Internally Inconsistent but pretty

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2003)

Loved the first movie. It was actually an interesting and thought-provoking sci-fi film.
This one, though, is a wreck. It makes no internal sense. It tries to answer questions as to who made the Matrix and the prophecy etc and then answers them in a way that completely contradicts everything we've seen before without any attempt to try to make it make sense. I'm not the only one who was sitting there listening to the characters (especially the Architect) babbling away thinking "hang on, that didn't make sense!"
*SPOILERS* Fundamental things that didn't make sense: * What on earth was the reason for the machines to keep recreating Zion? * Why were the millions of people inside the Matrix going to suddenly die if Neo chose the wrong door? * Why did the Architect even give Neo a choice at all, and what precisely was the choice anyway? Yes, I know one door saved Trinity and one door sort of saved humanity, but how precisely was his going through the other door going to save humanity? * Neo has special powers inside the Matrix because he can see it for the computer-generated world it is. So how does he magically stop a Sentinel in the real world at the end?...and many more. *END SPOILERS*
As for the action, look, it didn't have any tension. Once you make your hero superhuman and unstoppable (as Neo became at the end of the first Matrix movie) you have to give him some weaknesses. Even Superman had kryptonite. Otherwise who cares about the fights? Spectacle, yes, but meaningless. For example, they could have made TIME Neo's limitation. Neo might have had to do so many things with his superhuman powers in an extremely short period of time that suddenly we would doubt whether he could manage it. Just an idea. But as they were, the fights had no meaning whatsoever.
And what's with Laurence Fishburne's public speaking voice?
I could only enjoy this movie if I just pretended to accept that whatever crap was coming out of the actors' mouths was actually as profound and logical as it was supposed to be.