Here be spoilers.

The three movies I was/am looking forward to the most this year are sequels: X-men United, Matrix Reloaded and of course, The Return of the King. I’m looking forward to the latter the most, but at the same time will be sad to watch, bringing to a close the last installment of the new Holy Trilogy. (If you don’t know what the first Holy Trilogy of geeky movies is, you’re in the wrong place).

Anyway… So I’ve seen X2 and Matrix Reloaded and like most sequels, both are far inferior to their predecessors. However, while X-men 2 was quite bad, I have to say Matrix Reloaded was a fun, very respectable summer movie which I’d see again.

Let’s start with the abominable X-men 2. First off, I have to say that among my entourage I am one of the few to have disliked it. Lots of cool little action snippets, but there was practically no character development in this one. Wolverine, who was such an interesting and mysterious character in the first movie, is now almost a sensitive new age guy. Some say the movie is true to the comic book, but I didn’t see much of Logan’s struggle with his animal nature in the movie. It made him very… ordinary. Just another “nice guy who can be tough”.

Good things about X2:
- Little bits of cool action.
- The opening scene in the white house
- Mystique
- Nightcrawler
- Magneto and the little bits of steel

Bad things about X2:
- Little bits of bullshit, badly written snippets of “character development” in between the action
- Pointless scenes, like Mystique trying to bang Wolverine, or Wolverine going to Alberta, finding nothing, coming back and being told “didn’t you look underground” (forehead slap)
- Onesided characters like Pyro (just an all around bad guy, not even any struggle as he turns to the dark side) or Deathstrike, whose only role in the movie is to get her ass kicked
- An uninteresting villain (which by the way was perhaps the only sin committed by the Spiderman movie last year)
- An ultraboring finale, with a breaking dam (come on, they used that in one of the Superman movies! In the 70s!)

Matrix Reloaded is a thousand times better than X2, although it doesn’t beat The Matrix. But that was to be expected. It packs lots of eye-candy-action that I’d enjoy watching again, and although the story takes some unfortunate turns, it hasn’t completely derailed (*). It’s still The Matrix. Like Wolverine, some of the characters from the original have lost some of their cool appeal (namely Trinity, Morpheus and Agent Smith). My main criticism of this one is that it seemed like every little character had to embark on a long philosophical monologue about one thing or another - causality, purpose, choice, blah blah blah. In the original, the speeches were tighter and more interesting.

Good things about Matrix Reloaded:
- GREAT action. I’m just not sick of bullet-time-kung-fu yet.
- The story remains true to the original (**).
- There’s something cool about Morpheus taking a samurai sword to a car.

Bad things about Matrix Reloaded:
- Way too long gratuitous rave-and-sex scene. What is this, a music video?
- Endless philosophical speeches.
- Thought it was too bad that Agent Smith is now just a little maverick character out on his own.

* For an example of a sequel taking a good thing and anally raping it, take for instance the much-anticipated Alien 3, where most of the characters from the previous movie which you came to know and love get killed in the opening credits. Bless you, David Fincher, for you gave us Fight Club! But damn you, Fincher, for fucking up the Aliens franchise!

** So far. But they had better come up with a satisfying reason why Neo’s got powers outside the Matrix. If they cheat us out of a good explanation for that, it’ll suck. If the explanation is that the real world is actually still the matrix, it’ll really suck.