Reviews

To create the car chase, the production actually built their own 1.4 mile-long stretch of road in Australia to have complete control over the stunts. The Wachowskis cram so much mayhem into the sequence that they even have a four-way fight inside a car and Agents leap-frogging between moving vehicles. Trinity weaves around cars and trucks while the camera seems to pass right through them (they're computer generated and this scary shot was a movie first).

We'd seen Bullet Time before, so what do the Wachowskis do for the climax of the chase? They Bullet Time a head on collision between two lorries while Neo flies down and saves Morpheus and the Keymaker, that's what. Link in the control room pumps his fists in excitement; the audience does the same.

After much philosophical mutterings about choice and fate between Neo and the Oracle on a park bench, Smith makes a surprise entrance and launches a full scale clone assault. Some of the following fight shots are fully CG and though the Wachowskis put many months into perfecting the technology, you can't help but feel they made the CG people too perfect (where's the dirt on their clothes?).

Still, you won't see better martial arts choreography outside of Hong Kong and the Burly Brawl easily rewards your patience after the lengthy Zion naval gazing. There are flashes of humour in Reloaded - Trinity deadpans about how long it took her to tie her boots, Link narrowly avoids saying something rude in front of the children, Merv swears profusely in French because it's 'like wiping your arse with silk' - but po-faced monologues are the course of the day.

In its favour, Reloaded has action as innovative as the first film (more so) and certainly isn't a sequel thought up after the fact so the writers could cash-in. 'The Matrix was always going to be a trilogy' say the Wachowski brothers, and if you stuck around for The Matrix Revolutions, then you saw that there was indeed a continuous story. Unfortunately, you also saw that all the good ideas had been used up in Reloaded and Revolutions ended on a whimper rather than a bang.

DVD/Blu-ray Special Features:

(Trilogy Boxset)

2 commentaries: Philosophers & Critics

The Matrix Reloaded Revisited

Featurettes: Car Chase, Teahouse Fight, Unplugged, I'll Handle Them, The Exiles (21 sub-featurettes), Enter The Matrix - the making of the video game