Matrix: Reloaded... Post here.

[Sakurako Hino]

Oh yes. It's almost time! I'm seeing it Saturday! Feel free to post thoughts here when you see it.

[Matt]

I'll be seeeing it 2nite. Most of the reviews I've seen for it were negative on the first watching though, but they all seemed to enjoy it better the second time around.

[Sakurako Hino]

Tell me something I don't know, C-man.

I'm still involved in 2 or 3 flame wars on AICN's boards right now over the negativity. I'll probably get banned from AICN at this rate. Those losers over there are uncultured primatives. To think I used to like that place.

*sigh* At least if there's any reviews here, I can trust them.

[Jager]

Careful, Ensign, your Elitism is showing!!!

To each, our own.

[Matt]

If you don't like it at AICN, visit chud.com . I like that site a little better than AICN, even though I visit both frequently.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

I know someone who saw it Tuesday night... he said it was worth seeing.

[Matt]

"Worth seeing" isn't exactly a positive review. I'll see pretty much any movie that looks like it could be interesting.

[David 'Dr. Troll' Smith]

He isn't that much of an SF buff or a movie buff. He said that it didn't quite match up to the first movie, but with that caviat it was worth seeing.

[Sakurako Hino]

Jager: Sorry, it's just that "Ain't I Cool News" gets my blood hot.

Re: CHUD.com: I'm already chillin' there. Look around for Zone Zero.

[Matt]

Here is my short & spoiler free review of The Matrix: Reloaded.

First thing, before seeing the movie you need to see as many segments of the Animatrix as possible. There are several scenes that reference them, and if you haven't seen them those parts of the movie won't make sense. 4 are available on www.theanimatrix.com , and the others are available other places online. The Final Flight of Osiris and Kid's Story are the most important to see beforehand.

And now the movie. It was good, but like most big effects movies, they bit off more than they could chew. There would be one great shot followed by another shot that made me want to scream at the screen. Granted I do special effects for a living, so this may bother me more than the rest of you. My other fault with the movie was in the pacing. The movie goes from a 5 minute fight scene to a 5 minute heavy dialogue scene in which so much information is discussed that it is hard to follow. This makes the movie drag a lot. The Agent Smith courtyard fight is a good example of overdoing it. The fight didn't need to be nearly as long, especially since half of it is horrible. We haven't yet reached the point where we can integrate 3D humans into the foreground of a scene yet, and Reloaded does nothing to push that boundary. The animation doesn't bother me, but it in no way meshes with the real actors.

My major complaint about the movie is why would Superman spend all of his time in a fight with thugs? Considering that he is the one, and can do almost anything, why does he waste half of the movie fighting henchmen? The scenes are enjoyable, but it's odd for a philosophical movie to have flawed logic.

If you like tons and tons of fight sequences and want to listen to some philosophy, then this is the movie for you. Spider-man is probably the closest movie that I can think of to compare it to. It had some really great scenes, but then a few things that I really wish they had left on the cutting room floor. Overall, I think the movie could have been trimmed a good 10 minutes and would have played better. I'm going to wait on giving it my final grade until I see it a second time.

One last thing. Anyone that goes to see it, FYI, there is a trailer for Revolutions after the credits roll. A lot of people left the theater I saw it in, so if this interests you, don't make the same mistake they did.

[Sakurako Hino]

Okay... I'm notgoing to AICN this review, Chosen, but I have a point to make.

Neo IS NOT superman. He may be "the one" but he doesn't and can't just wipe the matrix away with a swipe of the hand. He still has to work within the rules of the matrix. Yes he can bend them greatly, but he isn't THAT super-human. You can give him this much: The agents cannot kill him, he can stop bullets, and he can fly. He can also, through contact, hack agents. Think of neo more like Kite in .hack://infection where he has to actually fight to do damage.

[Vixen]

Just because Neo is The One, doesn't mean he's 100% grasped the totality of his abilities. Morpheus referred to the original One, the predecessor to Neo, and that this One could change the Matrix - but he didn't say that this man could do all of this straight away.

In roleplaying terms, Neo has to gain some more experience and raise his Matrix Manipulation power a bit before he can start doing that sorta stuff.

As for the AICN review, to be honest if I had a quarter for every time those boys have been wrong about a movie I enjoyed I could pay off my student loan. (Almost.) Anyone who types in capital letters to get his point across, rambles on with no coherance whatsoever and includes ten thousand unnecessary ellipses in a paragraph - and does it on the most butt-ugly website that human minds can imagine - is essentially, not worth my time.

[Matt]

The movie is what compares him to Supes. And I don't want to give any spoilers, but he can do more than fly and stop bullets. And just the fact that he can fly means that he shouldn't waste his time in hand to hand combat. I can understand the combat where he is trying to get through someone or protect someone, but when someone is after him all he has to do is fly away, i.e. the Agent Smith fight. And I really wouldn't have had that reaction to it had the fight scenes not dragged on forever. As every other scene is in slow-mo, the fights take much longer than they should, and I really wish he would either fly up in the air and keep kicking his ass from a protected position, or just leave. If certain scenes of the movie had been better, I wouldn't have even thought about it.

