For some reason I challenged myself to revisit the Matrix films.
I forgot how much I actually enjoy the first film, and have always stuck with my 1999 DVD for the theatrical color timing. It looks quite good upscaled too. Simply a great ride of a movie. 13 years on and still fun.
4 balls out of 4 spoons.
I thought Reloaded was always a bit of good action sequences with middling to bad dialogue. Theatrically it was an overlong mess. Coming back to it, I found myself hating the film and finding it incredibly stupid as it went on. The key phrase here is "GET ON WITH IT!". The Merovingian was a great character though and sadly was only really in one scene. The car chase is not very good despite its elaborate structure. And what's with the CGI animated Neo and fight sequences? What we can't even have real people doing the fights any longer? And don't even get me started on the "we're all going to die, so let's mass techno dance/grope in slow motion" sequence. Stupidity.
1.5 balls out of 4 dress/robe thingys. I'm being generous.
Revolutions. I swore I'd never watch this again. An obviously bad film, and theatrically everyone was in a stunned silence of disbelief. Really this is just the second half of the same film as both sequels were shot simultaneously. But this one has all of the really bad elements. I thought it couldn't be as bad as I remembered. There is no redeeming quality to this junk. It is terrible, badly written, pathetic, meandering, nonsensical, mindless and complete stupid in every conceivable way. Words cannot even begin to describe the depths of it's absolute stupidity in every conceivable element of filmmaking.
Zero balls. Ball-less crap. Worse than any of the prequels. And that's saying something.
So essentially here is another franchise that should have never been. There are no Matrix sequels. Like Anchorhead has said many times about ESB and ROTJ but to a much greater degree, the sequels opened things up too much. There was no imagination or focus left.
And the sad thing is, I wanted to like these sequels.