Oddly enough...
...I didn't LOATHE The Matrix, but I dislike it, and abhor the amount of hype it's received.
The basic concepts -- nothing you see or hear is real, virtual reality taken to its logical extreme, downloadable skills and knowledge, spunky heroes fighting against a tyrannical but faceless enemy -- were reasonable enough, and perfectly acceptable for a sci-fi pic. I believe that a great spy caper is waiting to be made with the "what skills shall I download NOW" concept, as long as you put a storage-space limit on it as well as a person's other inherent limitations. Sure, you can absorb the cumulative skills and knowledge of Bruce Lee, Einstein, a great mechanic or a great programmer... but what do you need to forget to make room for it?
The bullet-time special effects were neat, but nothing to build a movie around.
So what did I dislike?
* If you're going to make a high-tech sci-fi movie, make a high-tech sci-fi movie. If you're going to drift into flights of fantasy and Great Prophecies and This Has Been Foretold and such, do it. But don't spend half the movie building a solid technical story and then throw in crap about "The One" and "Love can bring the dead back to life" and the whole deus-ex-machina ending! Keanu could've been the conquering hero in the end without being portrayed as some sort of demigod foretold by a mystical oracle. Sure, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Did we really need to LITERALLY cross that line?
* Keanu Reeves... in general... irritates me.
* Sequels were filming before the first one was released. That's marketing BS in its purest form, IMHO.
jeff. Then again, I still think the Star Wars series should have stopped at one, MAYBE two films.
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