Review Detail

The best tribute to the sequels in their original form you can imagine. Stupendously good audio quality, video quality and incredibly professional editing come together to turn the original sequels into a single, continuous story, and it simply works. Toning down Neo's superpowers so he can't affect Sentinals, doesn't see Trinity's death and doesn't have to remove the bullet from her (since she is never shot in this edit) has remarkably little impact on the overall proceedings in a good way. The re-edited lead up to Neo finding the door for the source works considerably better than it did in the theatrical cut and reinforces the fact three teams are working together much more. The annoying sub-plot of Neo stuck in Matrix limbo is cut entirely with no major plot holes. There's still plenty of great action sequences - the shortened highway chase has ingeniously chosen cuts but is still highly enjoyable, as is the trimmed battle for Zion, although I don't entirely see the point of removing Kid's involvement other than for the sake of shortening the entire battle - and drama with minorly improved stakes thanks to the seamlessly added scenes from 'Enter The Matrix' that give more depth to Locke and Niobe, and even sometimes improving the already brilliant pacing. Faultless work from Jerick in the execution department, so well done there!

However, the problem I have with this edit is hardly in the perfect execution of it's ideas, but rather the ideas themselves, it's purist nature. It strays very closely to the original narrative, and the problem with the original storyline IMO isn't it's focus on the fate of Zion so much as it's occasional ramblings into indulgent philosophy, and the fact that Zion's population mostly consists of secondary characters you never grow to truly care about. None of the new secondary characters ever develop beyond their initial traits (Niobe is always the strong-headed woman, Locke is always the stubborn commander, Link is always the likable family man etc), and any scenes that try to develop their personalities seem pointless because they only ever display their traits again rather than add real, unique development. The same can be said of the numerous moments of hollow-ringing philosophy since most of the time they involve secondary characters you don't care about, with limited direct impact on the story proceedings, and therefore they feel like unnecessary distractions from the action sequences, the core elements of the Matrix universe's mythology and the actual fate of Zion. It's simply boring storytelling. This edit includes *plenty* of these indulgent philosophy and redundant, repetitive secondary character development scenes, albeit brief ones, including the infamous Architect scene that is left mostly untouched and several scenes highlighting how the sequels love to constantly return to Morpheus' obsession with his mental book "THE PROPHECY: HOW NEO WILL SAVE US ALL". It's just paced extremely well with the worst fat from Revolutions trimmed. I also thought the change that tries to make it seem as if the Oracle's appearance remains the same was unnecessary, since it's already explained in the movie albeit poorly and would only add a few minutes to the running time if you left it as is. The issue is made even worse by your decision to leave the ending as is, making the change in The Oracle's appearance confusing as hell unless you're already familiar with the film, and IMO all fanedits should be created with the assumption that you are showing it to someone who has never seen the film before to avoid this. I understand there's a post-credits scene explaining the change, but that doesn't make it seem any less unnecessary or confusing since the story is technically over by that point anyway. Some poor acknowledgement within the film itself is much better than some good acknowledgement once the story is over.

So for those reasons, this edit isn't for me. Geminigod's Epic Edition remains my go-to version of the sequels for shifting the overall focus, toning down the philosophy and secondary character development to fairer levels, despite some rougher editing. But I applaud Jerick for doing such a quality job with Reprogrammed, even more so since it's his first release. Recommended for Matrix fans.