THere are so many movies that excite me so much that I nearly shake, but I don't think there any that matches the experience I once had when I watched The Matrix Reloaded, the first sequel to the 1999 classic. That I was at a cinema, complete with booming sound, contributed to the experience.
There were many sequences responsible, but there were two in particular the rocked my world:
- An early scene where Trinity continues shooting the Agents while falling of a tall building. It was not only the concept, but the visuals of this particular sequence were jaw-dropping.
- The Burly Brawl scene, where Neo fights off multiple copies of Agent Smith. As with the falling sequence, it was both the concept and execution that made me so god damn excited.
This is movie magic. I even went as far as declaring the movie a masterpiece. That's a rare accolade for a movie to possess. I did this not blind to the movie's flaws (I was very well aware of the less-than-excellent story). It's just that the excitement was so great that the flaws seemed like minor blemishes in comparison. Sadly, that wasn't a case on a revisit.
The true test of a movie's excellence is on a revisit, or better still, on multiple revisits. The movie must remain excellent even when it is no longer the-new-hot-thing, when other masterworks have been released. The Matrix Reloaded isn't such a movie. The visual effects, it's best asset, even looked cartoonish on a revisit (thought still great), and felt like putting make-up on a rotting corpse (a stupid story). Not it's not a bad movie, just not a very good one.
So, The case of The Matrix Reloaded is whereby I ecstatically declare supreme a movie on the initial viewing, a movie that proves a complete let-down on a revisit.