The last surviving human city, Zion, is in grave danger. Hundreds of thousands of sentinels have started to bore their way through the planet’s surface, in order to reach the city many miles beneath the surface. The inhabitants of Zion are only too aware of the danger that they now face, and plans are in place to form a last defence against the robotic monsters that are intent on annihilating mankind. Morpheus and his crew return to the city, where Morpheus faces disciplinary action for ignoring his orders to remain in Zion, but he remains resolute in his belief that Neo is “The One” and maintains that he alone will save the city from destruction. Despite doubts from senior military figures, the commander of Zion accepts Morpheus’s faith in the ancient prophecy and authorises him to take his crew outside of the city, from where they can once again download themselves into the Matrix.

THE BUZZ

Suddenly, everything just seemed so dull. Characters who were completely new to the audience were shown kissing and lamenting their separation in a vain attempt to make us care about them. The leader of Zion talked in riddles about the purpose of machines, in some laboured attempt to make the whole thing seem intellectually meaningful. What the directors seemed to miss was the fact that the audience just didn’t care – they wanted to see some butts kicked. But then, when they did, everything STILL seemed extremely dull. All the ass-slapping, face punching, gravity defying, limb breaking fight scenes suddenly seemed very old hat.

If ever a film were in need of a consultation with the Plain English Society, then The Matrix Reloaded would be it. Everyone does their best to talk in riddles all of the time, to such an extent where things start to sound ridiculous. In this film, it is not enough to question why something has happened. First, you must question how you knew you wanted to ask why it had happened and whether the answer is the result of what you had previously asked someone else. If that sentence makes absolutely no sense to you, then you’ll soon understand what you can expect. Morpheus seems to have been injected with 200ml of “Waffle Serum” and spends the larger part of the film postulating and lecturing everyone else about his beliefs. It’s all very well and good, but when you sit down and analyse the story, you find that it’s actually very simple. The dialogue seems intended therefore simply to puff up the film’s ego and it becomes tiresome in the extreme.

Such was the dismal extent of this film that I even started to dislike the characters that had previously been my heroes. Keanu Reeves seems to have defied time and managed to age very little since the first movie, but he seems more wooden than ever this time around. His facial expression ranges from mildly disinterested to completely disinterested and he shows as much interest in what’s going on as I did. He’s more powerful than ever in this film, and has picked up a new ability to zoom around everywhere like Superman – and he looks just as silly doing it. I think he must have found religion somewhere between the two movies, as he now sports a fetching vicar’s outfit, minus the dog collar. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) looks as slinky as hell in her PVC cat suit, but there’s no escaping the fact that the woman is terminally ugly and certainly not worthy of the adoration sent her way by Neo. The icing on the cake is the presence of two new evil henchmen, who transform themselves into nasty spectres at will. They sound good until you remember that they are in actual fact the DIY twins from Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes.

But these things simply aren’t enough to lift The Matrix Reloaded from base mediocrity. Many readers will simply fail to comprehend how I could rate a film like this so poorly. The fact of the matter is that audience expectations of this film were justifiably high. With a four-year production time, an enormous budget and the same creative team behind the first film, Reloaded should have been mouth watering. What we got was something that was largely very bland, with a few juicy bits scattered within it. I have yet to decide whether Reloaded wins the award for Worst Film of 2003 or Most Disappointing Film of 2003. Ultimately, it might just end up being both.

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