YAWN.... SPOILER ALERT

Rating: 1/10 (20 May 2003)

Where The Matrix was a tightly-knit film, each scene relevant and interdependent, The Matrix Reloaded came across with too much philosophizing, too much brooding and too much redundancy, so much so that when Neo fights the Agent Smiths ad naseum, I found myself rooting for the bad guys to end it once and for all. The fights were unoriginal and repetitive, like some XXX film. How much can someone watch before it becomes droll? This is just another of Hollywood's attempts to cram a two-hour film into four for the sake of profit, not art. And I missed the coming attractions after the credits, which no one announced, but left me to find out about after I had left.
Apparently, everything we learned in the original film was a lie. "The real world" is not where humans are plugged into embryonic sacks. The world of the Nebuchadnezzar is a matrix as well. Toward the end, Neo uses his power in "the real world" to stop the octopus machines. Only he shouldn't be able to do that, because his powers are only those of a lucid dream. Which means that "the real world" is also a dream. From what I would surmise the plot to be, thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, humanity, wishing to become immortal or needing to escape some cataclysm, plugged itself into a computer, so that all of the minds of its populace would survive (This is one chapter from Amazing Stories from the 1930's by Lawrence Manning from a series called The Man Who Awoke.) But the computer caretaker gained sentience and began manipulating their thoughts. To prevent anyone from awakening, it created a dream within a dream, a borrowed theme from Open Your Eyes/Vanilla Sky. But I guess we will just need to wait and see how the money machines manipulated the pens of the Wachowski brothers. I only hope that one day I can awaken to a DVD with the edited "corrector's cut" with all the soap rinsed clean.