The George Lucas method for destroying franchises in full display.

Rating: 3/10 (5 April 2010)

Back in 99 everyone was expecting the new Star Wars movie, it was going to be the "big" sci-fi/fantasy event of the year, of the new millennium. Turns out the phantom menace was an atrocious mess of cgi and bad writing, same with the rest of the star wars prequels. The real sci-fi event of that year was not Lucas ego leaving a big stain in cinemas all over the world, it was a fun kung fu/anime hybrid of nerd power fantasies done right enough to engage the viewer and not make you feel that your intelligence was being insulted. It was the year of the matrix.
Now move to 03, the sequel is coming, the Wachowskis had an entire generation in the palm of their hands. The could had created the biggest and most successful cult-movie franchise this world has seen since....Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The world was full of possibilities for the matrix, everything was coming out: video game, anime, action figures and anything else you could name of. History in the making. Then Reloaded opens in cinemas everywhere, and we have another mess of bad writing, poorly directed sequences, annoying cgi and so on. A franchise permanently killed (not even the money made from the expectations helped) dozens of fans writing endless rants "explaining" the movie in the internet and just a bunch of people coming out completely bored out of their minds.
It's not hard to see where everything goes wrong. The matrix reloaded has pretty much no reason to exist at all, just like the star wars prequels. It adds nothing to it's world, it actually destroys it. But mostly, is just a bore to watch, a huge incredible bore of a movie that will hammer your head with endless sequences of tedious fights that go nowhere, and a bunch of cgi stamped all over your face.
Neo is now god/Jesus/mahoma/whatever, the whole learning process from the first movie is over. He can defeat agents with his pinky, but not just him, pretty much everyone else can do that, except of course Trinity in a atrociously placed sequence for yet another embarrassing scene of super nerd powers. Remember how dangerous the agents were in the first movie? Every encounter could mean the death of any of the characters. Not here, they're just cgi filler for all the over-long action sequences that the Wachowskis could stuff here.
Remember how the first movie felt with a purpose? A clear series of objectives? Surviving the agents, protecting the location of zion, watching Neo learn about his abilities. None of that is here, there's a web of characters over a web of sub-plots over a mess of a "core" plot where Neo is suppose to re-start the whole matrix because the creator of the matrix made it that way. Sounds interesting? It isn't, the dialogues never once will engage you in any way possible, neither the acting, which seems to have hit rock-bottom after the fairly decent performances in the first movie. Several characters are now just filler, others fan-service (hello Mrs Bellucci) and there's just more and more stuff that never feels that it belongs there, or that is fun to watch.
There's probably a long long website/blog/vlog of matrix fans answering all the "questions" about this and that. But when a movie boils down to a long summary of Q&A, then it's not a movie anymore. It's a fan-fic in this case, a badly written one. It's not the "what" but the "how" that really matters, even if Reloaded was speaking about great truths in this world (not the case here by the way) it does so in the most utterly juvenile, incompetent and clueless way possible. Yeah man, Neo might be the reincarnation of every single human deity into one, but he will still look goofy as hell in those clothes and flying around everywhere.
It took George Lucas two decades to ruin his franchise, the Wachachachoskis did it in only 4 years. I guess this still could be worse, it could be a movie about blue furries fighting one dimensional space marines, or Indiana Jones fighting aliens.