The Matrix Reloaded

Marked essential with a condition attached: essential only if you are watching Revolutions as well. This is half a film. It stops on a cliffhanger with Neo unconscious and nothing resolved, because it and the next one were shot as a single production and cut in two. Starting it and quitting after it is the one genuinely bad way to watch this series.

It is also better than its reputation, and its reputation was formed by two scenes. The Architect's monologue arrives at the climax and spends five minutes in vocabulary nobody uses to tell Neo that his rebellion was anticipated and that he is the sixth version of himself. The information is good. The delivery is a lecture, placed exactly where a film needs momentum. The Burly Brawl, with a hundred Smiths, was state of the art in 2003 and is the one sequence here that looks worse every year.

Set those aside and the middle of this film is extraordinary. The freeway chase ran fourteen minutes and was shot on a mile and a half of road built for the purpose, and almost all of it is real cars and real stunt performers. The Merovingian, the twins, the keymaker and the château fight are the series at its most playful. Nothing in the first film is as purely enjoyable as this stretch.

What it does to the story is the part people under-rate. The first film is about waking up. This one asks what happens after, and answers that the waking was also designed. That is a harder idea and it costs the series its clean shape, which is a fair thing to dislike and a strange thing to call a mistake.