of Keanu
Reeves. (I've played it once, it gets old fast.) As I haven't been keeping
up with the plot, I can only assume that all the well-dressed guys finally
got sick of Keanu Reeves luring them in with false friendliness and
punching them through walls, and so got together as a team to take him
out the only way they know how: jumpin' on him.