As Good as everyone Says and as Bad (Some possible Spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (24 May 2003)

Just thought I'd drop a few thoughts after seeing Matrix Reloaded.
I hadn't read any reviews of the movie going into it but I was catching some very negative vibes around work and the web (just from review headlines and such) so I went into it with somewhat lower expectations I otherwise might have. But, unfortunately, even this didn't save me.
I have to agree with some of the other reviewers that parts of this movie are boring and sleep-inducing, but contrary to some suggestions it wasn't the "talky" parts or because I didn't "get it" that made my mind start to drift. IMHO every single one of the fight scenes could have been cut in half and not affected the movie as a whole. These fights were long and drawn out and *pointless*! I enjoy the wire-fu and the action, don't get me wrong, but as Harry Knowles said over on Ain't It Cool, what happened to that scene at the end of The Matrix when Neo literally "explodes" Smith? Why didn't he do that or even attempt it in this one? And while we're asking questions about Agents, here's another one. In the first movie the other characters were getting the snot beaten out of them by agents. It may even have been a line from one of the characters I think that the best way to fight an agent was to run. And yet in Reloaded we see both Trinity and Morpheus going toe-to-toe with agents and the worst injury we see is a little blood from Trinity's mouth. Come onnn! They're not all "The One". They can't all fly and turn themselves into computer animations.
I went with my wife, who is absolute death on obvious CGI work, which, by extension, makes me paranoid about it, so I was aware of the fake-ness in some parts of Neo's fight scene with the hundred Agent Smiths where Neo would suddenly assume a very fluid appearance. Surely they could have done this scene without animating Neo? Here's an idea, if you can't do the stunt using plain old wirework or other methods then, hey, don't do it. A lot of times CGI just Looks. Too. Fake. And it jolts you out of the movie. It's like being able to see behind the set, or see the wires. Get over it, it's not a means for doing away with every other method of sfx, make-up and stuntwork in a movie. To echo another reviewer's comments, I don't want to pay Aust$12.50 to watch a 2hr+ video game.
I enjoyed the movie, it had some very fine moments and twists in it, there were some great scenes (not the least of which was Trinity's motorbike ride and Neo's ferocious flight to save her life at the end) and stunts but it really failed to live up to what it could, potentially, have been. Those who call it mind-blowing or brain-bending or any variation on those words obviously needs to get out and a) see more movies, or b) read more books. 'Cause I'm still sitting here and my mind is most definitely not blown.
The one big failing of this movie was that it simply wasn't a movie on its own. I realise that was a part of it, like X-Men had to be made before they made X-Men 2. Like any of the Lord of the Rings movies viewed on their own simply aren't complete movies, but Reloaded just lacked something. It felt, as others have said, that this movie was just padded out to stretch one script into two movies. I sincerely hope not because I'm frightened for Revloutions now. I'm praying that Revolutions will blow our minds, and I'm terrified that it won't because I want nothing more than for Revolutions to live up to the hype and expectations that have been buildings in the minds of Matrix fans for the last four years and to blow the lid off everything we've seen up till now.