Great story/effects + bad execution = Good but not as good as the first.

Rating: 10/10 (15 May 2003)

I'd just like to say the special effects and fighting scenes were amazing. I never thought that anyone could pull off a 20 minutes fight scene with a million people who look the same and just have a bunch of bodies flying around and not get bored after 2 minutes, but they pulled it off. The CGI was very well placed in it, it never had a close up shot of anyones face during the CGI, which is an obvious give away, and it seemed pretty natural.
The twenty minute minute rave scene almost made me cry. All I could think was that the whole movie was going to be one big party with a million extras jumping up and down, but I'm glad they changed it a bit.
I think that they added scenes like that and extra time on the fight scenes because they wanted to make 2 movies out of one, because thats really what it is, 5 hours of unedited footage.
Don't get me wrong, this is one of the best movies I have seen in a while, but it really has nothing against the original. The original Matrix was a very novel idea, it hadn't been done before and it wasn't too hyped up. This movie was very hyped up, I have no idea how I managed to see this movie without it getting ruined for me, but I did.
About the thing with "Why didn't they just hook up cows to the matrix." How do you even know cows exist in the real world? I remember the scene where they were talking about how there were programs for everything - for birds, trees, and wind. What makes you think there isn't one for cows? Maybe the real world was nothing like The Matrix's earth, it could have been just inhabited by humans, or maybe humans were the only thing that survived the hundred-year war.
**SPOILERS**
OK, I'm done with that rant. Anyway, another thing I didn't like too much was how they made it more Hollywood. I wouldn't have lost any sleep if Trinity had died intsead of somehow being brought back to life by Neo sticking his hand in her chest.
To sum it up, great effects, lots of useless filler scenes, and you have no idea why they have to hook up humans to the machines, and maybe you'll find out in the third one.