No competition for Lord of the Rings!

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2003)

I finally went to see the Matrix Reloaded yesterday. I loved the first one but I never felt it really needed a sequel. After hearing some negative words about it, and fewer positive, I lowered my expectations and went to watch it. But as it turned out, my expectiations were still too high!
This is not a great movie at all. In fact, the first half is really terrible, with that stupid caveman-dance and all the uninteresting relationships, I was bored-- which is not a good thing for a Matrix film.
Then there was a highlight, the (clearly cgi'ed, but very entertaining) fight between Neo and the agent Smith clones. I was glad the Wachowski's dragged Smith back into the story, for he was one of the best things in the film, although I wondered when he would go and wink at the camera. Then there was the fight on the stairs and the freeway chase, both were nice but never as ground-breaking as they should have been. I liked the twins, although I found the way Morpheus beat them plain stupid and illogical. But none of those scenes really made up for the truly pathetic first half of the movie. Zion is truly the worst idea since George Lucas decided to put Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. I also found Morpheus completely disappointing, all he did was mumble incomprehensible quasi-wisdoms and walk around with his hands on his back. Carrie-Anne Moss was great as Trinity, but it says something of a film when Keanu Reeves is one of the best things in it.
But then there was the finale. I presume the Wachowski's have edited this on a Hi-8 camera or with (as Leonard Maltin once said) a chainsaw. It was a mess. A horrible, mess. First I thought it was a trailer for the third film, but suddenly a power-plant was blown up and there was an architect who should have said memorable things like "there is no spoon", but Andy and Larry apparently ran out of inspiration.
Watching the Matrix Reloaded made me wonder. Did they spend all their money on the freeway-chase, and then realise that they had to make a film? The effects were sometimes hilariously bad, the dialogue was sub-Phantom Menace, the editing was amateur-ish. While there should have been new, memorable characters (see Lando and Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back or Gollum in the Two Towers), there were uninspired people where you just couldn't care less about.
This was a disappointment and Revolutions has to do a lot to make up for this.