  Well. I went to theater. I saw it. Huge chunks of machinery were blown up. People drove vehicles recklessly and at insane speeds. Various intricately-orchestrated battles transpired. One totally irrelevant rave-party spliced with deeply emotional love-making scenes gyrated across the stage. All the old Plot Devices - the One, his Mentor/Prophet, his Woman, the Oracle, the Agent (now able to endlessly replicate himself, but to no avail since he keeps getting thwarted anyhow) are back. A few new Plot Devices - The Keymaker (who even admits to his nature as a Plot Device, telling Neo when asked "How do you know all this? ', 'It’s my purpose to know these things. ' Exactly. ), some older programs, gone renegade and turned into Decadent Aristocrats, one of whom trades the Keymaker to Neo in return for a kiss (really) and yet another portentous polysyllable-spewing cardboard cutout, the System Architect. While we're talking about the System Architect, I must say any scriptwriter who puts the word ‘ergo’ into someone’s mouth not just once but twice in the course of the same scene is just wanking. Much of this movie could be dismissed as wanking, by the way. The even more stunning set-pieces, the intricately choreographed fight sequences which seem to extend beyond the demands of mere plot, functioning as a sort of balletic ars gratia artis, the portentous pronouncements by Morpheus (which can be summed up in a few simple phrases: This is a war.
Neo is the One. We are all soldiers. We will win. I believe. ), the Supermanesque (or should that Supermanly? Damned if I know) flight scenes, all they achieve is to up the spectacle-factor. On another level though, this movie genuinely takes the story-arc further, adding satisfying ambiguities and uncertainties to the first film's fairly simple, messianic storyline.
Neo is the one, but no one, even himself, is sure quite what that means or what he will achieve. The introduction of the concept of endless recurrence makes one wonder whether there is any real freewill or purpose in all this. At this point, Neo clearly makes a choice, choosing the moment, the human element, the love of his woman over the chance to start again with a clean slate.
But, as the Oracle tells him his choice was pre-ordained. The important point is to understand why he has to make the choices he does. Beyond the illusion of freewill lies the challenge of understanding. And so forth. All in all, a very thrilling experience, and also satisfying to me because it takes the premises of the first part to new, interesting places.
On the downside, a lot of the acting and dialogue is flat, the style cannot hide a certain paucity of substance (particularly in those inane speeches by Morpheus and the Architect), Carrie-Anne Moss just isn’t that pretty, and thank (insert appropriate cosmic force here) the last part is coming out late this year, otherwise we’d all have just too long to wait for resolution. I’m being rather kind about the movie because it is willing to ask tough questions and mostly doesn’t resolve them with pat answers. Mainly, it’s only a movie and I expect far less out of SF movies than I would from the written word, so any intelligence at all is a happy surprise. I doubt I’ll bother to watch it more than once though. Apart from the gut-level thrills, most of the more cerebral content in the movie has a high decay-rate. 
