I’ve been kinda holding back for a day or so before posting about Matrix: Reloaded, just to be sure that I’ve got my reasons for disliking it straight in my head. And let me state that again, and very clearly, I surely did dislike this soulless sequel. I am, in fact, gobsmacked that it was even made by the same guys as the first one.
Here are my personal key reasons for loathing this cinematic suppository:
– Discontinuity from the first film. At the end of The Matrix, Neo can fly into agents and explode them from the inside. Neo can return from the dead. Neo bends the matrix to his will. They can’t shoot him. They can’t stop him. They can’t even trace his phone calls. He is a risen Christ-figure, a saviour, so much a God in his environment that the laws of phsyics no longer apply to him, he is no longer even shacked by gravity itself. He calls the system itself to tell them that he now has an agenda, he will awaken everyone in the matrix and let them see what’s what. He KNOWS what he’s up to.
At the start of Reloaded, Neo … can fight better than the other dudes, and WOAH! Can fly! … and that’s it. He has no idea what he’s meant to do. They make a point of having him state this! Fuck that shit.
– Editing. You should never _NOTICE_ editing in a movie, in my opinion. You should certainly never ponder what drugs the editor(s) were on when they did their work, and you should never EVER actually cringe in your chair when presented with shitpile editing.
– Score. “What score?” you ask? Movie 1 had an ass-kicking score. I cannot remember a single track from the Reloaded score. And it was apparently the same dude who did the work. Bizarre.
– Subtext. Or, in this case, Supertext. I can almost imagine one of the CSI guys looking at my corpse on a table, and saying into his little tape-recorder “Death appears to be result of sledgehammer blows which have driven a movie theme directly into the brain.” Yes, yes, you wanted to make a movie which dealt with the nature of reality, and the relationship of man to machine. I get it. I GET IT. I got it the FIRST TIME. You don’t NEED TO FUCKING EXPLAIN IT POINT BY POINT. I don’t need _stilted fucking exposition_ from Councillor Exposition, it is OBVIOUS what you’re getting it. Thank you!
– Fight scenes – Static. Pointless. Viscuous compared to the fluid excellence of Movie 1. Crappy music. I was mostly bored.
– Shagging and Dancing. Don’t get me wrong, I _like_ shagging, I like it fine. I don’t mind sex scenes, nor for that matter do I mind slightly softcore dance scenes. And I’m sure that if you want to intercut two of these kinds of scenes together, in order to OH SO FUCKING DEFTLY make YET ANOTHER point about how humanity differs from machine, that’s fine too. It’s just that I DO think that a few seconds of it would be fine, given that it doesn’t advance the plot in any way, or anything. I’m REALLY not sure why you’d want to have these intercut scenes go on for .. oh, hell, I don’t know … about six hours, it felt like.
– CGI. Yes, CGI. A lot of the fight scenes were pure GCI. They were. They so _so_ were. Really, really, REALLY CGI. In fact, bits of that one scene with Neo and the Lots of Agent Smiths looked like a fucking PS2 game. I wish they’d stuck to wire work. This was simply shitty texturing, and unrealistic-looking CGI. What the fuck were they thinking?
and lastly:
– The Dialogue. Oh, sweet Jesus, the dialogue. So very very much of it. Dialogue like .. great .. big … albatrosses, yeah that’s it, albatrosses sculped out of lead, painted all my least favourite colours, inscribed with stiff, pensive gothic poetry written by livejournal users who’ve just broken up with their latest mouth-breathing partners, and then hurled into the air by catapults, only to land directly in my auditory canals, while thousands of howler monkeys look on and screech wildly. The next movie, I hope it’s all non-CGI fight scenes, with no dialogue whatsoever. I might allow one “Woah!” from Keanu, but that’s it.
Things that were good:
The one-liners of Huge Weaving(s) and the silver agents. Bits of the freeway chase scene were excellent. That’s about it, for me.
I will not be making much of an effort to see Matrix: Revolutions, based on this film.
May 17, 2003 at 8:35 am
Okay, I have to admit I haven’t read this review fully. I will probably read it tomorrow when I am sober, but if there is one thing, I agree that the Matrix Reloaded blows goats (my opinion to be found here. I was really really disappointed and will not be watching that movie again. Ever.
May 17, 2003 at 3:44 pm
I went in thinking that I would be protected from disappointment by my mighty shield of diminished expectations. I thought the first one was just OK, and I expected this one to be a bit worse.
But it managed to disappoint me anyway. The fight scenes were boring because none of the characters were ever really in jeopardy.
May 19, 2003 at 12:54 am
Given what you and jsr have said, my vague feeling of can’t be bothered has been strengthened. I found the first one slightly puerile, though I did enjoy the visuals. I did rather like Xmen 2 though. I had low expectations of that. Some of the design was pretty. A lot of these things have no decent story to speak of, I really just go to look at the pretty moving pictures.