I just saw The Matrix: Reloaded. So what was it that I just saw?
Was it OK? Or was it crap?
The easy answer is crap, of course: 90% of everything is crap, so the odds are with me if I pick crap.
On the other hand, I was there; I saw it. So, just in case this was one of the rare 10%, I'll go over what I saw.
To start with, let's get the obvious out of the way. The special effects, the fight scenes, and the car chases are very good. (They had to be, since it's been at least one technology generation since The Matrix came out.) It's gotten so that we take FX like this for granted. Any movie that doesn't spend 100 million bucks on FX almost seems amateurish, anymore. Is it even possible to tell a story without touching up every frame with a computer program?
And then there are the fight scenes. Choreographed to perfection, they almost seem as if these guys really are fighting. Lots of bullet time, lots of wire fu, all the stuff that made people cheer for the first Matrix: exactly as promised.
And then there is the car chase. Back and forth on the freeway, with Morpheus fighting off an agent on the back of an 18-wheeler. Of course, with agents about, the deck is severely stacked against Neo and his pals, but they manage to come through in the end.
Which brings me to where the bad taste starts. The cutting in this movie is pretty extreme. We go from a damned precarious escape on the freeway to a scene where everyone is safe at home. And there are more cuts like that. Some of the scene changes are dangerously confusing. Is the scene just before Neo wakes up with a start just a dream? Don't count on it. Has it happened yet? Maybe.
And yet with all this attention deficit, the movie does spend several minutes on an orgy, with Neo and Trinity making love while the rest of Zion's inhabitants are having a rave. So what's important here?
The story itself is extremely thin. Let's see: they haven't heard from the Oracle, but they gotta hear from her, because the machines are tunneling down to Zion, so Neo goes to talk to her (fight numbers one and two), and finds out that they gotta get the keymaker. ("Ghost Busters" anyone?) It also turns out that there are bunches of renegade programs loose in the Matrix. The Oracle is one of them, and so is Smith. They could be a lot of fun, but most only get to play a minor part a little bit later.
Next there's a lengthy layover in Zion, with nothing much happening except that Neo gets laid, and we find out about a mole in Zion.
Then it's off to get the keymaker. The keymaker tells them how to get to the Source. Various things go wrong, as expected, and Neo ends up talking to the Architect. I'm sitting in the theater, thinking Tron meets the Control Program. OK, so it's derivative. What about this movie isn't? More to the point, we discover that the rabbit hole is a lot deeper than Neo suspected. Neo doesn't actually catch on, though it is transparently obvious to the audience. (Or is that just me?)
Lots more stuff goes wrong, Neo ends up in a coma, and then there's the final scene. We're told that Zion got destroyed because sabotage interfered with the defenders. Presumably that was the mole we were shown earlier. We're also told that there was one survivor. Crescendo electronic music as the camera pans from looking down at Neo's unconscious face to the face of the mole, lying on the next pallet.
I gave that ending a full raspberry. Talk about your misplaced drama. What this movie needed was an enema. Someone needed to flush out the self-important philosophical crap. Cut out about half of the fighting and car chases, and add some actual story, instead. Let's put it this way: taking the kind of movie making exemplified in The Matrix: Reloaded to an extreme would mean having Neo fighting for 100 minutes on the back of a racing 18-wheeler, while Morpheus drones on about his faith. (Morpheus was the god of dreams, son of the god of sleep, you know.)
Was it crap?
Given that it rehashed all of the material already laid out in the first movie, that it moved from plot point to inconsequential plot point with glacial speed (the car chases and fights give only an illusion of quick action), and that it managed to make a dog's breakfast out of the ending, it was crap.
And that's all I've got to say about it.