Hmm, after reading the first half of the Reloaded script, I'd guess it's an OK movie.

Harbinger: The first trailers of Spirited Away made it look lame and pathetic. (and possibly redundant)

Nope. At least not in my oppinion. Spirited Away is my favorite movie.

It's not exactly hard to find plot failures and absurdity in the Matrix -- the prime reason for its popularity seems to be the well presented (though technically botched) plot premise (i.e. the tutorial scenes after Neo leaves the Matrix) and (mostly) the sweet camera work / fight scenes. Even if they don't make sense, they're cool! They're overflowing with cool! How can you not like teh cool!

Hence the explanation of why the lobby scene is good:
It looks cool. Further reasoning is unnecessary.

Most of us agree that games should focus on content, and not graphics, yes? Why doesnt that apply to movies as well? Xmen2 seemed like it was told by an 8-year old who wanted fantastic fight scenes and special effects without any coherence in story. You know how that can be: "and then wolverine fights some guy and rips his head off and then the moon explodes, and then magneto takes over the earth, and then all the xmen defeat magneto, and then the galaxy explodes, and then...".

If you want to see cool graphics for no reason, go look at demos. I dont know if they still have the Assembly gathering, but im sure you can download the entries. And for fighting scenes, any Jackie Chan or Jet Li film is going to have better fight scenes than anything Keanu Reaves can do.

The X2 storyline wasn't that spread out with meaningless events. Secondly, comparing Jackie Chan or Jet Li to Keanu Reeves is majorly off considering Jackie Chan and Jet Li use their martial arts experience and knowlegde in their movies where as Keanu Reeves admittingly doesn't know martial arts at all unless he is trained for a certain movie (ie. Matrix and Matrix Reloaded). X2 did have a few parts where they could have done it different, for example, when the mansion (school) was attacked instead of regrouping right off Logan, Rogue, Bobby, and Pyro went to Bobby's home in Boston which really wasn't needed but they wanted to show off Pyro's powers evidentally to show that he would be a villain at some point (which happens in the end of the movie).

The Matrix had a coherent story. Well founded in realistic possibility, no, obeying the second law of thermodynamics, no, but coherent? Yes. I can see no argument for incoherency, aside from those which fault the viewer.

Clearly your tastes are not representative of those of most of society.

Interesting camera work, semi-rare superpower presentation (fast movement done as slo-mo or "bullet time"), cartwheels and wall kick make for interesting choreography, unique premise for superpowers, music. I wouldn't present this scene as the high-point of the movie, but it still stands above average in my view.

The Matrix did supposedly introduce some new effects into film which have been widely adapted since then; and I think you only saw it semi-lately so perhaps some of the new-ness of it is not appearant to you. Aside from this, you pretty clearly just have a very different taste from the general populace.

While there is nothing wrong with having different tastes, it does make the worth of any of your movie opinions / reviews to anyone but you ... extremely dubious, heh. So I don't think I'll rent Heat any time soon ...

Clearly You haven't seen the matrix bashing on GameDev (of all places), have you? Lots of my views are not representative of most of society, which the non-answer I usually hear when I ask why Thing A is so revered *shrug*

I don't recall anything particularily special about the camera work, slow-mo has been used during heavy shootout scenes since before Die Hard, the cartwheels and wall kicks looked ridiculous (running up that wall probably made Trinity easier to shoot), there was no superpowers on display that I saw (other than coolness == invincibility), and the music wasn't particularily stand-out.

Wrong answer. A movie should be judged by more than how flashy it is. I saw The Exorcist who knows how long after it first came out, and I could see clearly why horror fans still love it. The effects should fit the movie, not just be used for newness sake, and especially not carry the movie (as seems to be the case for The Matrix). As they say, the best special effects are the ones you never notice.

Judging from the album sales of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, I suspect you are right.

And Heat is a pretty well recieved movie, with an A-list cast. I only mentioned it because it was known for a million-bullet shootout which was far better than the lame lobby scene. It's an okay movie; check it out sometime.

$movies{"Spirited Away"}{"Classification"} eq "Alice In Wonderland without the narcotic use";

And I totally agree. The Matrix was cool. I'll never give it best of anything. But It was cool.

I watch movies for pure enjoyment. Ripping movies's dialog, writing, and acting apart realy realy ruins the whole thing. Unless the whole thing ruined it its self... But I haven't seen a movie that made me want to stop watching it right away in quite a while.

Bearing in mind that I was never a fan of the X-Men comics (not a fan as in I never read them, not as in I didn't like them), will I miss a lot about the movie? My gfw/s saw it and said it was cool, but she's a fan of the comics. I've heard less than stellar comments from people who didn't know the comocs.
I did like the first movie, though...

Evert: You'll be able to follow it easily enough. Just because the movie was partly inspired by GLMK doesn't mean you have to have read it to be able to understand what's going on If you liked the first movie you'll probably enjoy this one.

Which is funny since IIRC The Wolverine in X1/2 is Australian.

Really? Ooops. Wrong movie! Sory.