Published by: Warner Brothers Video
Retail: $29.95 US
I'll get to the movie in a minute.
The DVD of The Matrix Reloaded has most of the things you should expect from a big studio release. Anamorphic widescreen, high-quality transfer, "Making of" Featurette, and so forth. The only glaring omission is any commentary tracks, which I'm sure we'll see on The Matrix Reloaded Revisited Super Turbo Edition. Also, there's The MTV Movie Awards Reloaded, which is about as funny as a Saturday Night Live sketch. No, modern SNL. Yup. That bad. So, the DVD is well done, but there's clearly going to another release, probably as a two pack with Revolutions, or as all three movies. Wait for it. You've already had a bootleg of the movie for a while, anyway.
Now for the movie itself. This was my first time seeing The Matrix Reloaded. I'd heard uniformly that it was poor at best, so I had very low expectations. Reloaded wasn't too bad, but it has so many problems that it took me this long to force myself to review it. Reloaded is a shining example of a movie that just isn't good. Not spectacularly bad, like The One (the Jet Li movie), just "not good".
The main problem with Reloaded is the way it exponentially increases everything about The Matrix. In The Matrix, there were Agents; debugging programs of the evil virtual world, Sleeping Humans; plugged into The Matrix and capable of being taken over by Agents at any time, and Awakened Humans; with Magical HK Cinema Powers. Good enough. The rules were pretty simple, once you started using Magical HK Cinema Powers, you called attention to yourself as Awakened, and thus had to deal with the debugging progs.
Reloaded, however, adds in about ten supplements worth of material to a game that was fine with the core rules. Not good supplements, either. We're talking Digital Web (v1), WoD: Gypsies, and WoD: Blood-Dimmed Tides. Reloaded starts out fairly simple in the add-ons. We find out that there are a few old programs kicking around The Matrix. Okay... The Oracle is one of them. That makes sense... So is That Guy That Guards The Oracle. Who? And the Key Maker. Huh? And The Merovingian. Wait! And Agent Smith. But why do they- And The Merovingian's Ho. But if the Agents- And a couple of werewolves. That's just dumb! And ghosts.
By the time Reloaded ends, The Matrix has gone from a tightly run system to the most disorganized piece of technology since a few thirteen-year-olds rigged their computers together just to play Doom on three monitors. I'm trying very hard not to nitpick a movie about flying around and beating up computer programs, but why would there be back doors in The Matrix? Agents can take over anybody within The Matrix! There's so much to complain about from this movie that I'm just going to stop at this point, because otherwise this will review will never end.
The Cast of Thousands above are a symptomatic of the main problem with Reloaded. To keep the computer references going, it suffers from "feature-itis". If the script had gone through three or four more revisions, this could have been equal to The Matrix. Rather than being Empire to The Matrix's New Hope, it comes up Attack of the Clones. A few fun parts, but heavily flawed. For more griping about the movie, go by Dave's Ramblings