Warning: Spoilers for, and scatterbrained whining about, The Matrix Reloaded (just in case I'm not the last nerd on Earth to go see it)

It took George Lucas 20 years to forget everything that made people love his movies. How did the Wachowski Brothers manage it in just 4?

God, what a mess. I couldn't wait for it to be over so I could give my eyes a rest from rolling every 15 seconds...

And I don't just mean the little nitpicky things. Like how this ragtag society has got it together enough to build a gigantic underground city and fantastic hovercraft and Matrix-sneaking-into technology and so on, but apparently they've forgotten the ancient human secrets of sewing and laundry detergent. Or how Neo can stop bullets in midair just by doing a "Talk to the hand," and yet he can't keep all them boots out his damn face. That's all carried over from the first movie, but it didn't really bug me then because of everything else that was going on. They kept things hopping. But this one just draaaags. Your mind wanders, and you start thinking about all the stupid stuff that they should be distracting you from thinking about.

I mean, why did they think anybody would care about a bunch of guys sitting at desks arguing about chain of command or whatever? They even had a fucking Meeting Of The High Council scene. You know, like every other Meeting Of The High Council scene that's ever brought a movie to a complete stop? Where a bunch of characters whose names you don't know argue about shit you don't care about? There should have been subtitles at the bottom, like:

THIS WILL BE SCENE 14 ON THE DVD...

BUT YOU CAN'T DO DICK ABOUT IT NOW...

KEEP MASHING THAT IMAGINARY SKIP BUTTON, LOSER...

HA HA HA

I don't even want to get into the Sweaty Cave Rave scene, or the Cyber-Cake That Gives the Cyber-Blonde a Cyber-Orgasm for Some Reason scene, or any of the several dozen Wheelchair Guy from the HBO Original Series OZ Talking to His Girlfriend Who I Think Is the Sister of the Two Brothers from the First Movie But I Am Neither Sure Nor Interested scenes...

And why did everybody act so surprised that Agent Smith could make copies of himself? He's a piece of software. Why wouldn't he be able to? Just right-click, dude. He can probably even rename them if he wants. Or they could just be Agent_Smith(1), Agent_Smith(2), etc. But anyway, don't they have file-sharing in the future? Or maybe that's the point, maybe the Wachowskis are sick of everybody downloading their movies for free, and that's their big "fuck you guys" gesture. Every time a Smith gets kicked in the teeth, it's a blow against Kazaa. Neo's like, "Whoa... I know copy-protection fu!"

Speaking of the totally insane special effects battles, they were okay, although you could always tell when it was all-CGI. Even with the realistic flapping cloaks and wrinkled clothing and facial mapping and whatnot, the CGI characters all had a sort of plastic look to them. Although the programmers did do a pretty good job of giving them weight and mass, unlike the CGI in stuff like Spider-Man and all the trailers for The Hulk. And I liked the deal toward the end where they recreated the Millennium Falcon escaping the Death Star II from The Empire Strikes Back, except with Ted "Theodore" Logan gone all goth and zooming around like Superman.