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Blood + Fire
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MATRIX RELOADED REVIEW (SPOILERS!!!)
I got this from AICN talkback, remember, don't read this if you hate spoilers. It's fairly long-winded so if you want a more simpler review then read the reviews that are linked at the bottom of this post.
Quote:
From: derekwallace79
Subject: I have seen Matrix Reloaded (spoiler warning)
Comment: While it's true that Neill Cumpston's review could've been lifted by reading the back cover of a DVD, all of the things he says are true, at least sequentially. I got to see Reloaded as part of a taping for the MTV show "Movie House". They made us wait for about 4 hours in the Warner Brothers Parking garage, out in the rain and inside a huge soundstage. We had to go through no less than TWO sets of metal detectors. No backpacks or electronic equipment were alowed inside. And we got some neat "Matrix code outlining the shape of a key" tee shirts. So finally, after a bunch of warm-up bullshit, the movie begins. No trailers, just that green WB logo on the black storm clouds. Matrix code streams down. (stop reading now cause I'm gonna ruin THE WHOLE DAMN MOVIE FOR YOU) From the opening logo on out, the most unoriginal, uninspired sequel that has ever shot down my expectations played out. Yes, everything Neill said happened, in the order he said. But before I go into any depth on this movie, I want to make it clear that I was pretty biased coming into Reloaded. So, I'd like to take a moment to poll everyone and let me know what they think about the following... At the end of the first Matrix, Neo could stop bullets by putting his hand up! He could dive into Agents and make them explode! He could fly! He could come back from the dead, even! Now then... In Reloaded, we are treated to Neo FIGHTING 100 AGENT SMITHS WITH A POLE (as you all know from the trailers). Umm...maybe it's just me, but if he can put his hand up and stop 100 bullets in the lobby where he fights the Merovingian's henchman (the people with the weapons on the staircase)...well why the hell can't he just put his hand up and stop 100 Agent Smiths as well??? Of course the fight with 100 Agent Smiths LOOKS COOL...but I'm sorry, I just don't view it as a worthy successor to the action of the first Matrix. If Reloaded was a stand-alone movie the Wachowskis had done, sure, I'd be slobbering too. It looks really great (except for a few really bad CGI Neo moments). The best parts of the fight, to me, were when Neo would slam the fuck out of a copied Agent Smith and the sucker would go flying up into a building 200 feet away and bounce off a window sill. LOL The 100 Agent Smiths scene, while looking really great and making me wonder how the hell they accomplished it, was just a bunch of chocolate candy with no real substance. I was realy bored most of this movie. What do you all think? Also...if Neo can get killed and come back to life, where is there any danger inherent in fighting ANYONE in the Matrix? Oh crap, I just got shot the fuck up! Ooop! Now I'm resurrected! When you end a movie like they ended the first one, the stakes have to be that much bigger in a sequel. Maybe spend some more time in the real world, fighting stuff you AREN'T prepared for. How about a raid on the humans-in-pods battery plant? Neo has to destroy the Matrix, free everyone and then they have to actually get those millions of people to Zion somehow...while something that makes Sentinels look like Gameboys enters the melee??? The car chase scene is neat-o in most parts, but whenever Morpheus and Agent Johnson are on top of the semi duking it out, the backgrounds look so horribly Playstation 2. Am I crazy or could they have green screen projected some actual highway footage for this??? Trinity heading into oncoming traffic on the motorcycle was badass. Morpheus with a sword and an uzi reminded me of Snake-eyes from G.I. Joe. I suppose I should talk about the characters now... Neo. Keanu hasn't so much learned to act, as the Wachowskis keep him quiet and pensive. Harry Knowles was right in his review of the original Matrix way back when. The sunglasses help hide bad facial expressions. Eyes are the windows of the soul, and nobody would be convinced if they saw Keanu's blank stare while delivering the Wachowskis' dialogue. But of course, a LOT of the dialogue is weak (especially this time around). The actors do their best, but shit Brothers Wachowski...you got enough money...pull in somebody to help out with something that, to me, is more important that Neo hitting a bunch of CGI with a pole! Anyway, they up Neo's powers a bit, but they don't take it all the way. Maybe they're saving up for the third one, but fuck that. A sequel, a the very least, should be twice as good as its predecessor. That would mean Revolutions should be off the chart compared to the first Matrix. Yeah, that may sound like a tall order, but shit man, look at the brilliance of the first film. The framing, the SFX, the concepts (although lifted from many sources such as religion, anime, kung-fu films, etc.) Trinity. She gets to kick ass of course, but I was really bored by her hitting cops with her helmet and fighting the Agent in the hallway (they even reused her infamous freezing in the air crane-style kung-fu kick). She was relegated to heroine in distress, and that's bullshit for someone such as herself. They tried to have a neat little moment where he brought her back from the dead the same way she brought him in the first one. The idea of pulling a bullet out of her chest like plucking ice from a cup of water was great. Him jump-starting her heart by squeezing it was great also. But I just wasn't compelled. Of COURSE she ain't gonna die! Fuck man, don't expect me to be on the edge of my seat when I know that Carrie-Anne Moss' name is in the credits of Revolutions!!! Morpheus. He gets to have a Sparticus speech to the gathered masses of Zion (looking hella buff in the real world...he must do isometrics while piloting the Neb). It was slightly rousing, but shit how I wanted him to say something about humans touching and warmth and feeling and emotion and closeness being the opposite of being a machine. That would've been a better transition into the Neo/Trinity sex scene (which really conveyed a sense of hunger on both of their behalfs). They really play up Morpheus possibly being crazy and the prophesy being a buncha bullshit (as expressed by Captain Lock, who Niobe left Morpheus for). One thing I gotta note about the Wachowskis is how they take classically shat-upon groups like lesbians and blacks and give them strong, empowering roles. The lesbians in "Bound" don't apologize for what they are and what they do. And the black people in the Matrix are often smart and hard-working and WELL-SPOKEN. Tank, Dozer, Morpheus, Lock, Link, Niobe, Zee...they're all just regular people who happen to have black skin. Morpheus is, to me, one of the single-greatest black role models in the history of cinema. Intelligent, suave, not a womanizer, doesn't swill 40 ounces or talk in slang. I had never really thought about the symbolism inherent in Morpheus breaking the chains in the first Matrix when the Agents are trying to hack into his mind in the government building. Now, after that black-empowerment speech of mine, I do have to say that both Niobe and Link were mis-/underused. Now, they're still fleshed out and not racial stereotypes. They're just movie convention stereotypes (ex-girlfriend with an attitude who comes back around and disbelieving comic sidekick). As for Niobe, maybe she'll show back up in Revolutions. Guess we'll just have to play the video game to find out more on her. Harold Perrineau, Jr. as Link just didn't sell the part for me. I didn't buy any of it, he had no emotion. Whenever he gave a little cheer after something dope happened in the world of the Matrix, it just felt SOOO hella third unit. But I gotta say, worst of all, he was there to replace Tank (Marcus Chong had payday conflicts and got his ass booted). What chaps my ass the most is that Zee (Link's girlfriend and sister to the dearly-departed Dozer) says she lost BOTH her brothers to that ship (the Neb) and doesn't want to lose Link. Ummm...time out, Green Bay! Tank was hurt, but alive at the end of the first Matrix! If he died on a mission that happens between it and Reloaded, I'd like to know about it. Has anyone heard if there's going to be an Animatrix that deals with this? The Kid...annoying as shit, useless to the movie, and I suppose it will make more sense once we see the Kid's Animatrix episode. Boy, that's a really stupid name, too. Spoonboy was cool, but "the Kid"??? How generic is that??? And no, people, the Kid does NOT fight Neo. He doesn't even plug into the Matrix. He just stumbles around, acting badly, and irritating the shit out of me. Agent Smith. Now, I talked about the fight, but not about his character. He's been freed. Somehow, during getting blown up, a bit of Neo got imprinted on him. Something copied or rewritten. But he is no longer an Agent. He's a free agent, pun intended. So, he's got his own agenda. I don't even remember why he wanted to kill Neo still, I was so bored. It just felt like...hell, people loved Smith...gotta put him back in! People loved Agent Smith and he was badass. Sooo...let's put in ONE HUNDRED AGENT SMITHS! And he'll be ONE HUNDRED TIMES as badass!!! It all just felt so forced and contrived and like a buncha popcorn eater bullshit! Don't get me wrong...I love Agent Smith as much as you guys do. If Hugo Weaving had've made it into the X-Men trilogy as well as the Matrix and Lord of the Rings series, I wouldn't hesitate to call him the most brilliant actor (from a business standpoint) in the entire universe. But enough is enough. Also, I just thought about this. It's a problem that's bothered me with Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man (a character in X-Men who spent most of his time on the team X-Factor)... What happened to the other 99 Agent Smiths? At the end of the fight, they all walk away. But where do they go? Some, but not all, of them show up in a hallway sequence near the end of the film. But what I'm really wondering is...are they exact copies that have their own motivations? Cause then they wouldn't want to die either. It was shown that they all have that infection/replication ability, cause three of them start to infect Morpheus in the hallway. So imagine a perfect