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Spoilers of both this and The Matrix follow.
I liked the original Matrix a great deal. It was not a deep movie, despite Fishburne's attempts to philosophize, but it was fairly well paced, fun, and I have a soft spot for Hong Kong fights.
In the original, Neo was the secret life of the rather unhappy cube worker Anderson. By day, corporate drone, and by night, brave hacker. Eventually, he eventually is forced to choose between these lives by his actions - does he become an outlaw fighting the machine, or does he go back to the safe, forgettable world he started in. Interestingly, he discovers that once one is shorn of illusions, life rather sucks. He has his girl by his side and his boon companions, but he eats processed swill, dresses in sweats, and lives in a truly skungy bit of machinery. Still, the truth makes him free.
At least part of the fun of that first movie lay in the "what if it were me" questions raised in the viewer's mind. What if _I_ were capable of the impossible? What if I were "The One". It does not even matter that much what you are The One example of, with a cool title like that.
Further, agent Smith made a wonderful bad guy, as he embodied all of the fear of authority that we carry with us. He was as unstoppable as a terminator, and as merciless.
At the end of the Matrix, Neo must return to the Matrix to share his good news of freedom.
This movie fails to completely to carry through on the ideas of the original movie, and it does so with such lack of gusto, such poor scriptwriting and such poor editing that I cannot believe they had planned these changes. When the dialog is at a fifth grade level, with various long words dropped in randomly, I find it hard to believe that they understand what they are saying.
My short list of characterization failures:
The Oracle goes from mildly helpful, if deceitful to utterly obstructionist without any real reason.
Major "personalities" of the matrix are introduced without need - the keymaster, for example, was a cute idea, but just not that interesting a character.
Fishburne loses his "advisor" role, and gets nothing to replace it with.
The people of Zion are not particularly likable, nor would you really _want_ them running the world.
Special effects problems:
The fight scenes are pointless and intermitable. In The Matrix, you felt Neo could lose, and that he had to become something greater in order to survive. In The Matrix Reloaded, he is merely the viewpoint character of a particularly poorly plotted video game.
The fight on the freeway looked quite fake, and not that interesting.
Pacing problems.
As I mentioned above, the fight scenes were interminable.
The rave went on too long - everyone in my row at the theater was looking at their watch. Not because we mind good dancing and good orgies, but because we did not know about the people pictured, nor did we care.
Whatever hack wrote the creator's soliloquy should be blacklisted from the business. It meandered, used words that the scriptwriter clearly did not understand, and was a waste of time and a pacing killer. The creator's speech could have been done in a tenth the time, and with more peril as "Zion exists to give rebels a place to go so they do not destroy the Matrix. There are now too many people who do not believe; the matrix is in danger of crashing and killing every person hooked up to it. Further, the earth cannot support even the people in Zion, let alone these others. You may choose one person from Zion to form the new Zion, while I wipe the memories of the people currently in the Matrix."
Instead, we got a long, drawn out bunch of twaddle. If someone argues that it is deep, ask for a transcript, and try breaking down the sentences. Each one is too long by several clauses, and uses words with clearer, shorter synonyms.
So, in summary, not worth seeing.
I have seen the third one, and despite what a number of reviewers have said, skip it. It does not save this turkey.
The reviewers who feel that the second and third movies were "deep" should go see some truly deep movies. Perhaps read a book or two on rhetoric and debate, and perhaps a bit of philosophy. This movie is just not hard to understand, but it is hard to stomach.
Scott


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