The Matrix Reloaded


The Matrix Reloaded is a 2003 American science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It is the sequel to The Matrix and the second installment in the Matrix film series. The film stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Gloria Foster who reprise their roles from the previous film, with Jada Pinkett Smith joining the cast. In the film, Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity attempt to reach the Source of the Matrix to end the war as Zion prepares for an invasion from the machines.
The film premiered on May 7, 2003, in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, and had its worldwide release by Warner Bros. Pictures on May 15, 2003, including a screening out of competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. The video game Enter the Matrix and The Animatrix, a collection of short animations, supported and expanded the film's story.
The film received generally positive reviews, though most critics found it inferior to the first film. It grossed $741.8 million worldwide, breaking Terminator 2: Judgment Days record for becoming the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, until Deadpool surpassed it in 2016. In addition to being the highest-grossing film in the franchise, it was the third-highest-grossing film of 2003, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Finding Nemo. A direct sequel titled The Matrix Revolutions was released six months later on November 5, 2003.

Plot

Six months after escaping the Matrix, Neo and Trinity are now romantically involved. Morpheus receives a message from Captain Niobe of the Logos calling an emergency meeting of all ships of Zion. An army of Sentinels is tunneling towards Zion and will reach it within 72 hours. Commander Lock orders all ships to return to Zion to prepare, but Morpheus asks one ship to remain to contact the Oracle. But within the Matrix, Bane, a member of the crew, encounters the former Agent Smith. Smith forcibly overwrites his mind, effectively killing him and possessing his body. Thus able to enter the real world, he exits the Matrix.
In Zion, Morpheus announces the news of the advancing machines. The Nebuchadnezzar leaves Zion and enters the Matrix, where Neo meets the Oracle's bodyguard Seraph, who leads him to her. The Oracle reveals that she is part of the Matrix and instructs Neo to reach its Source with the help of the Keymaker. As the Oracle departs, Smith appears, telling Neo that he became a rogue program after being defeated by him. He demonstrates his ability to clone himself over other inhabitants of the Matrix, including the new upgraded Agents. He tries to take over Neo's body but fails, prompting a battle between Neo and many copies of Smith. Neo defends himself, but is forced to retreat.
Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity visit the Merovingian, who is imprisoning the Keymaker. The Merovingian, a rogue program with his own agenda, refuses to let him go. His wife Persephone, seeking revenge on her husband for his infidelity, leads the trio to the Keymaker. Morpheus, Trinity, and the Keymaker flee while Neo holds off the Merovingian's henchmen. Morpheus and Trinity try to escape with the Keymaker, pursued by several Agents and the Merovingian's chief henchmen, the Twins. After a long chase, Trinity escapes, Morpheus defeats the Twins, and Neo saves Morpheus and the Keymaker from Agent Johnson.
The crews of the Nebuchadnezzar, Vigilant, and Logos help the Keymaker and Neo reach the Source. The Logos crew must destroy a power plant and the Vigilant crew must disable a back-up power station to bypass a security system, allowing Neo to enter the Source. Haunted by a vision of Trinity's death, he asks her to remain on the Nebuchadnezzar. The Logos is successful, but the Vigilant is destroyed by a Sentinel. Trinity replaces the Vigilant crew and completes their mission. Agent Thompson corners her and they fight. As Neo, Morpheus, and the Keymaker try to reach the Source, the Smiths ambush them. The Keymaker is killed after unlocking the door to the Source for Neo.
Neo meets a program called the Architect, the creator of the Matrix, who explains that, as the One, Neo is an intentional part of the design of the Matrix, which is now in its sixth iteration. Neo is meant to stop the Matrix's fatal system crash that naturally recurs due to humans' free will, leading to dozens of humans gradually refusing to accept the simulation. As with the five previous Ones, Neo has a choice: either reboot the Matrix from the Source and pick a handful of survivors to repopulate the soon-to-be-destroyed Zion, as his predecessors all did, or go to save the imperiled Trinity, causing the Matrix to crash and killing everyone in it. Neo chooses the latter, prompting a dismissive response from the Architect.
Neo's vision of Trinity comes true as she is shot by Agent Thompson while falling off a building. Before she hits the ground, Neo arrives and catches her. He then removes the bullet from her chest and restarts her heart. They return to the real world, where Sentinels attack them. The Nebuchadnezzar is destroyed, but the crew escapes. As the Sentinels catch up to them, Neo realizes he can sense the machines in the real world, and telepathically destroys them but falls into a coma. The crew are picked up by another ship, the Mjolnir. The Mjolnir's captain reveals that the machines wiped other ships defending Zion after someone prematurely activated an EMP. Only one survivor was found: the Smith-possessed Bane, who lies beside Neo in the medical bay, also unconscious.

