Sermon on the Mount

To diverge from the ranting about SCO and Linux/Unix/Whateverix (hands up guys who's using any of these as their desktop OS?), let's talk about something not-so-geeky - the Matrix Reloaded ...

What was good about it

Kung-Fu - lots of neat funky stuff that went on
Merovingian and Persephone - they were both actually interesting characters. The Merovingian was just alot of fun doing whatever he wanted ("French is the best language to swear in. [stream of curses] It's like wiping your ass with silk."). And he pointed out what should have been a valuable lesson to Neo about creating programs to achieve what you want. As for Persephone...........
Flying - Neo doing his "superman thing" just looked cool
Agent Smith - Hugo Weaving is simply awesome. He was a bit of a crowd favorite in the first film - and he's back in a big way here.
The Architect - sure he talked at a million miles and hour and acted as if he'd just swallowed a dictionary - but his speech gave a great twist to how we've come to think of what's going on with the matrix.

What was crap about it

Gun-Fu - where was it? Where was the follow-up bar-raising equivalent to the lobby scene from the first movie? Almost the only time you saw any kind of gun-play that lasted for any length of time was the opening scene
What are Neo's powers? - Okay so Neo's demonstrated he can stop bullets by the wave of his hand. Why can't he do the same with swords and stuff? Okay - it'd make for a boring film with god-mode Neo all the time, but at least explain why he can't stop them.
Short-cuts - Neo is now shown that short-cuts and backdoors exist in the matrix. He now knows what the code looks like - why can't he use them more often? At all? They're introduced and then left completely alone for the rest of the film.
Annoying whiny Kid - who the hell is he and why does he have such a crush on Neo? Was this explained at all? Apparently his presence is explained in The Animatrix somewhere - but considering this isn't out in Australia (as far as I know), relying on something like this to explain why/if we should give a shit about him is just lazy.
Tank - watched the first movie the other day and amazingly he lived. Now where the hell was he in the sequel? According to Reloaded both he and his brother Dozer are dead. If he died separately fine - say so don't make it sound like they both karked it in the first flick. Couldn't get the actor back - fair enough - come up with a decent explanation as to why his character isn't there - not a 2 second throw-away line.
Shit-house Rave - okay so these kind of stupid dance parties aren't my kind of thing, but when you've just been told that hundreds of thousands of death-dealing killing machines are digging their way down to kill you and you don't have long to live what are you going to do - shitty dirt rave (minus the glo-sticks I might add) or keep building more death-dealing power armour and EMP bombs?
Zion - no wonder Joey Pants wanted back in the Matrix. This is the fabled last free bastion of humanity? What a dump
TALKING LIKE A WANKER - 'nuff said

From the V - talking about Matrix Reloaded

Also, in the Stupid Column:
White Haired Council Dude: "Yo Party People in Da House! I give you: Mad Religious Nutjob to Make You All Feel Better"
Morpheus: "Hey everyone, I'm Morpheus and there's 250,000 hunter-killer robots with your names on who will be arriving for dinner some time tomorrow. Don't worry though, because I Talk Like A Wanker"
Crowd: "Oh that's OK then, let's all dance and fuck"

Enough of this - I'm off to play me some Vice City.