The Matrix Reloaded

DIRECTED BY Larry and Andy Wachowski
STARRING Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

In 1999, The Matrix saved sci-fi: Hollywood science-fiction had been blown off course by George Lucas and Jar-Jar Binks’s sequel franchise for kids. Then the Wachowski Brothers arrived at just the right moment with bullet time, long leather coats and an illusory reality created by computers, where humans are just an energy source.

When we last left our messianic hero, Neo, the struggle to reconquer the planet was just beginning. The Matrix Reloaded cranks things up for him as well as freedom fighter Morpheus, tough broad Trinity and sinister G-man Agent Smith. The machines have found Zion — the hidden human city — and threaten to destroy it. Humanity’s only hope is to kidnap a timid little Asian man called the Keymaker, who knows the location of every portal between the Matrix and the real world. But can Neo and company safely transport the Keymaker out of the Matrix?

The answer to that question is the film’s action centerpiece — an extended car-and-motorcycle chase that reinvents the genre. As our heroes race along a busy freeway, reality-altering villains leap between speeding cars and trucks in pursuit. In another unforgettable scene, Neo once again goes mano à mano with Agent Smith, who has been multiplied into a hundred clones for an epic fight scene that took a month to film.

Reloaded has great new characters, too: Jada Pinkett Smith plays Niobe, Morpheus’s old flame; Monica Belucci is Persephone, a beautiful temptress who tries to veer Neo off course; and Nona Gaye (Marvin’s daughter) is the freedom fighter Zee. There’s also a pair of sinister villains who look like the blond pop twins Nelson reinvented as Rastafarian ghouls.

And if Reloaded’s ending leaves you hanging, there’s good news: The Matrix Revolutions, the series’ third installment, will hit theaters this fall. In the meantime, though, The Matrix Reloaded does just what its predecessor did: It blows the hatch off the sci-fi world.