Rewatch – The Matrix Reloaded

Directors: The Wachowskis
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving
Year: 2003

Original Rating: ★★☆☆☆
New Rating: ★★★☆☆

Look I’m not going to sit here and tell you The Matrix Reloaded is secretly a masterpiece. It isn’t. It has real problems. The Zion stuff is still boring. The rave scene is still silly. The ending is still a cliffhanger that doesn’t work as a standalone film.

But I was too harsh in 2003. This movie has more going on than I gave it credit for.

The Architect scene. The one everyone mocked for being pretentious. The old guy in the white room explaining that Neo is the sixth One and the whole prophecy is a system of control. People hated this scene because it undermined the triumphant narrative of the first film. Neo isn’t special. He’s a variable. A predictable anomaly that the system accounts for.

But isn’t that interesting? The first Matrix was about waking up and realizing the world is a lie. The second Matrix is about waking up AGAIN and realizing that even your awakening was planned. That even your rebellion serves the machine. That’s not bad storytelling. That’s genuinely challenging philosophy.

The action still holds up. The freeway chase is one of the great car sequences in cinema history. The Burly Brawl — Neo fighting a hundred Agent Smiths — was groundbreaking at the time and while the CGI looks dated now the choreography remains impressive. The Merovingian’s chateau fight. The Neo vs. Seraph scene. When the movie is moving it MOVES.

The problem is when it stops.

Zion. Jesus. The city of free humans is just. Not compelling. The council meetings. The speeches. The interpersonal drama between characters we don’t care about. Every time the movie goes to Zion the momentum dies.

And the romance between Neo and Trinity. It’s fine. They love each other. We know. We knew in the first movie. We don’t need multiple scenes of them being in love. The emotional core of the original was the question of belief — will Neo accept who he is? That question’s been answered. What remains is less interesting.

The Wachowskis were trying to do something ambitious. They wanted to make sequels that complicated rather than repeated. They wanted philosophy and action and romance and mythology all at once. They didn’t fully succeed. But they tried.

I’m raising my rating from two stars to three. Not because the movie got better — obviously it’s the same movie — but because I was grading it against impossible expectations in 2003 and can now see it more clearly for what it actually is.

A flawed, ambitious, intermittently brilliant sequel that asked more questions than it answered.

My rating: ★★★☆☆

The Matrix Reloaded on IMDb | The Matrix Reloaded on Rotten Tomatoes