Feature: The Matrix Reloaded

Reloading the Matrix

If you think you’ve seen everything The Matrix has to offer, you couldn’t be more wrong. Stars Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving tell us why the movie makes taking the red pill seem like popping a junior asprin..

Nearly four years have passed since we last plugged into The Matrix, although we’ve always known it was there; the translucent glowing skin covering the gristle and bone of our true reality. But all it takes is a scratch at the surface to enter this world of suits and blue skies, where agents keep the peace and renegades such as Neo and Trinity try their best to disrupt it. Like Neo, we have re-entered The Matrix knowing what can be done there. Before there were limitations and now there are none, still it doesn’t hurt to grant council with the one man who can deliver sage advice in a time where war with the machines is inevitable and reality as we know it will never be the same.

“I believe in the world of the seen and I believe in the world of the unseen,” says Morpheus enigmatically – or rather the actor who portrays him, Lawrence Fishburne. He could be talking about the computer simulation – but he’s actually comparing the acting profession to the unreal world. “I’m a person who has the capability of moving between those worlds effortlessly. Part of my professional life is playing people and then I have my real life. I have a real good perspective on both of those things.”

Fishburne is but one of the returning cast who have handed over their considerable talents to the Wachowski brothers in order to bring to fruition a saga that began in 1999 with The Matrix and will end later this year with The Matrix Revolutions.

But it is the middle chapter that is under discussion here as The Matrix Reloaded emerges on DVD this month, replete with an extra disc full of added value for the masses to dissect and digest.

Among those returning familiar faces are Keanu Reeves, Hugo Weaving, Carrie-Anne Moss and the aforementioned Fishburne. And although some years have passed between the first and this second instalment, for many of them re-entering The Matrix was like returning to a family that they had simply been estranged from for a short time.

“It’s great to get back together again,” agrees Hugo Weaving, an actor not unacquainted with working for long periods of time on a series of movies, having only recently finished filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“It wasn’t even like starting a new film because we all knew each other in so many ways. Sure there were new pressures, but there were also other pressures that just weren’t there.”

by Grant Kempster

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Photo © Warner Bros
Feature © Visual Imagination 2003. Not for reproduction

Taken from

Ultimate DVD #47
October 2003
ships from Sep 11 2003
News-stand Price
UK £3.99 / US $7.99

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