May. 17, 2003 - 10:41 pm
so my new girlfriend Ananda and i were supposed to go see this on Thursday night, but a tornado came through town that night. the power was out at the theater, so we decided to go last night instead. it was still a sell out crowd though. Ananda owns a copy of the first movie and i probably would too if it weren't sold exclusively in the snap case. i don't buy snap case dvds. they suck. but anyway, we're big fans of the first one.
i'll try not to spoil this one. basically what the story is is that the machines have discovered where Zion is and they are drilling down towards the city. Neo and the rest of the crew, along with a few friends, have to try to figure out how they can stop the machines alone, since the rest of Zion is going to try a futile battle with the machines.
ok, lets talk about special effects. yeah, there are some awesome ideas in this. a few very new things going on. i especially like the dream sequence near the beginning with Trinity falling from a skyscraper with dual machine guns firing at an agent above her in bullet time. that and Neo's takeoffs from the ground before he begins flying. i thought that they should have gone more abstract with some of Neo's abilities though. i mean the idea is that he is capable of anything right? well why isn't he doing some really insane stuff that isn't completely logical? i mean, yeah his fighting is awesome and he performs some great feats of strength and acrobatics, but couldn't he just flip out and get some X-Men type powers or something? why not?
and i was a bit bothered by them completely cgi-ing his face from scratch in a couple of sequences. they still haven't got that quite right. i mean the movement was good, but the difference between computer generated Keanu and real Keanu is still pretty vast.
i agree with Colin that some of the new things they came up with for this are just very illogical and you feel like they're doing it just to do it. particularly the henchmen of The Merovingian. he has these Medusa shapeshifter ghost guys that fight against Trinity and Morpheus. i mean really what are those guys? and then he also has what are presumably werewolves working for him...right. but some of the new characters and actors are great. the Keymaster is very funny and i always liked it in fighting games and movies when you have to protect someone important to your cause that can't defend himself or herself very well. it's like the Strider battle in LOTR (2001) on Weathertop where he protects the Hobbits. great stuff. and another great character addition to The Matrix Reloaded is The Merovingian himself. i have to memorize his French cursing. that's hilarious.
so overall it's a great movie with loads of great action, but there's a bit of weirdness that doesn't make this movie as great as the first one. the first one's really flawless, but this one is still worth getting into.