Miller, truth be told I haven’t enjoyed more than half of a fight scene since Bruce Lee died, so it’s probably more than a little of me just being spoiled.
However, there is one aspect of The Matric Reloaded that just took it over the top for me. That’s the fact that theee fiiiiighhhttttsssss gggggooooo slllooooooooowwwlly aaaannnndddd tttthhheeeeee moooooooooves aaaaare teeeleeegraaapppphed.
I don’t just mean the speed. I mean the movement. Unless the point of a fight is to show someone’s inability to fight (which, at least for some of them, isn’t supposed to be the case), they bloody well ought to look like they can fight.
Now, I am not an expert at martial arts … or much of anything else, for that matter. However, if you bring me someone to fight I can guarantee you of one thing: you’ll know where I hit them by where they hold themselves. I don’t telegraph my moves. Not to be a totally pompous little nugget, Miller, but do you know what I mean when I say that? Here’s an example:
In one of the fights (and honestly, so many of them were just so repetitive that a few have run together), one of the Smiths lunges forward with his entire half body to punch Neo. Now, this would be annoying and boring if he were doing it at actual contact speed (which, truthfully, if he’s had more than a few years of training, is several times faster than it was done in the movie). But it’s that whole “Oh God, I have to watch this guy move like he doesn’t know how to punch for the next minute” … at least, it seems that way;) Basically I can see in “a split second” where the guy (basically whoever it is, and this isn’t really restricted to this movie) is going to move, and from that I can pretty much immediately think of a few moves the other person could make to either counter the attack, block, or do something else like move behind the guy. I know it’d be boring if the other person just ended the fight right there, but it’s the way the fights just go on for so long and it doesn’t look natural to me at all.
So basically what I mean by telegraphing moves is that I can tell where the person is going, so it’s like I’m doing a mile run and I have to stop every few seconds so the other person can catch up. It gets REALLY old REALLY quick. And iiiiiiifff iiiiiit’s beeeeeing shoooooown innnnn slooooooooow mooooootion, iiiiiit geeeeeeets reeeeeeeeally ooooold really quick.
And re: your point about the fights being similar to the first (or not), I found them to be extremely similar in terms of moves/sequences used. Apart from the costumes and scenario, there really was not much difference to me between some of the scenes in the first and in the second.
I don’t think anyone would say I was overhyped for the movie. I was awake and in a decently good mood, but I was pretty sure going into this movie that it would be more of the same from The Matrix (1).
I was not overly impressed by The Matrix (1)'s fight scenes (apart from, initially, that whole bullet thing), and the few that were not painfully dull to me involved people obviously exerting effort (like Neo’s difficult fight with Smith). However, the second time I saw it I was much less impressed (although still more impressed than by the hand-to-hand fight scenes in Reloaded).
To be fair, though, again it’s difficult to satisfy me with fight scenes. Many of my friends, some of whom are martial arts aficionados, were satisfied, if not somewhat impressed, with the scenes from such films as Drunken Master. I liked a few, but none of them made me feel the way Bruce Lee’s scenes still make me feel, many times after I saw them initially. Slightly OT, but I happened to catch some previously-unreleased footage of fights from the movie Bruce was working on when he died, and those made me nearly orgasmic.
Nothing in a fight scene not involving Bruce Lee has done so.