A shallow movie for a gullible audience

Rating: 1/10 (18 February 2007)

This may be the worst big-budget sci-fi movie I have ever seen. Ever. Worse than I, Robot, worse than Lost In Space. Yes, it's that bad. Just try to endure the "Cave Rave" scene through its entirety and you'll see what I mean.
When I first saw the original Matrix, I wondered how the Wachowski brothers could top themselves with the second movie in the series. Well, they didn't. It's like they decided to skip #2 and go directly to #3 when it came to upping the ante. This movie sucks. It sucks real bad, and I'm disappointed that I wasted two hours of my life watching this dreck.
For starters, the dialogue is horrible. It seems that the directors chose to mimic the original Star Trek t.v. show for cheesy speeches and boring conversations between characters. I don't think there is one line of redeemable dialogue in this flick; it makes all the actors sound like they didn't pass the fifth grade.
The special effects, while passable in some places, are simply horrible in others. The fight scene between Neo and the dozens of Agent Smiths looks like it was copied out of a cutscene from some video game made in 1998. And the exploding trucks after the chase scene looked just as bad. CGI technology has gotten to the point where these kinds of goofs are inexcusable. Heck, Jurassic Park looks better.
The action in the first Matrix was well-paced, while in Reloaded it seems like the directors wanted to showcase all the money they received from the studio by filling every action scene with as much CGI and exploding debris as possible. The chase scene on the freeway should have been fun and exciting, but it turned boring after about three minutes. Ditto for the Merovingian mansion fight.
I've heard many people say that Reloaded is the one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, and I am at a loss as to how they were fooled into believing this. Maybe it's the fact that Reloaded (and the rest of the series, for that matter) disguises its humble action/adventure origins in a cloak of grade school quasi-philosophy. Seriously, if you think that the Matrix series has some kind of deep, in-depth psychological meaning, then you need to go back to college and take some real philosophy courses. I do understand the point that the Wachowski bros. are trying to get across, but don't insult my intelligence by telling me that the Matrix is a serious discussion in subjective reality. It's not even close.
The only good part about this movie is Monica Belucci and her cleavage. It's too bad such a great actress got stuck in some of the worst scenes.
Calling this movie a science fiction classic belittles real classics such as Metropolis, Soylent Green, Blade Runner, and Akira. You're just comparing apples to oranges.
On a side note, I've only seen this movie on the DVD that came with the Matrix collector's edition (the one with the resin bust of Neo). I have to say the sound quality on this disc is horrible. All of the quieter parts are so muffled I have to turn up the volume just to hear any dialogue, only to have my eardrums ruptured once the music or explosions kick in. Strangely enough, this is only a problem on this particular disc; it doesn't happen with the other discs in the collection. Anybody else have this issue?