Matrix Reloaded Review

Brilliant, Aspen. Absolutley Brilliant. I thought i was following along fine, but only one thing didnt make sense.
All in all i thought it was a great movie. Whats better than morpheus with a Katana and a Machine Gun?
I dont think i coud last 4 years for a sequel like i waited for 'Reloaded'. Thank God we only have to wait six months!

Aspen's post is pretty much the way Kong saw it as well, but there is still a big question left unanswered...

No kidding. Clone bodies with only a portion of the mind functional so they can have life support. But they don't even need that, they have the technology to create the matrix...

Oh yeah, there'd be no story then. I forgot.

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Oh, I dunno, maybe we generate some kind of beneficial brain activity concious that we don't otherwise. All that matters is that there are some potential explanations, and not that we necessarily get one, in my opinion.

It ain't science, it's science fiction.

*plonk*

(nail on the head)

Well your opinion is wrong!

Thanks for clearing up a few things Aspen.

But that does'nt change how I feel about the movie.
what I found...
GOOD
- Agent Smith rocks, Hugo weaving does a great job with the character. I like the way Smith's personality has changed, funnier..
- The expansion of Smith's story.
- The 'twins' were bada$$.
- Neo VS all those Smiths
- Monica Bellucci
- Some of the special effects.
- The ending

Now the BAD
- The journey towards the ending, I did'nt really care what was happening up until the end. I just wanted them to shut up, get it over and done with and move on.
- The crap and boring speeches, Morpheus the main culprit.
- Zion, damn that was stupid, it was like from a star wars movie with all the tribal stuff, robes, dances.
- The Zion rave scene totally out of place.
- Sometimes fight scenes started for no apparent reason.
- The KFC dude ( The Architect) at the end.
- Keanu Reeves can't act.
- The choice of music for the fight scenes, I found them crap and did'nt really match the action and excitement on screen.
- Some 'Virtual actors' looked very fake.
- Tank, what happened to you man, Link just does'nt compare to you.

Thats all I can think of Now.

Overall I found it a disapointment but I'm sure I'll won't find it as bad when I watch it again ( On Video). I Liked the first one very much and was expecting reloaded to be better but I was wrong.
The trailer for Revolutions looked really good but so did the one for Reloaded and see how that turned out.
Alas, these are my opinions and mine alone.

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Well, in my case at least, you believe wrong.

The ship is actually called the Nebuchadnezzar. But since you're obviously such an honest, die hard matrix fan who became obsessed over it after the first film, you already know that.

It was more like 10 minutes, but I agree with you: it was gratuitious. Morpheus' speech was likewise fluffy and pointless. I suppose it served the purpose of whipping the Zionites into a lusty frenzy and giving them courage (ie good crowd control) but beyond that, I don't see what it was good for. I personally was waiting for him to whip out the "The One will save us" speech and was somewhat disssapointed that he didn't do anything of the sort. Instead we get something more along the lines of, "We will resist the power of the machines..WITH THE POWER OF TECHNO!" UNTZ*UNTZ*UNTZUNTZUNTZ*

Apart from these minor gripes, this movie did what it had to do, and did it very attractively, I might add. I paid $18.00 for two tickets for a late-night showing (thanks, fandango.com, for your gratuitous service charges, I will never buy tickets from you again) and I feel I got my every penny's worth.

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See, I don't really see the rave/sex scene as superfluous. My instant thought in that scene (especially cutting back and forth to Neo/Trinity and their facial expressions, etc.) was to contrast vividly humans and machines. That is, this sort of primal, emotional release is something machines will never be able to understand or quantify properly.

I dunno. I guess I didn't see any problem with it because of its stark contrasts. Those were doubly evident during the sequences of Neo and Trinity naked because of the leftover plug-holes in their bodies, things you don't normally see on them in other scenes. It was a reminder that they themselves were once machine-like, but were now free to enjoy one of the truly holistically human experiences: sex.

Didn't anyone else take it this way?

Someone mentioned Agent Smith being perhaps a wrench in the cogs in Revolutions. That sparked a thought I started to form while watching the movie. Early on Smith "thanks" Neo for freeing him and says he doesn't quite know what about him has changed. And now that he's sneaked his way into Zion (via Bane, I think), I am wondering if he might come over to the "good side" (a la Darth Vader) at the end, preferring humanity after all. It would certainly be quite a switch from the man who couldn't stand the smell of human sweat in Matrix 1.