copy of Doctor Doom. Wouldn't it try to destroy/betray itself??? Moving on to...the new Agents (Johnson and Tompson). They don't have 1/100th the stage persona that Agents Jones and Brown had in the first film. Which, by the way, where did they go? They ran away after Neo blew up Smith in the first Matrix...did they get deleted? These new Agents are more like low-level body builders. I mean, it makes sense they'd up their power and speed, but you don't have to make someone bulky to do that. To paraphrase Morpheus, do you think size would matter in a world such as the Matrix? The Sentinels now spin around and throw bombs at the hovercrafts of the resistance. Yay. How fucking boring. Replace the Sentinels with something that eats them for breakfast, please. The Oracle. The revelation that the Oracle is not human, but a sentient program as well was a neat twist. Too bad Gloria Foster passed away, I'd be really curious to see what else they would've done with her. Turns out that she's the mother of the Matrix, or something. I'll have to watch a key scene again to figure out what's what. Seraph. The Oracle's bodyguard, of sorts. If you can get past him, you MUST be the One. Um, sorry. The fight wasn't that great and Neo could've just jumped into your ass and blew you up. Boring. Move along. The Merovingian. A French bad guy who talks a bunch of nonsense. Basically, he has the Keymaker and isn't letting him go. Also a sentient program from an earlier version of the Matrix. Blah blah blah. He runs away, might be back for the sequel, although I doubt it. Persephone. The Merovingian's wife who betrays him because he cheats on her. This is a good idea gone bad. Programs that become sentient and become more and more human as they become more and more complex. I just didn't care about any of them, though. And then they go and waste a ton of $$$ on CGI of the Matrix code showing a woman's bladder popping, making her have to go pee or something. Either that or the Merovingian gave her an aphrodisiac and she ran off to the bathroom. Now that I think about it, that may have been it. Cause he does retreat away to the bathroom himself or some shit. Bah, move on to his bodyguards, the Twins. The Twins look cool, but all their dialogue is pretty worthless (sadly, there are NO really great quotable lines in this movie, except MAYBE Morpheus' speech about "isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for"). About the Twins...that part where the giant explosion happens on the overpass during the car chase is what's supposed to kill them, but it's unclear whether or not that's what happened. They get blown up into the sky and turn into ghosts. Couldn't really tell if they disapated or not. But even still, damnit! They can turn into GHOSTS! They were shot through, sliced through and punched through by "ghosting out" just before the impact came...so why the hell didn't they just do that when their SUV started flipping over??? And they never explain how the Twins can ghost out. Just that they are from previous versions of the Matrix. The Keymaker. Has found backdoor entries to get to certain locations in the Matrix (as well as bubbles where you can't be detected). He has the key that can get you to the Matrix mainframe, where the idea is that in Revolutions, Neo will fight his biggets challenge and free all human minds from bondage. The Architect. The guy who created the Matrix, now turned into a sentient computer program model of himself that guards the mainframe. I wish they'd explain WHY it was made in the first place, by a human at that! Was it for military training? Erotic fantasies? Anyway, his monologue was really boring and really confusing, and those two go together like peanut butter and chocolate when it comes to making me tune out. But since I'm so big into the world of the Matrix, I'll go to another free screening (be DAMNED if I'll pay to see this) so I can try to make something of all his gobbledy goop. Then there's Zion. Pretty neat how they designed the place. I love the idea of a city deep in the ground where it's still warm, built in a huge cylindrical chamber that has hundreds of crosswalks connecting areas together. But really, the logistics of sewage removal boggled my mind. There's a great little exchange here between Neo and the head Chancellor-type guy about how machines and people are interdependent and how they don't always know how machines work, but there is a reason for them and it all works out in the end (a metaphor for Neo and faith and whatnot). Oh yeah...in Zion, they have these giant robot suits with guns for arms that watch the main gates when hovercraft dock. And oh, how clever...the operator of that robot suit spun his guns and dropped them to his side like a Wild West cowboy. Yee fucking ha. That is so goddamn inane. That in the "real world", having done that 20 million times in your life, you would spin your gun arms like that at that exact moment. Feh! Alright people, I realize that by now, I must sound like a total asshole. Don't get me wrong. You AIN'T gonna find a Matrix fan who knows more about backstory or has thought more about this concept than myself. But goddamnit, I guess that's just the curse of having an active imagination. And just so I'm not