We all know Matrix Revolutions was pure shit -- that's an undeniable fact every man, woman and child knows.

But was the Matrix Reloaded pure shit? Aside from the Zion raves, which are totally lameass, I thought it had some fun ideas -- the idea of the Matrix getting a virus in the form of Agent Smith, the amazing fight scenes, and then Smith actually getting out of the Matrix in a human body.

It was a masterpiece but I don't think it deserves to be in there with Revolutions. What say you?

I feel the other way around, actually.

You thought the Zion rave was the film's highlight? Fair enough, there were some pretty hot chicks in there.

Kidding aside, what did you dislike about Reloaded and like about Revolutions?

I liked the robots versus bugs fight in the third movie. There wasn't a scene I liked in Matrix 2.

I love all three flicks. In fact, in some ways I love the sequels more than the first one.

Then you are a complete asshole. But only while in the Matrix.

This. Except for the last part of the comment. That part's dumb.

I didn't really make a huge distinction between the three. Each successive movie seemed like more of the same. The only thing was, to me, that the sequels weren't fresh and new because they were sequels. Granted, I've seen each movie once--in the theater--so I haven't refreshed my memory but at the time they seemed fine. I don't get the hatred some have for the later movies. Was it just that the first was enigmatic and later efforts took away some of the mystery?

I think they definitely had some pacing problems, at least. The overly long rave scene in the second, and the boring (and also overly long) scene between Neo and the Merovingian in the third. I think that, combined with some plot holes and a rather dark ending turned a lot of people off.

I don't quite dislike it, but to me it's the lesser of the three. The first one was a pretty good movie, which used atmosphere and suspense to hide a neat and simple sci-fi concept in some shallow philosophy and capped it off with an amazing and innovative action sequence, while the other two were mostly just action sequence that didn't seem as amazing nor innovative and drowned the movie in hollow philosophy masquerading as complexity and depth, but I prefer Revolutions because the "heroic last stand of a small army of rebels" has always been one of my favorite cliches, and while I'm sure it doesn't hold up too well now, the flying duel between Neo and Smith was pretty awesome in its day. Also, I thought it gave the series the only possible logical conclusion.

But I do tend to like both, so I don't think they are as bad as people say. Of course, I waited until I found them really cheap on DVD and to this day they still have their plastic wrappers, so it's not as if I'm a huge fan of them, either.

I like the one with the orgy. Or maybe that was Matrix knockoff porn I saw.
I can't ever keep 'em straight.

Agreed. I even like the big speech at the end by the Architect.

I actually do like the second one of the best of the three. It explained some stuff that I thought was kind of dubious in the first one, and the action scenes were better. Although yeah, the scenes set in Zion were kind of lame. Not even the raves, but all the stuff where Orpheus had to appear before "the council." That was ass.

I love all three films too.

*With the exception of the second and third ones...

Reloaded was actually an encouraging effort. The story idea they set up was good, and the highway fight was good.

It was the whole Zion subplot, set, casting, and execution which consumed the series in fail. And also, I didn't think Neo getting blinded was a good story touch.

The latter two Matrices has the problem of being overly long and expository, with a lot of really terrible dialogue. But really they weren't that bad all things considered.

I like the third better than the second but they both were letdowns after the first. Fishburne's weight gain between the first two was jarring. Morpheus, the secret to saving Zion wasn't hidden at the bottom of a box of Ho-Ho's.

He gained even more by the time he joined CSI. Should have done a little more kung-fu.

For me that fight was pretty boring -- robots swarming forward as guys fire 50 cal machine guns at them for what felt like an eternity.

One of the coolest things about the first Matrix was all the wire fu and special effects of people havign superpowers while in the Matrix. The second film has tons of cool kung fu fights -- Neo versus the army of Agent Smiths on the basketball court, Neo versus the Oracle's bodyguard, Neo versus the "Ghosts" and werewolves from earlier versions of the Matrix (another cool concept), Morpheus versus the Agent on the freeway... tons of cool kung fu action.

Part III only had the awesome "Superman versus Zod" fight scene at the end, but other than that, it didn't have the cool action that made you love the Matrix to begin with... as Jay said, the worst parts of Reloaded was all the Zion junk and part III had nothing but Zion junk.

It's interesting to note that while Reloaded fell in critical reviews, it still maintained a high positive score on RT at around 75% (more or less) while I think Revolutions rated rotten at a really low 38% (or something, going from memory). On an anecdotal level, I remember people still acting as if the Matrix series was stil totally cool after Reloaded and that a lot of people bought the DVD, but when the final one came out, people started turning against the whole thing or saying only the first one was cool.

What I hated most was the physical fight between thousands of machines with machine guns. That flew against the whole concept of the Matrix for me.

I went from being terrified of one of those ships in the first one, to being bored by thousands of them.

My complaint was that by the end of the first, Neo was literally "God in the machine". It shows him utterly bored at the prospect of fighting agents (not just better than them, but using no effort to block everything Smith can throw at him). He's been reborn and is now something much more than human. He can see all the code under the illusion of the Matrix and can manipulate it at will.

Which is a great ending.

But then we get the sequels and he's back to kung-fu fighting. And to try and overcome this obvious narrative problem we get lame lines like "Upgrades" and the silly notion that sending hundreds of agents against him should be a challenge. But hundreds of agents being batted around like dolls is not dramatic. In the first, they built them up enough that I actually believed that they could kill any of the protagonists at any given moment. In the sequels, it never felt that way again.

In the end, I think Neo's hero-arc was completed in the first movie. What followed was a lot of long, convoluted exposition about philosophy, inter-mixed with fight scenes that had no real sense of jeopardy attached to them.

+1