Mean Reviews

I like the New Yorker more and more these days, even as I have grown to notice how predictable portions of it are. For example, I laughed out loud several times reading Adam Gopnik’s review of The Matrix: Reloaded. As might be expected, he begins with a pretty comprehensive overview of the impact that the first Matrix movie had on contemporary academic philosophy, and notes that the line “welcome to the desert of the real” comes from Baudrillard. Later, he mentions both novelist Phillip K. Dick and postmodern philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the same sentence.

Once his highbrow credentials are established, he gets to the review:

It would have been nice if some of that complexity, or any complexity, had made its way into the sequel. But — to get to the bad news — “Matrix Reloaded” is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie. It feels not so much like “Matrix II” as like “Matrix XIV” — a franchise film made after a decade of increasing grosses and thinning material.

As must happen at least once in every issue, there is the mockery of right-wing populism intruding into popular entertainment:

Lambert Wilson appears as a sort of digital Dominique de Villepin — even virtual Frenchmen are now amoral, the mark of Cain imprinted on their foreheads, so to speak, like a spot of chocolate mousse.

And sure enough, he does the gay-icon check:

Then, there are his twin dreadlocked henchmen, dressed entirely in white, who have all the smirking conviction of Siegfried and Roy.

Last, right before he says the redeeming values of the first movie are not besmirched by the banality of the second, he adds the requisite jab at Dubya and Fox News:

… one can even start to wonder whether the language we hear constantly on television and talk radio (“the war on terror,” “homeland security,” etc.) is a sort of vat-English — a language from which all earthly reference has been bled away.This isn’t to say that any of us yet exist within an entirely fictive universe created by the forces of evil for the purpose of deluding a benumbed population — not unless you work for Fox News, anyway.

I agree with everything he has to say, but then again, he doesn’t say much: The Matrix was all about smoking dope and going to Philosophy 101, our president is a moron, and sequels are never as good as the originals. I already knew that, though. As more succinct viewers put it, “Matrix: Reloaded blows donkeys.”