Well, upgrades; so to speak.

Rating: 7/10 (23 May 2003)

Well, one thing is getting more evident as these few years pass by: while in the 70's Star Wars made millions of fans go to the theatres and buy merchandise; now, in the late 90's and early 21 st century, piles and piles of movies try up to be the inheriters of the Star wars saga: The Matrix, X Men, Lord Of The Rings or Harry Potter. When the first Matrix came out back in 1999, it became an instant success: it had a provoking message, state of the art special effects and truly dazzling gravity-less fights. Within a year hundreds of movies referenced in bigger or smaller amounts, the fights that changed movie History. It isn't necessary to be the movie's Oracle, to understand that sooner or later the sequel (or maybe two!) would be coming with the underling of being truly essential to the story. And as they said many times troughout the movie, upgrades have been done. In every possible aspect... of technology. All the subtileness of the first movie is now gone to leave room for special effects fanfare and sound galore. However the storyline and provoking messages were lost among the four year lasting filming, that clearly only took that long for the sake of its dazzling action sequences and special effects; so it is sad to report that after four years of waiting, Reloaded is clearly inferior to the predecessor, because the Watchowskis pushed farfetched more than they actually could, so this sequel commits all the mistakes the lower sequels do: reference success movies as much as they can. Regarding that, Star Wars fans will rejoice, since the references to the galaxy far, far away abound -- the whole of Zion, the counsil and the counselors, the ships and the trio of heros. But the filmmakers weren't satisfied: they had to invade the comic books, specially the far better X2: Neo can take any hard hit like if he had an iron skeleton like Wolverine; he's telechinetic like Jean Grey; he controls bullets like Magneto, and if it wasn't enough he had to be superman either. The film can be nitpicked - as it is being gradually - but it is not that bad, popcorn at its most. So far the year has clearly a winner: X Men 2 over the Matrix Reloaded, Hugh Jackman over Keanu Reeves, and while The Matrix has dozens of fights and slightly better special effects, X Men 2 has Nightcrawler's homicide attempt on the president, that solely beats the entire Reloaded thing.
7 out of 10.