Violence and lack of direction abounds (spoiler)

Rating: Null/10 (30 May 2003)

I went into this film with high expectations, admittedly. The Matrix was a film that opened a whole new branch of film-making: the technomancer becoming techno-Buddha. The Matrix: Reloaded was extremely poorly paced, and sometimes downright irritating, most notably the oft-hyped full-body sex scene between Neo and Trinity, which frankly made me sick to see, since there was little or no apparent emotional chemistry beforehand. On the other hand, I found the Agent Smith character intriguing as a villain, his experience with Neo in the first episode appears to have drastically changed him, making him 1. independent and 2. self-replicative. The irony of Smith's existence hits home with a scene where he sends Neo his now-useless earpiece. He confronts Neo in a really needlessly-long fight scene, involving Agent Smiths by the dozen. Aside from the seemingly endless stream of fight scenes that followed, the plot finally taking a real direction with a confrontation between Neo and the System Architect (I swear, I was thinking Tron and the MCP all over again), which led to a totally new direction for the series, especially for Morpheus and Neo. All in all, I found this movie just another high-tech action flick, and if I want to see a real one, I'll watch Blade Runner.