I'd love to jump into this thread, but, Stephen, you pretty much said EVERYTHING I have to say. I also *loved* the Agent Smith and freeway sequences, and I am also surprised that people are putting Reloaded down for meaningless philosophy when that's what the first movie was all about too. I remember when the most common movie quote I heard was "There is no spoon." Anybody that took that seriously gets a personalized LOL from me.

That said, I thought two philosophical speeches went on too long (the Architect's and Merovingian's) which was not the case in the original Matrix, so maybe what people are objecting to is not their meaninglessness but the way they disrupt the pace. The original film wasn't exactly evenly paced either, but we were still learning about what the Matrix was and who all the people chasing Neo were, such that the uneven pacing does not become apparent until a second viewing, when we already know the answers.

Those two scenes, however, were my *only* problems with Matrix Reloaded. On the whole, I think it's superior to the first movie by a nose. Why? Reloaded is a stylistic improvement, and in a movie whose purpose is 100% style, what other metric are you going to use?

The original had two scenes that blew my mind at the time: the first shot of Trinity taking out the cops, because that was the first moment we saw the kind of action we would see later, and the climactic skyscraper/helicopter sequence.

Reloaded's Agent Smith battle and freeway sequence (the latter has to be like 20 minutes or more of non-stop rule) win. On top of that, we even get an incredibly ruling opening Trinity sequence that, in just the one single shot of her landing on the ground when the explosion happens, matches the analogous scene from the first movie.