Well, them's my thoughts. A good, fun movie overall, even with the parts of the multiple-Smiths scene where everyone looked like a fake video-game version of themselves. Once in a while if you keyed in on Reeves' face, you could tell he was CGI at that moment. But they were counting on you NOT looking at that, of course.

ALSO, hadn't I heard that the actress who plays the Oracle died? At what point did she die, since that was obviously still her in this movie? Will she then just not be in Revolutions? Just curious...

Linda

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Oops, Chris, can you make my post a spoiler and then delete this. I dunno how and always forget to do it! Thanks!

One last comment about the rave scene: Heck, if you didn't have the kind of easygoing, everything-handed-to-you lifestyle that all of us here take for granted, what ELSE would you have to do for entertainment?

This kind of "entertainment" is pretty much all these people have left. It's primal, it's urgent, it's fully human, and to me it made perfect sense.

That having been said, I too was disappointed with Zion as a whole. I mean, wouldn't these people have to have some sort of internal commerce, industry, work? Seems like they all just sit around in little rusty cubicles and wait for something to happen. Even the commander who took Neo down to the engineering wing said he hadn't a clue how anything worked to keep everything going. Frankly, I'd imagine that place would need all hands on-deck 24/7 to keep it functioning on such old, battered equipment. It would not by any stretch of the imagination run itself so smoothly as it seems. Those people have far too much free time.

I would have liked to have seen more of the daily life of Zion -- the industry and bustle of the "city" as a true city. Not just as a waystation for Neo and his gang to grab a catnap, make a speech, have sex, and then whoosh, they're off again.

Them's my other two cents.

Oh, I dunno about that. They seem to have sufficient technology to do more than just grind against each other for entertainment purposes. If they can teach themselves Kung Fu in a matter of minutes, I think it's safe to say they've got Nintendo, at the very least.

Regardless, It was too hedonistic and as such did not line up with the high-minded concepts Morpheus is so fond of.

"We shall forge our destiny! We shall reclaim the earth for all of mankind and cast off the shackles of mechanical oppression! But first, dryf*cking!"

So you didn't see at all that it could have been, "But first, let's celebrate our humanity"? "Our difference from the machines"?

Still don't have a problem with it, frankly.

As for the technology, I just recall not being too impressed with things like their food choices or clothing and hygiene situation. They use the technology because they have to. But they haven't really made themselves a very livable situation in terms of creature comforts. It probably doesn't help that they're forced to live hidden away, no access to growing things on the surface of the earth, etc.

I would have like to have seen a little more of that daily struggle.

I saw that it could have been that, yes, and I'm sure that's what they were going for, but I feel they messed it up. It could've been clever and poignant...instead it was juvenile. It was MTV. It's not so much the concept that I didn't like, as the execution. In my opinion, the end product was a scene that felt completely out of sync with the rest of the movie(s) so far.


Agreed. Given the amount of time they devoted to Zion, you'd think they'd have expounded on that sort of thing a bit more.

Fair enough. Perhaps I didn't have as much problem with that scene because I pretty much never watch MTV (except The Osbournes and the occasional Jackass episode). So it didn't "remind" me of that at all.

Okay, now that I have your attention, what do you think about the whole Smith-as-redeemable idea? Did that possibility occur to anyone else? Anyone? Anyone? (she says, in her best Ben-Stein voice)

Was he redeemable? He still seems bad, just bad for a different reason. He does seem more human now, though, I'll give you that, and with that change comes some sympathy, but ultimately it seemed to me he was still interfering with all good guy stuff.

Yes, but Vader was like that till the end too. Granted, we were given a reason in Empire Strikes Back to hold out hope for him -- he's Luke's dad.

In Smith's case, could it just be that he has become "infected" with some element of humanity, and now that he is in some sense among the humans (via Bane), he could prefer it?

I'm talking about movie 3 here -- what *could* happen. Might not be as inevitable as Vader's turn, but then again, those movies weren't big on shocking plot twists, frankly. Most all had a keen amount of foreshadowing.

Can't the two of you do this at home?

OH WAIT. YOU ARE, AREN'T YOU?

LOL ... we're at different homes.

Although when he's here at this home, I've been known to call him down to dinner using AIM and email.