Hmmmm...

Rating: Null/10 (27 May 2003)

My my - a lot of very negative reviews here from the IMDB clan. Well I must confess that prior to seeing this I had seen some very negative reviews on various sites so I went in expecting little - what I got was a mixed bag. The premise as it stands at the end of the film is intriguing - the idea that the Matrix, to work, has to offer a choice of acceptance or rejection and that this inevitably means (1) the growth of a community of rejectors (Zion) that will ultimately endanger the Matrix unless checked (2) the emergence of an anomaly in the form of Neo who acts as the rebalancer or even rebooter of the Matrix. The hints suggest that Neo is in fact a Matrix program of some form that has become human and that his discovery of love in this 6th incarnation has allowed him to bridge that gap - he now affects machinery in the 'real world' and the idea about both machine and man needing each other for existence will be tied up in Revolutions - though any point of this chain could just be a lie by the Architect or you could have the 'dream within a dream' scenario where even the 'real world' is a Matrix encompassing a smaller one - all these possibilities exist and the film sets these up as well as can be expected - though I fear the Architect's speech could have been too confusing for younger audience members. However a lot of the other ponderings on causality and choice elsewhere in the film are frankly inane and cod-philosophising at its worst.
The FX were good if not great in parts. However we have come to expect this and Matrix I is largely to blame - ironic that you get knocked down because you did such a good job before but seems characteristic of much of life. However two points do start to grate:
1) Neo had begun manipulating the code at the end of 1. His inability to do this and his subsequent fights etc. in Reloaded are partially explained by 'upgraded agents' and 'mutating / altered coding' but it just doesn't really cut the mustard - the directors seem to realise this and scuttle past it in their desire to pack in as much kung-fu-chop-socky as possible.
2) The fighting has become too stylised - no-one seems to really get injured apart from a couple of the Merovingian's goons - that is understandable with agents but it just gets a bit boring after a while for anyone who isn't a kung-fu fanatic.
I really don't think this film is bad - I always feared that the directors had pushed the abilities of Neo too far at the end of the first one for anything to be left for a 2nd & 3rd and they have proved me partially right and partially wrong. Any comparison with the childish drivel & nonsense that was Attack of the Clones and Phantom Menace is way off mark.