totally ragging on this movie, let it be known that I thought there were some BRILLIANT moments. Such as... Neo flying out of the building just as it explodes, pulling a wake of fire behind him. Neo flying into the sky, coming down through the clouds and pulling them after him as well. Generaly, the flying sequences were just plain DOPE! When Neo pulls the wake of cars behind him as he rockets at 2,000 mph through the concrete canyons of the city was phenomenal! When he swoops in to catch Morpheus and the Keymaker just as two semis crash into each other and explode in bullet time was pretty cool also, but hella fake compared to the wake of cars. Oh, and when Neo has to fly from the mountains back to the city...well hell, just how big is the world of the Matrix when you're inside of it? Is it a full world, like Earth? With continents and countries? Are there are stars and the moon in the sky? Cause, if he could, Neo could fly to the moon since "that's not air you're breathing" and rules like gravity don't apply. Why the fuck am I the only one who thinks about all these extrapolations? Shit, someone let ME write some comics, yo! Agent Smith answering the phone and coming out into the real world! This has the single best potential, IMHO...but they squandered it. No scene were Smith talks about what it's like to have human senses and weaknesses and have to breath and eat and whatnot. If he could escape from the Matrix that way, he would be free and have no reason to want to kill Neo. It would have been a great turn of events to have Smith need to join the resistance to stop the machines cause he was now mortal and could die. He'd have information on how to stop Sentinel attacks and take out key strategic points and whatnot. But NOOOO...buncha bullshit instead about Kain (the guy he infected) being taken over by Smith and sabotoging stuff. At the end, they reveal that Neo has powers in the real world as well. Neat twist, but dammit, I like the idea that the Architect proposed instead. The Architect says that even the prophecy of "the One" was made up by the Matrix as a system of control. I've always been keen on the idea that it was all one big lie, one big fantasy cranked out by the Matrix that spun out of control and led to the downfall of the machines. I just love the idea of perfect machines having to create an imperfect fantasy world because humans are imperfect and hence, imperfection leads to chaos and boom, the system fails. Hubris, baby! Alright, I'm basically done bad-mouthing this film except for one last note: how goddamn horrible the soundtrack and the score are. Don Davis' score of the first Matrix basically hasn't left my mp3 player for about four years now. The use of horns and synths just got to me. Horns ALWAYS make songs sound bigger, more epic. And they were just GONE in this score. Hell, even the soundtrack was lame. Yes, we get another Rage Against the Machine song. P.O.D. is on there. The hell? But worst of all, the movie ends with a goddamn DAVE MATTHEWS BAND song!!! Umm...now, I happen to like most of his early stuff (before it all sounded like the same song). But in no way, shape or form does a cyberpunk thriller need to have DAVE MATTHEWS BAND playing at any point! The beauty of the first soundtrack is not only are all the songs dope and make you wanna rock out...but the titles and the lyrics are relevant to the movie as well. "Mindfields" by Prodigy. "Wake Up" by Rage Against the Machine. Etc. Hell, the music (mainly remixes) that use for all the TRAILERS is better. "The Revolution Will be Televised" is a GREAT song. "Chonga Fury" by Juno Reactor in "Final Flight of the Osiris" was a great choice also. But fuck, man!  To recap: All-in-all...this movie is NOT a worthy successor to the Matrix. I think it's pretty obvious that if you watch the first one, it's a stand-alone story that is just great ending where it does. Much like the first Star Wars. Unfortunately, Reloaded ain't no Empire Strikes Back. So yeah, of course everyone is gonna go see it. And yeah, everyone is gonna rationalize and say "yeah, but the fights were really cool" or "but the flying was dope" or whatever. But that does NOT a good movie make, IMHO. Disappointed and getting ready to "doge this!" from everyone's replies, Derek C. Wallace P.S. If you wait through the credits to see the trailer for Revolutions, be prepared to be disappointed. It's a random series of clips that doesn't really convey what's going to happen. Besides, if you've seen the 2 minute, 30 second trailer for both Reloaded and Revolutions, then you've seen most of the footage already.
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Another review here
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/sneak/matrix.html
and here
http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=15123
All my fears have been confirmed, an action driven flick... The plot sounds ok from what I've read but we'll have to wait and see how it's played out. Regardless I'll still be going to the Public World Premiere of this film.
I'm cringing at the idea of Neo's powers not being contained to the Matrix system.
Last edited by Mr.Deflok; 05-03-2003 at 08:29 PM..
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05-03-2003, 06:22 PM
