Amazing Matrix

If you believe all the experiences promised in The Matrix Reloaded you would think its makers, the Wachowski brothers, had rewritten the laws of Einstein's physics, the life of Buddha, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, a fair bit of the Bible and no doubt the handbook on the art of robot maintenance, too.

Well, it is not all that revolutionary, but - deep breath - on the evidence of this 139-minute super epic, it is certainly one mighty eyeful.

If it doesn't blow your mind on the miraculous effects that cinema can now create as it pushes the boundaries of perception to the vanishing point of reality, it gives you something that you will never forget setting eyes on for the first time.

The whole film may be more than a bit suspect cerebrally, with dime-store philosophy, potted mysticism and cut-price otherworldliness, but visually it gives full value as a virtuoso workout for your senses.

The character list is Miltonic in conception. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is the excomputer hacker from the first Matrix film now transformed into a Messianic spiritual and physical superman and living proof that the computer nerds shall inherit the earth - except that the Fascistic regime of the Machines is taking it over. When the film opens, the only human inhabitants left are besieged in the underground city of Zion. Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), an all-in-black nemesis, is the fallen Lucifer of this universe who can replicate himself like some Sars virus a limitless number of times.

In one of the film's earliest stand-out sequences, which demonstrate the wonders of technology specially developed for the production, Neo, in his whirling frock coat, does gravity-defying battle against 100 replicants of Agent Smith that ends in an immense rugby scrum of dozens of identical agents piling on top of him to keep him down.

He explodes out of it like a heaven-seeking missile. It's a fusion of kung fu, martial arts and wire-work acrobatics that ascends to an elegant crescendo in the struggle of The One against Many. Today's preview audience gave it an ovation. The irony is that although technology is the enemy in The Matrix Reloaded, it is the entertainment sine qua non of a film that has pretentions to be the Bible epic for our secular age. Its morality is distinctly Old Testament, and the character of Morpheus, played by a burly Laurence Fishburne, is a Moses figure and lends legitimacy to the feeling that what we are really watching beneath all the computergenerated wonders is a political allegory about the survival of the modern state of Israel.

In another fantastic sequence that lasts nearly 15 minutes, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), the woman warrior in a shiny jet black catsuit that will make all feline dudes purr with envy, conducts a running, jumping, never standing still battle with Agent Smith amid the whirling traffic of a freeway.

In pursuit of her are identical albino twins with white dreadlocks, played by the British Rayment brothers, who are the hit men of the cosmos.

The destructiveness of this sequence is something I have never seen exceeded in other genre films that deal with traffic pile-ups and giant crashes. Wait till you see two "Longpath" container trucks ram each other head-on and the shockwave travel their length like a rolling earthquake.