Directed by Lana Wachowski
Written by Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon

1999 was a year of fear of Y2K and a film that blew everyone’s minds called The Matrix. That film introduced us to a world run by the machines and humans were merely batteries. The only other film franchise that was as bleak as this was the Terminator series. The film also broke the boundaries of CGI with a inventive camera technique called “bullet time”. A 360 degree etupf of cameras would catch and spin around the action and create a unique slow motion effect. This was simply groundbreaking in 1999. Granted today you get to see that in football replays, but give credit to the Matrix films for bringing that to life. This film was eagerly anticipated and fans of the series, myself included. Was interested in how they would bring back these characters and what new CGI tricks are up their sleeves. Sadly you don’t get much way of story except for a ton of flashbacks. High expectations will never be met with this film. No fancy new CGI or film technique to see either. Disappointing.

Here comes the spoilers.
Right off the bat we are thrown into the first scene from the first film being watched like some sort of memory reel being replayed. Yet things are slightly off and different. Two hackers are watching this and wondering what is going on. Then we are taken to Tom Anderson (Neo) who is now a game creator of a successful game called “The Matrix” which is essentially all the events of the series in a video game. Kudos to this being a very meta type thing to do and easy way to trick Tom/Neo into forgetting who he was by making this all in his head. Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff) is now the boss at the gaming company. The machines have changed their ‘skins’ so they do not look like what they used to.

Supposedly 60 years have passed since the Machine War when Neo and Trinity died to save the humans at Zion. Now humans want to free more people that are trapped in the Matrix, but the elders form the Machine War want to keep the brokered peace. It isn’t long before the young hackers get to Neo and he takes the red pill and he is back form the ‘real’ Matrix. Yet he discoverers that Trinity is still inside and he now wants to get her out. Met with resistance he and the young hackers go inside anyway to try to get her. We get a huge fight scene, but most of the action is blurry and too zoomed in to tell what is going on. Just a mess. No neat camera effects or ground breaking CGI gets introduced here. I think most audiences were waiting for something spectacular to leave the theater talking about just to be disappointed.

Not to give away more spoilers, but former enemies temporarily join forces to help Neo take Trinity out of the Matrix. In a sequence that brings back horrible memories of 9-11 we get people falling out the sky to their deaths. Horrific, and yet it gets too easy to forget these are simply Machine controlled ‘bots’. I honestly think the writers seriously needed to play a bit more dangerously with the enemy of my enemy is my friend motif here. What we needed was another Neo versus Agent Smith battle royale with some ground breaking effects to wow us as it used to back in 1999. The only nice surprise is Trinity having the same powers as Neo and being able to fly.

Seeing them bring most of the band back together was nice, but nothing new special effects wise is extremely disappointing.

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