Review Detail

I must say at almost half the runtime of the two movies it combines, there isn't a whole lot I found myself missing in this edit. There are a couple things that were cut out here that I wish were left in though. I like Agent Smith discovering the ability to jump into an unplugged body, I like Neo in the train station, and I kind of like Neo discovering he can affect the sentinels in the real world. As for additional cuts I wish were made, I was hoping that the Neo vs 100 Agent Smiths fight would be a little trimmed down. I absolutely hate when Neo becomes a smooth CGI creation and the fight becomes cartoonish and uninteresting. The fight starts out good, but I think some of the sillier elements of this could still be cut out to keep it more in line with the original movie's aesthetic.

Of course, the problem with this is that there are SO MANY moments in these sequels that dive into bad CGI that it would be impossible to cut them all so maybe why bother in the Agent Smiths fight? I feel like almost every action sequence in these movies starts out great, but at some point gets too big for its britches and goes full CGI and just sucks you out of it. If it wasn't such a jarring transition and the effects were better and more subtle, it wouldn't be a problem. But that's no fault of the editor here. Jerick can only work with the footage available.

So while I would say it's worth watching this just to save some time with the prequels, it can't fix some foundational problems with the sequels themselves. In the first movie, everybody was scared of one Agent Smith and 5 Sentinels. It was a huge plot point in the movie. In these sequels, Neo leisurely fends off dozens of Agent Smiths and Zion battles millions of Sentinels. It's much too far of a stakes/danger leap to expect the audience to care about it. There are ways of upping the ante without just multiplying it by a thousand.