Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I'm not a fan of Keannu Reaves. In fact, I think the guy is a complete dork. However, when he wasn't in this movie, the action was pretty cool. Probably the major fight scenes kept my adrenaline pumping throughout the entire movie, especially the fight at the dock. Forgoing the horrid "acting", the dock fight was as close to something as you'd call digital art as possible. Mifune's death scene is one of those great heroic death scenes. Not his death throes in his hamburger'd face, but just how he wasted in that rush of droids that just swarm his vehicle. The characters were mostly cliche and the cliches were so far cliched that you could remove the voice overs and not change much. It's the landscape of this pulverized world that leaves you pondering what you are witnessing. That is art to me. Attempting to partly define meaning in something that has no overt meaning. If you avoid the mostly trite (or tripe) dialogue in this mundane story, the visual effects of course are the real draw. The dock fight scene itself is, indeed, worth obtaining this movie (and probably is the only reason, imo, to watch it) The earlier points do not reach higher plateaus than what the original one established. The second one brought an interesting character in the Architect to describe the philosophy and elevate the conversations into a more erudite level (where Keannu's expressions of frustration, imo, are more due to him not *truly* understanding what the architect really is saying). However, the visuals do climax in a satisfying display of what the world potentially could come to as a Orwellian nightmare.