I'm not bashing the movie, but I do think it is odd that you are working so hard to defend it since you haven't seen it. When you see it, then come back and give us your review for it.

[Sakurako Hino]

I'd be more than glad to.

[Vixen]

Okay. Seen it. Love the HELL out of it. And, so did my mom, who I saw it with.

My responses to your points:

1. Slo-mo fight scenes - you must have watched a different movie than I did, because the movie I saw had extremely fast-paced fight scenes, that slowed down in parts so that you could see a very clear shot of someone doing something awesome. Easily more energetic and fast-paced than the original's.

2. Neo Fighting Agent Smith: perhaps, he thought that if he managed to defeat Agent Smith, that he could glean some more information out of him. Or it could be that Neo was so pissed off that Agent Smith tried to possess him that he wasn't thinking clearly (I know it'd annoy the heck outta ME.) As Agent Smith stated later on, Neo tends to act first and think later and hasn't quite grasped the totality of his abilities.

That aside: I got it. I got everything that they were trying to do, or at least I got something out of it. I understood what the Architect was saying. I was into the contrasts between the dance floor's public passion and Neo and Trinity's private passion. I thought every special effect shot was impressive, even the ones I could tell were not real. And the ending blew me away instead of letting me down because I knew, and expected, and accounted for the fact that it was not going to have a traditional narrative structure. About the only thing that threw me is that we cut from Neo looking around an old apartment that I *think* was his, straight to the Neb docking in Zion. A little phone call from Morpheus saying, "Neo, get out of the Matrix - we're leaving broadcast depth and going back home."

Sorry. Hate to stay off the bandwagon, but The Matrix Reloaded was worth every penny I paid for it - and I paid for two tickets, because my mom's a Matrix nut too and I took her to see it as a belated Mother's Day gift. I'll definitely watch it again, and I cannot wait until November. I watched 'Bound' not too long ago and the Wachowskis have yet to let me down.

[Cody]

Bound? Now that movie rocked!

Sorry - can't say anything about Matrix 'cause I haven't seen it yet. Something I plan to remedy tonight or (if the lines are long) tomorrow.

[Matt]

I saw Reloaded a second time today. I liked it a little better than I did the first time, and the flow didn't bother me as much as before. One thing I was able to do was watch the trailer for Revolutions a little more in depth, to look for signs of some things that I didn't think were needed to see if they were in that movie. Which is a problem discussing a movie that you don't completely know the significance of each aspect of the movie.

I still don't like parts of it. The Smith fight is half amazing and half crap. When the first Smith walks up is brilliant. When the next 5 walk up is a complete technical breakdown. I watched the faces more this time, and was surprised that you can obviously tell that Hugo and Keanu aren't even in the shot for part of the live action bit. I'm used to quick cuts of a stunt guy where you can't tell, but Keanu's double was on there a couple of times for a few seconds, and he only looked similar to the ONE. But I really enjoyed the first half of that fight. But as soon as it goes to all CG it is a huge let down. The freeway scene is really good, up to the point where the agent jumps on cars to catch up with them, and like the CG Smith and Neo, he looked really bad. And as I said before, because I do this sort of thing for a living, I have been trained to look at the details on stuff like that, so I will always be a harsher critic on CG stuff.

The only really great actor in the movie is Hugo Weaving, and they at least used him to the full potential by having him play 100 characters.

Vix, the one shot where he is in the apartment is the Oracle's apartment. And don't worry about voicing your own opinion. I'd definately rather hear someone's own honest opinion than just have them echo my sentiments back to me. And for the record, I'm not part of any bandwagon to lynch the movie. It's just hard for me to write a review and discuss anything about the movie without giving spoilers. And because it's such a techincal movie, I figured that was my angle to discuss it without giving anything away that people didn't have an idea about from the trailer. I liked the movie, and have now seen it twice in 3 days. It is just far from a perfect film though.

I give it 6/10.

[Sakurako Hino]

Okay, I saw it Saturday Afternoon, but I gotta get back to bed. I'll let you guys know what I thought in a bit. I promise.

[Cody]

Awesome flick!

Some spoiler info follows for those that haven't seen it yet;

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I see what you mean about the Smith/Neo fight but lack your appreciation for the quality of the CGI. For the laymen like me it was good but I thought it went on for about about a minute or two too long. The fight itself made sense to me since Smith had to make the attempt on Neo - and fail to do it easily - and the fight (I think) had to demonstrate Smith had the ability to challenge Neo despite his being the one.

I actually liked the ending with the resolution to the prophesy of "The One". The prophesy itself was one of the elements that didn't make sense to me from the first movie. If they're in a controlled virtual reality then where does the "prophesy" come from? Finding out it was part of the matrix programming made more sense.

