Steve Reads

In response to a thread on a friend’s message board, I wrote down some thoughts about The Matrix Reloaded (below). It probably contains spoilers, so I’d propose that you keep away from it until you’ve seen the movie. Or read what I’ve written if you expect that you’ll never see the movie.

Some friends and I talked about “The Matrix Reloaded”[film] after we saw it, and I think we all agreed — to varying degrees — that we were underimpressed by this movie. I can say the following for myself.

1. The eight-hour sequence where they cut between a rave and Trinity and Neo having sex is completely unnecessary.
2. They overused the viewing-things-through-Matrix-vision technique (meaning, the world looks digital for a moment).
3. Neo restarted Trinity’s heart. If possible, that is even more cheesy than kissing Neo back to life in the first Matrix.
4. If Neo learned in the first Matrix how to completely destroy agents - that is, not just beat them during fights, but actually turn them into pure energy or whatever — then why didn’t he use that here? Why did he just resort to the usual fighting? And in general, they hardly used Neo’s status as The One at all, except a) to make him fly off into the sky, and b) to make him fly long distances to save Morpheus and Trinity.
5. If Neo didn’t need to pass a martial-arts test to meet the Oracle in the first movie, why did he need to do it this time?
6. The plot is unnecessarily tortuous. All the stuff about the Keymaster — including the sequence with Persephone and the Merovingian — seemed like a waste of time.
7. The fight sequences were interminable. I see that the martial arts and car sequences are cool, but they stopped seeming cool after a few minutes.
8. In general, I’ll summarize a few of the above points by saying that the script to this movie is much less tight than the script to the first Matrix. I don’t think it really knew where it wanted to go. And a great deal of the movie felt superfluous. As one of the folks mentioned above said, it seemed that every scene in the first movie had a place, whereas every scene in this one surely did not.
9. The philosophy in the movie was interesting (it kept reminding me of Gödel’s Theorem), but there wasn’t much of it and they didn’t make it central to the story. They focused more on superfluous fight scenes.
10. As one of the people mentioned above said, the first Matrix seemed like a world that we might be in right now; it was believable. In contrast, this one seemed very much like a fantasy world. It was less believable.
11. The first one was so remarkable, and such a mindfuck, because we had never seen a) a story like that, or b) such amazing special effects. This one added very little to the story, and we’ve seen all the interesting special effects before. It lacks the newness of the first one, and adds very little. So of course it’s going to be less jaw-dropping than the first.

Just some initial thoughts. I’m sure I have more, but those were the first few that came to mind.