Cast

Zee was originally played by Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, before filming was complete, requiring her scenes to be reshot with Nona Gaye. Pinkett Smith declined her role in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps in order to star in The Matrix Reloaded. Jet Li was offered the role of Seraph, but turned it down as he did not want his martial arts moves digitally recorded.

Production

Filming

The Matrix Reloaded was mostly filmed at Fox Studios in Australia. Filming began on March 1, 2001, and ended on August 21, 2002, concurrently with the filming of the second sequel, Revolutions and the live-action footage for the Enter the Matrix video game. The freeway chase and "Burly Brawl" scenes were filmed at the decommissioned Naval Air Station Alameda in Alameda, California. The producers constructed a 1.5-mile freeway on the old runways specifically for the film. Some portions of the chase were also filmed in Oakland, California, and the tunnel shown briefly is the Webster Tube, which connects Oakland and Alameda. Some post-production editing was also done in old aircraft hangars on the base. The city of Akron, Ohio was willing to give full access to Route 59, the stretch of freeway known as the "Innerbelt", for filming of the freeway chase when it was under consideration. However, producers decided against this as "the time to reset all the cars in their start position would take too long". General Motors was hired to donate over 300 cars to be used during production, destroying them for the sake of creating art. MythBusters would later reuse the Alameda location in order to explore the effects of a head-on collision between two semi trucks, and to perform various other experiments. It took 27 days to film the Burly Brawl sequence, which was combined with motion capture and CGI. This would become one of the most expensive action scenes, costing $40 million to make. Around 97% of the materials from the sets of the film were recycled after production was completed; for example, tons of wood were sent to Mexico to build low-income housing.

Visual effects

Following the success of the previous film, the Wachowskis came up with extremely difficult action sequences, such as the Burly Brawl, a scene in which Neo had to fight 100 Agent Smiths. To develop technologies for the film, Warner Bros. launched ESC Entertainment. The ESC team tried to figure out how to bring the Wachowskis' vision to the screen, but because bullet time required arrays of carefully aligned cameras and months of planning, even for a brief scene featuring two or three actors, a scene like the Burly Brawl seemed almost impossible as envisioned and could take years to composite. Eventually, John Gaeta realized that the technology he and his crew had developed for The Matrixs bullet time was no longer sufficient and concluded they needed a virtual camera. Having before used real photographs of buildings as texture for 3D models in The Matrix, the team started digitizing all data, such as scenes, characters' motions, or even the reflectivity of Neo's cassock. The reflectivity of objects needs to be captured and simulated adequately and Paul Debevec et al. captured the reflectance of the human face and Borshukov's work was strongly based on the findings of Debevec et al. They developed "Universal Capture", a process which samples and stores facial details and expressions at high resolution, then capture expressions from Reeves and Weaving using dense capture and multi-camera setup photogrammetric capture technique called optical flow. The algorithm for Universal Capture was written by George Borshukov, visual effects lead at ESC, who had also created the photo-realistic buildings for the visual effects in The Matrix. With this collected wealth of data and the right algorithms, they finally were able to create virtual cinematography in which characters, locations, and events can all be created digitally and viewed through virtual cameras, eliminating the restrictions of real cameras, years of compositing data, and replacing the use of still camera arrays or, in some scenes, cameras altogether. The ESC team rendered the final effects using the program Mental Ray.