Awesome fights, some decent philosophy if a little deep at times and the deepening of the matrix architecture is very cool. Finding out that the machines don't have total control, that there are rogue programs, viruses and machine on the side of man was great. All in all I really recommend the movie to anyone that didn't hate the first one.

You won't be disappointed.

[Hugin]

I liked aspects of it, disliked others.

About as subtle as a hammer to the face with the philosophy and while I liked Mr. Fishburn in Matrix, in Reloaded something seemed very different. And not in a good way.

Sorry, but Neo ended Matrix acting like it was all over. The fight was on his side now and he was going to be kicking tushie muy maximo from now on. What happened to that?

Any movie made that requires you to have seen one of a dozen filmlets prior to it is making a big mistake. I haven't seen a single one of them and if that robbed me of some understanding or enjoyment, that is a failure on the part of the filmakers. I don't give a rat's ass if it's part of a trilogy, each film should be able to stand on it's own to some degree.

I liked some of the action sequences, but just because you can afford to cram the screen with CGI doesn't mean that you should. If you become too caught up with how 'kewl' everything looks it removes you from being emotionally involved in the movie. You then have to reattach and you miss things.

Liked it well enough. Give it a B- or a solid B.

Liked X2 much better.

[Cody]

I don't think the fimlets are a requirements except for Flight of the Osiris. That was the only one I'd actually seen, I think I still followed the movie anyway, but it seemed to me that this movie really did require you to have seen that one. Otherwise the tunneling plan of the machines loses some of the impact since they show so little of it.

And although you shouldn't be required to watch a short to figure anything out about the main movies, at least FotO was shown publically.

Quote:

Originally posted by James 'Prodigy' Meehan:

What happened to that?

Morpheus was wrong about the nature of The One. Everything Neo believed was based on what Morpheus had told him about that (damn) prophesy and the nature of the Matrix but it turns out there's a lot more to the matrix than Morpheus knows. It turns out there's a lot of The One that Morpheus doesn't know.

I think Neo's conversation with the councilman, Hammon?, foreshadows more than the nature of the Oracle. That conversation, along with that of the Oracle and Neo, seem to say that much of what they believe about the Matrix may be what they are suppose to believe about it. That their beliefs are part of the programming of the Matrix. In the first movie Neo wakes from the Matrix and by the end is "free". In Matrix Rebooted he finds out that his freedom is actually an illusion.

I'm still a little hazy on the "save Zion or save Trinity" choice though. Neo seems to be making the same mistakes as his predecessors but the Architect told him that he could NOT save Trinity and he does that.

[Cody]

Hey, I have a question for any Matrix buff that wants to try and field it. Shortly after Neo "wakes up" the crew of the Nebechenezzer is pulling the metal plugs out of his body. It seemed like that was standard procedure and they only leave the plug at the back of the head that allows interface with the matrix. But in the Neo/Trinity love scene in Zion (Matrix Reloaded) both of them still have the plugs. And when Morpheus is addressing Zion we see he still has the plugs on his chest as well.

WTF?

[Cody]

Never mind. I just rewatched the DVD. They don't pull all of them out.

[Apep]

I enjoyed it but the first one was much better. I don't enjoy only watching half of a movie. I think the ridiculous amounts of Smith was more comical than it was supposed to be, at least to me. It didn't seem threatening to me, but more ludicrous. Something abou the action sequences just didn't grab me the way the first Matrix did either. I don't know why, but they just didn't seem as intense. Maybe it was the Smiths, not quite sure. I guess it was worth the price of admission, but I was a little disapointed.

Yeah, X2 was much better. I hope the Hulk is just as good, please let it be better than Daredevil.

[Matt]

Endeavor, so what did you think of reloaded? I've been waiting since May to hear you give an honest review of the movie. And if you don't remember your opinion, it comes out on video next week.

[Sakurako Hino]

For me to say anything now, before Revolutions comes out in November wouldn't be fair. I honestly have to say Reloaded is a prelude, and Revolutions is the finale.

But, I did like Reloaded to a point. I just feel it was rushed for a movie of such scope and calibur as the world of The Matrix.

My only real beef with the film is the whole deal with the Archetect. Whassupwitdat? I'd have to watch the movie again JUST to catch everything he said.

I'm sorry, if you hinge the plot on one character relaying a revelation in words only a college professor dares say to an average crowd, things are lost.

The Wachowski's forgot that they're preaching to the masses here, not the elite.

I do have to admit, seeing those power-loader mecha the people of Zion were using was quite sweet.

[Kirby1024]

I had a few beefs with the movie, for one thing, the Wachowski brothers let almost every scene go on for far too long.

Yeah, there was eye-candy, but they kinda forgot that after a while, anything gets stale.

Trinity Falling, the first time - far too long. By the end, "For gods sake hit the ground already!". The Combat of Many Smiths - Again, took far too long, and with no good reason. The Freeway scene - again, it just ran on forever.

Frankly, they could have added 5 minutes of something useful by reducing the action scenes by 30 seconds each. It just wasn't needed!