I have been asked to explain my one word reaction to The Matrix Reloaded, which was “dissapointed.” I shall do so now.

The truth lies behind the cut, kids. Don’t take the red pill unless you’re ready to know what lies beyond it.

Alex has a Spider-Man video game for the Play Station 2. In that video game, there is a cheat mode where you can turn on “Matrix” style fighting. Every few seconds during a fight, things will suddenly slow down. It makes for a really cool effect. After about twenty minutes of this, though, it gets a bit tiresome and you’re ready to see something new. At the very least, you’re ready for the game to start moving along at a regular pace so you can see what happens next.

This sums up my feelings over The Matrix Reloaded very nicely.

How many times in one movie do we have to see slow motion fighting? Especially when you start the movie showing an elongated scene that is comprised almost entirely of slow motion action?

There were some interesting revelations in this movie. The fact that, from all appearances, Zion and all of that hooplah is just one more incarnation of The Matrix being the one that took the cake. There were some great characters. There were many things in the movie that were good.

But there was very little that was great.

There was very little that made me say “wow…I’ve never seen THAT before…”

And that, unfortunately, is the shadow that this movie had to live under.

The Matrix was one of the most revolutionary movies to ever come down the line. It changed the rules. It upped the bar. Countless numbers of movies since have been compared to it, or accused of attemption to mimic it. Like The Sixth Sense, Memento and Fight Club it threw you for a loop when you figured out what was really going on. It had an absolutely despicable bad guy in the form of Agent Smith.

It was a great movie.

The Matrix Reloaded…

sigh

I guess I’m just not swayed by special effects anymore. I want to be caught in by the whole experience. I want story, character development, and a good plot. I want to see something new. I want to get all giddy over the movie, damnit!

I got giddy over X-Men United.

I was bored in several places during The Matrix Reloaded.

And I’m sick of CGI.

It’s not good enough for film makers to be relying so heavily on it. What made The Matrix amazing was the fact that they managed to create all of these new technologies and the actors still looked real. The CGI at points in this movie was so obvious it was laughable. I felt the same way about several scenes in Spider-Man as well. If you need that much CGI in a movie, just make a computer animated movie. That way I’m not going to be jarred out of my seat every time I notice that the actors suddenly don’t look quite real. It distracts me from the movie, and I find it highly annoying.

So there it is. Unleash on me all you want, slobbering fan children. If I went into this movie expecting a popcorn movie, I’d have been thrilled about it. But I wasn’t. I was expecting something better than the first. I was expecting the brothers to raise the bar. To top themselves.

In my humble opinion they failed to do so, and no references to William Gibson or fancy computer graphics are going to change that.