Movie Reviews

The first Matrix movie was a really smart sci-fi film, helped along with some excellent special effects and action scenes. Part two of the 'trilogy', The Matrix Reloaded is an action movie, helped along with some excellent special effects and some cool sci-fi ideas. That might not sound like a huge difference, but it is a difference worth noting, I think.

The Matrix Reloaded picks up a year or so after the events of the first film. I won't give away any major plot points here or anything, but suffice to say that Neo is pretty much a god to the people of Zion, the last human city, and Morpheus still believes that Neo is "the one" who will destroy the machines and free all of mankind. While the first film was a more "personal" film (dealing primarily with Neo's discovery of the Matrix and his struggle to understand and come to terms with it -- and himself), this new movie takes a broader approach. A lot of time is spent in the city of Zion itself, and we observe that there are many other hovercrafts travelling through earth's old abandoned sewers, freeing people and looking for weaknesses in the Matrix. In other words, we realize that what took place on the Nebuchadnezzar in the first film was only a very small part of the humans' fight against the machines. This is the way to make a good sequal: give us all of the stuff from the original film, but expand on everything, introduce interesting new characters and places, and don't simply re-tell the same story.

In those respects, The Matrix Reloaded delivers, and as such it is a very good, entertaining movie. I have a couple small complaints, though. The one thing that the Watchowski brothers perhaps expanded too much on was the action. I mean, of course the action in the first film was cool, and the action in this second film is cool, too. But sometimes it seems as though it was wrapped up in its own coolness, and one or two of the action scenes went on a minute or so longer than they probably should have (I'm thinking most particularly about the "Neo vs. Multiple Agent Smiths" fight-scene). Another complaint is the sometimes-blatent use of CGI. Similar to my first complaint, it seems as though maybe the filmmakers were trying too hard to do some really cool things, but some of the things they seemed to want to do could only be done with CGI, and it was pretty obvious which things those were (wow, that was a really convoluted sentance, wasn't it?).

Oh, and a word of warning here: it's very important to remember that The Matrix Reloaded is the first part of a two-part series, which will conclude with The Matrix Revolutions in November. I'm not considering this as a downside to the film, because I knew full-well what was coming; but just be aware that this film ends very abruptly, almost to the point of groan-inducing frustration (much moreso than even the last two installments of The Lord of the Rings). Come to think of it, perhaps that's something of a positive for the film: I was pretty wrapped up in what was happening near the end, and to all-of-a-sudden realize that I won't know how the story ends until November is pretty annoying!

Regardless, this is a good film, and Revolutions promises to be even better.