My The Matrix Reloaded review is a 3 out of 5, and that’s with some real effort to be fair to it. There’s greatness in here, the freeway chase for one, but as a whole the film is a bit of a mess. I think the success of the first film got into their heads, and they went all weird and stuff. I came out of the cinema wanting to love it the way I loved the first one, which I’ve watched more times than I can count, and I just didn’t. It’s not a bad film. It’s a film that doesn’t know when to stop talking and when to start fighting, and I wanted the second one. It’s the opposite of how The Empire Strikes Back handled a middle film, where the dark turn made the story bigger instead of flatter. There are moments in here that I’d happily sit through again, and then there are long stretches I’d skip, and that split is what stops me from giving it a better score.
Seventy-two hours to Zion
The story picks up six months on, with Neo flying and fighting like he owns the place and Trinity right there beside him. Zion finds out that a quarter of a million Sentinels are drilling towards the city, and they’ve got 72 hours before the machines arrive. That’s a great clock to hang a film on, and it should make every scene feel urgent. Morpheus and Captain Niobe and Commander Lock are all arguing about how to respond, with Morpheus trusting in the prophecy and Lock wanting to do something practical, and I liked that tension between them. It sets up a proper disagreement about whether to follow the One or follow the plan.
Then the Oracle sends Neo after the Keymaker, who can open a door to the source, and Agent Smith turns up having turned into a rogue program that copies himself everywhere, which gives us the big brawl in the courtyard. That’s a decent setup, and when the film is actually moving it’s good fun. Smith is the thing I enjoyed most in the first half, and watching Neo take on a crowd of copies is as exciting as it sounds. A whole crowd of the same person turns up again as clones in Resident Evil: Retribution, where an entire facility is full of them. The trouble is that the film spends so much of its running time standing still, and I couldn’t work out why it kept stopping when it had a deadline running.
The Oracle, the Merovingian and the Keymaker
Neo’s first stop is the Oracle, who sends him to a park to meet her in person, and then he’s put through a fight with a crowd of Smiths that ends with him flying away from the scene. Back inside the Matrix, he’s told that the Keymaker is held by the Merovingian, a smooth, arrogant French program who runs a restaurant and has a taste for the finer things. The group has to get past him, past his wife Persephone, and past two ghostly twins who can walk through walls, and the whole thing turns into a long series of fights and chases. It’s a lot to pack in, with one character after another getting a scene, and it’s easy to lose track of who’s who.
The Keymaker himself is a nervous little man who wears a belt of keys and who knows a door for every room in the Matrix. Getting him to safety takes the freeway chase, which is the best part of the film, and the rest of the story hangs on what’s behind the door he opens.
The rave nobody needed
The first big stop is the Zion rave, and it’s the part I’d cut. The whole sequence was not needed, and I couldn’t work out why I was watching a big crowd dance for that long when there was a clock running down on the city. It’s a lot of screen time spent on world-building I didn’t ask for, and it felt like the film was showing off that it had a bigger budget this time. The long speeches around it had the same feeling, scenes that were there to be in the film rather than because the story needed them. I’m sure some people loved it, but for me it killed the momentum right when it should have been building.
The Keymaker run is the same story in miniature, because the twins and the Merovingian’s whole crowd weren’t great. The Merovingian and his wife Persephone guard the Keymaker, and the scenes around them are talky and a bit silly. The action sequence itself was quite good though, and the freeway chase is a real highlight, with the bikes and the trucks and the fighting on top of moving vehicles. It’s the big set piece and it goes on for ages without getting dull. I’d happily rewatch that one by itself. It’s the stuff around it that I’d skip, and there’s more of it than there should be.
Neo isn’t special after all
Then he gets to the Architect, and this is where it really lost me. The Architect explains that Neo is the sixth One, that there have been other Ones before him, and that the Matrix has been reset and humanity purged again and again, with each One choosing to save a handful of survivors for Zion. So Neo isn’t really that special after all, he’s simply one of many. After the first film built him up as the one person who could end all this, I found that depressing, and it wasn’t the continuation I was looking for. It’s a long speech in a room full of screens, and by the end of it I wasn’t sure what I was meant to take from it other than that everything we’d been told was wrong. It’s the same kind of reset that X-Men: Days of Future Past pulls on its timeline, and that one at least comes with a payoff.
And then he picks Trinity over the whole plan, which is a fine character beat, since the Architect’s door choice makes him walk away from the saving-Zion option to save her. But by then I’d stopped caring about where it was going. I’d have been happier with less explaining and more of the stuff that made the first one work, where you were learning along with Neo instead of being lectured.
There’s one more thing that bugged me about the whole middle of the film, and it’s how much the world has changed from the first one. Zion is a big, loud place full of people, and the film spends a lot of time showing it off, with the council meeting and the crowds and the dancing. In the first film the Matrix and the real world were tense, lonely places where a handful of people were hiding from everything. Here it feels like we’ve left that behind, and the story is now about armies and cities and politics, which isn’t what pulled me in. I missed the small crew on the ship and the sense that Neo was making it up as he went along. The film is bigger, and for me it’s a lot less interesting for it. That’s really the heart of why this one felt like a letdown to me, because it has all the pieces and none of the spark that made the first one special.
The ending doesn’t help. In the real world the Sentinels attack, Neo does something unexpected with his mind to stop them, and then it simply stops on a “to be continued” for November. I’m not sure I like how they’ve split this into two films, because it feels a bit like a money grab. It leaves Neo unconscious and the crew waiting around to see what happens. I do want to see how it ends, because I’ve come this far and I’m invested in these characters. But it hasn’t won me over like the first film did, and that’s the bit that bothers me most.
What I made of it
I wanted this to be the film that took the first one somewhere new, and I think it tried. There are things in here I’ll remember, and I’m glad I saw it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything that made the first film special had been swapped for something louder and heavier.
The freeway chase is great, the Smith brawl is good fun, and the idea that Neo is one of many is bold. I just wish the film had trusted the story it already had. It’s a 3 out of 5, it’s a bit of a mess, and I’m still going to be in line for the next one because I want to see how it ends. Rating: 3 out of 5. It was ok, and I’m curious about how it finishes, but I didn’t love it.