The Matrix

With Matrix IV just around the corner, I re-watched the original trilogy. The first movie has held up very well, it’s just as good as I remembered, a perfect slice of 90s nostalgia or zeitgeist or whatever. But I had forgotten just how excruciatingly bad the second and third were. Everything about them is bad, and not in a good way. The dialogue and acting are risible. I actually felt sorry for the actors having to deliver them. The action sequences are tedious and boring, I skipped through most of them. New characters are introduced cold and we’re supposed to care about their fates, which existing characters somehow become less developed, which shouldn’t be possible. Even by my extremely loose sci-fi and fantasy standards, the plot makes no sense and has no continuity from scene to scene, things just happen, and then it’s onto the next unrelated thing. Really, those two films together ought to have ended the careers of everyone involved, except of course for Keanu, Fishburne and Belluci. It boggles the mind how the producers ever got funding for a fourth.