The best that can be said of the Wachowski Brothers is that they’re skilled enough at intricate storyweaving to make a bewildering film worth trying to figure out. That said, one can’t avoid the suspicion, after “The Matrix Reloaded”, that they might actually be counting on their fans’ inability to figure it all out. The story is a tossed salad of garbled Zen haikus and sci-fi mindbenders, garnished with kung-fu fighting and Cornel West cameos. It’s just coherent enough to keep you believing they’ll solve the puzzle.

The cliffhanger at the end of this chapter of The Matrix Trilogy is the mystery of how Neo uses his superpowers, so to speak, outside The Matrix.  Everything hinges on the answer, so nothing substantive can be said about The Matrix trilogy until the third installment, “Revolutions”, wraps up the loose ends.  About “Reloaded” itself one can say that it is loud, ponderous, grandiloquent, and, despite a few excellent action sequences, not nearly as innovative as its predecessor. The final meeting with The Architect had none of the mystery or wonder of, say, Dave Bowman’s “trip” in “2001”.  Instead it felt like a stale joke, one that wasn’t any funnier when the joketeller nudged you in the ribs a few times.

Whatever this movie gets right had to survive a disastrous start. The rave sequence opening the movie is an embarrassment. Democracy transformed into a giant disco fueled by drugs and gimcrack pop mythologies only reveals the paucity of real thought put into the movie’s political and philosophical positions. This phony, pseudo-intellectual political strain undermines any serious political comment “The Matrix” films attempt to make.  For despite their ultramodern fetish for technology, the Wachowski Brothers apparently long to resurrect a shopworn age of heroes so they can spot-weld it to our already tired shibboleths like “community” and “multi-culturalism”. Disappointing, but the movie picks itself up off the floor after that and turns in a good two hours of eye candy that almost makes you forget the questionable philosophy at the core of this “thinking man’s” sci-fi saga.