I see people bashing them all the time. There is a thread right now on “Which was worse, the SW prequels or the Matrix sequels”? And granted, they certainly weren’t the best movies of all time, and they did not stand up to the hype of the first movie (but what sequel ever does?).
But whenever I ask people what they really hated about it I get vague answers. So I come here. What, exactly, was so terrible about them? I am not asking to be snarky or sarcastic, I really want to hear people’s viewpoints.
I agree - I don’t think these were the best films ever made, but the sequels told an interesting story, and did a good job of world-building. Plus, violence! What’s not to like?
I think I asked this about a year ago here-can’t find thread (so maybe my memory Swiss-cheesed or I posted it somewhere else).
I sure wish I knew-their only real sin in my eyes is a lack of vision on the follow through; there’s tons of different directions they could have gone with (infinite nested realities, for one). But the ending was perfectly logical, if perfunctory, in reasonable accord with what had been established about Neo & Smith beforehand.
P.s. I don’t think the first movie was all that great to begin with, so I don’t share the pain of those who felt “betrayed” in some way by the sequels. At the time of release I couldn’t grasp why The Matrix got all this “wow wow” attention, while Dark City (out a year earlier), which shared a lot of the themes, was relatively ignored.
Without looking, can you tell me what happened in the sequels? I sure can’t. Hell - I couldn’t have told you what happened 5 minutes after walking out of the theater. I remember having some fairly solid questions about the franchise’s mythology after Matrix 2, but figured Matrix 3 would answer them. They didn’t - it was an even bigger mess of questions and vaguities (yeah, I made that up). That’s why they sucked. (IMO)
The story. The mechs. The plot dump at the end of Reloaded. That annoying kid in Zion. The often jarring CGI (particularly in the Burly Brawl). Neo inexplicably gaining real-world powers. The rave sequence and Morphias flaccid-sounding speech. Agent Smith coming back from the dead, undermining the first movie (as does most everything else on this list).
At the end of Reloaded, when he had super-powers in Zion, I thought, “Cool, it looks like Zion is also just a computer simulation, constructed to make people who want to flee the Matrix assume that they have escaped and are free, when in fact they are just in another part of a bigger simulation”.
That was the only rational way to explain why Neo had super-powers in Zion, and it would have created an interesting storyline.
But, when in Revolutions the producers really had Neo have super powers in the real world, that was crap.
One is in the second movie, when Neo is fighting the dozens of Agents Smith at once. They’re outside. Neo wants to leave; he has no further motive in the fight. The Agents want to keep him from leaving, so they can co-opt his power with their magic whammy or whatever; this requires them to hold him in one place for several seconds at least. So a long melee ensues, at the end of which Neo simply flies away.
That’s right. He just flies away. Because he can fly, and the Agents cannot. So why the fight?
It makes no sense, but it looks cool.
The second bit that I find emblematic is the way the Zion mechas are designed. THEY LEAVE THE USER’S FACE AND BODY ENTIRELY EXPOSED TO FIRE!! It’s a stupid, stupid, stupid design, and seeing it took me out of the movie entirely, as did the courtyard bit and many other similar scenes.
I understand wanting to make things look cool. I wasn’t expecting high art. But obey the rules of logic for your own universe, or you’ll shove your audience out of the experience.
Eh, I think that people were disappointed in the sequels because the philosophy was weak and the plot was thin. Except that was true of the first one, too, it just took a while for most folks to realize it. The Matrix isn’t a movie about the fundamental nature of reality or anything deep like that; it’s about kung fu, slow-motion explosions, and Carrie Anne Moss in a catsuit. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Once you realize that, all three movies get much better.
Count me in disagreement with Chronos, too. I thought the plot and philosophy of The Matrix was really clever. I still regularly watch the first film. It’s an amazing film, imo.
What killed the Matrix sequels for me was how they intentionally went TOO over the top on the fight scenes. The very first time I saw the fight on top of the semi-truck, I found myself checking my watch. “END ALREADY!”
I actually agree with a lot of your criticisms. Let’s see
Yes, the second and third movies were mainly gunfights and explosions and less plot.
Yes, the mechas left important parts exposed.
Yes, I never did understand why Neo had real-world powers.
And yes the kid in Zion was annoying.
I never noticed anything wrong with the CGI, I admit. I don’t mind the speeches and Smith coming back from the dead - this last especially is very common. If you have a really cool villain, you don’t want to get rid of him right away.
The rave was stupid…but at the same time I saw the point they were making.
But I never found any of these things to be harmful enough to the movies to destroy them. And there was enough cool shit that I could overlook the flaws.
Every movie has flaws. Looking at the sequels that Red Barchetta named, I saw flaws in every one of them (barring Godfather II which I have only seen pieces of so I don’t really know) but I still loved them.
Much of what you consider flaws compounded to detriments for me. Whereas for the other movies I cited, there’s not a thing I would change about several of them (Toy Story 2 and Terminator 2 are perfect, imo).
I don’t even know what this means. How can someone like value something they really enjoyed “too highly”? Just because one had high expectations doesn’t mean what they’re based upon is somehow invalid.
I would compare it to the dropoff in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
In the first movie of both series, you had the sense that the story came first. Somebody wrote down a plot and characters and only then were the scenes created within that existing framework.
The follow-up movies discarded this. They appear to have started by creating scenes that would showcase some special effect or action sequence or merchandising tie-in. And then some unfortunate writer was handed the list of random scenes and told to assemble them into some kind of narrative sequence.
You too, huh? I remember thinking about the major fight scenes in the movies and how the ones in the first movie meant something and later ones did not:
Matrix
Neo vs. Morpheus in the Dojo: Teaches Neo (and the audience) about the nature of Matrix
Morpheus vs. Smith in the bathroom: Morpheus buys time for the others to escape
Neo/Trinity vs. the guards in the lobby: Going to rescue Morpheus.
Neo vs. Smith at the end: Neo becomes the One, comes to understand how he can bend the Matrix at will. Matrix Reloaded
Neo vs. Three Agents: No significance - he knocks them around for a while and then takes off.
Neo vs. multi-Smiths: No significance - he knocks them around for a while and then takes off.
Neo vs. Merovingian’s goon: No significance - aside from annoying the Merovingian.
Morpheus vs. White Rastas: Cool looking, but they get blown up and… that’s about it.
Morpheus vs. Seraph: No significance, just two characters fighting instead of a handshake.
Morpheus vs. Agent on top of the semi: Cool looking, but really just a waste of time until Neo flies in for the rescue.
I probably missed a few. Anyway, the fight scenes in the sequels overall were just timekillers.