At the end of the first film, Neo the demigod has finally been revealed as such in a dazzling sequence of light and cascading source code that conveyed better than just about anything I've ever seen how absolutely everything can change whe the apple cart is well and truly upset. He has stopped speeding bullets that were flying toward him, he has come back from the dead, he has apparently destroyed his nemesis, Agent Smith by turning Smith's own great tactic against him (i.e., diving into the same "space" occupied by Smith's "body" and basically overwriting him). And he can fly.

Unstoppable Neo! Obviously he's gonna save us all, as he says in his final phone call to the Artificial Intelligence gestalt who built and run the Matrix.

And herein lay my misgivings about sequels. How much fun would it really be to watch Neo just kick more ass and take more names? Maybe if he gets bored and turns evil, yeah, that might be fun - omnipotence and its attendant boredom always carries with it the threat of corruption.

But the Wachowskis had other plans, and they were undeniably cool ones. Neo's neutralization of Agent Smith by overwriting him meant a lot more than just the end of a fight scene; not only did Smith survive the overwriting, but there was a co-mingling of what I can only think of as Neo's and Smith's digital DNA. As we quickly learn in TM:R, Smith derived frightening new abilities (that lead to one of the most ass-kickingly cool fight scenes ever, and made a simple, two-word sentence, "Me, too" into one of my favorite movie lines, maybe ever) that make him a greater threat than ever. Neo, too, would appear to have benefitted from the exchange, having forged a whole new connection with the machines he will fight, as he demonstrates in a climactic scene when those giant mechanical squid, the sentinals, menace his actual, physical self in the non-Matrix, non-virtual "real world."

That alone would be a pretty cool basis for a sequel, but that's not all the film had to offer to satisfy my hunger for more noodle baking, more loud industrial music, more stylistic pyrotechnics and more Hugo Weaving (so much more Hugo Weaving!).

Another powerful hunger of mine was satisfied in our getting to see Zion, the last human city, deep underground and still utterly dependent on the very technology that got us where we were - machines purifying the recycled water and air, machines providing heat and light, machines refining and working metal to build and maintain the last, vast human habitat - and this irony does not escape comment.