I liked it a lot. I need to see it again before deciding whether I really, really liked it a lot.

Folks have been saying it falls down in the philosophy department (being a resident, it would be embarrassing if I failed to notice), leaving us with mere Hollywood flash. Adam Gopnik seems the most thoughtful and articulate exponent of this critical line:

The first “Matrix” - for anyone who has been living in Antarctica for the past four years - depended on a neatly knotted marriage between a spectacle and a speculation.

But:

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.

No, no, no.

But let me work up to that by inching out onto this limb: I think the second Matrix movie may well be organized around a solid, philosophical theme. Even if you think it's a flop, it can't possibly be considered a flop of the sort Gopnik indicates - Bruckheimered-out regretabilia. It can only be an extravagant, philosophical failure. Bad, over-conceived art film at worst.

The theme of Matrix: Reloaded is not so much indicated as deduced in Gopnik's own review. He provides a gratifyingly comprehensive run-down of some of the first movies major religious and philosophical and fictional antecedents and implications. Along the way, we hear:

In a long article on the first “Matrix” film, the Princeton philosopher James Pryor posed the question “What’s so bad about living in the Matrix?,” and, after sorting through some possible answers, he concluded that the real problem probably has to do with freedom, or the lack of it. “If your ambitions in the Matrix are relatively small-scale, like opening a restaurant or becoming a famous actor, then you may very well be able to achieve them,” Pryor says. “But if your ambitions are larger - e.g., introducing some long-term social change -then whatever progress you make toward that goal will be wiped out when the simulation gets reset ... One thing we place a lot of value on is being in charge of our own lives, not being someone else’s slave or plaything. We want to be politically free.”

[Here, by the by, is a link to the Pryor piece, and many other philosophical essays - of varying degrees of quality and interest - on The Matrix.]

Freedom. The theme of the first movie was appearance and reality. The theme of the second could therefore only be freedom and necessity, by way of working out how to think about the ethical implications of appearance and reality. And that's how it turned out.

Here's the thing I think is confounding the critics, Gopnik included. The plot - the narrative style - of the second installment is very different than the first, as follows. The first had a beginning, a middle and an end, in that order. And a very mythic and organized affair it was. The second has no beginning (if you haven't seen the first movie, you are lost) and no ending (sorry, anti-plot spoiler that, I suppose). Only a very complicated middle, as a result of which the implied philosophy, such as it may be, is so far implied through a scanner darkly.

So I think the movie can only be faulted on narrative grounds, not philosophical. The narrative problem - if the third installment does not satisfy - will be that all these loose threads will simply be carelessly snipped off. Let's hope not. The hope is that it will all be gloriously pulled together, in which case the second installment will appear, in retrospect, every frame as philosophically fraught as the first.

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50's, 60's, and 70's probably shouldn't have survived, because...

Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent' clackers' on our wheels.

etc., etc., etc. The poster wonders whether he might just be indulging in nostalgia by seconding this attitude, but quickly dismisses the concern. Commenters on the thread confess to being moved almost to tears by the prospect of bike helments with flames on them, the flames seeming to promise a reckless, free-wheeling attitude towards life which the dour, padded helmet joylessly contradicts.

To repeat: this is silly, bordering on insane. The freedom to eat lead-based paint? Now there's something we can all rally around. Fight the power, dudes! But why stop there? Generations past lived lives even more fraught with the zip and zing of risk than those raised in the 50's, 60's and 70's. Risks such as dying of measles! Dying of polio! Dying of diptheria! (I could go on.) None of this namby-pamby vaccination for them. Kids coming up these days never get to risk getting rickets, either, thanks to nanny-state vitamin D enrichment of milk. Never knowing whether you were going to get rickets was one of those simple childhood pleasures now just a memory. And what about the risk of getting your childish hands mangled in the iron spools of some dark satanic mill? Joy-kill government regulators have taken that small pleasure away as well, what with those damn child labor laws.

Now, I know this isn't going to cut much ice with hardcore libertarians like the Samizdatistas, but I think adults should be able to smoke crack and ride around on chopped-out Harleys, helmetless (though possibly not all at the same time.) BUT, I have to say that I don't see anything much wrong with the goverment requiring people to keep their children reasonably safe, on the grounds that the children are in no position to calculate risks for themselves (or rather, are really really really bad at it). Parents' right to raise their children as they please is not generally regarded as extending to a right to let them eat lead-based paint, and that is entirely reasonable. They can eat lead later, when they are grown up.