Great movie with slow start

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2003)

Overall the movie was good. It has a slow meandering start which leads to a good end. The good things are that the fight scenes are quite good. The story is interesting after the first half an hour. The philosophical discussions are pretty good.
The main problem with the movies is that this is a movie that suffers a problem common to most sequels. Where the budget is 10 times larger, the action is 10 times more, there are 10 times more characters and their is 10 times more story. The net effect typically is that it is 1/10th of the original. The Godfather 2 is a perfect example of how to make a good sequel. The story of how the Godfather's origin is a small simple story which is great to watch. In the Matrix Reloaded there just seems to be too much going on and with Neo now having God like powers there is nobody to really challenge him, he just seems to have meaningless fight scenes. In the Matrix Neo was the underdog and thats what makes the fight scenes fun to watch. Also the fight scenes in the sequel are too complicated, there is too much to watch. In the original the subway fight scene between Agent smith and Neo was perfect. It was one on one and easy to follow. The other disappointment that I had was that some of the special effects seemed to look fake. In the first fight scene where Neo battles hundreds of Agent Smith. There are some slow motions scenes where you can see a computerized Keanu Reeves which is not very well done. Overall I give it a 8/10