The Matrix exploded into the consciousness of the world by bringing a freshness and originality to the action genre. Sure, the film borrowed very heavily from Hong Kong martial arts films and you can certainly find familiar elements from other genres, but the Wachowski Brothers managed to blend so many different themes in a new and unique way.

That first film ended with the hint of more story to tell, and with its phenomenal box office success, it was only a matter of time. So the only question was, could a sequel live up to the original.

Sadly, the answer is no.

However, this is a conditional no, because The Matrix Reloaded is not a complete film.

Reloaded takes place a few months after the events of the first film. Neo (Keanu Reeves) has fully embraced his role as The One and is on a crusade to free the humans from the control of the machines. His relationship with Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) has also intensified and there are hints that his feelings for her may become a distraction from the impending war.

Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), meanwhile, is facing trouble back in the human city of Zion. In the first film, our only frame of reference for the world outside of the Matrix was Morpheus and his unwavering belief in Neo. Now, however, we learn that not all of the free humans share Morpheus' faith in Neo. They can't deny his superhuman abilities within the Matrix, but not everyone feels that he is the key to human survival.

A massive wave of robotic sentinals is on the way to Zion to destroy the city and many think that continuing to risk sending ships up to broadcast into the Matrix is too great a risk.

Morpheus disobeys his orders, believing that he, Trinity and Neo must regain contact with the Oracle, that she may have valuable information about how to defeat the coming robotic army.

Within the Matrix, Neo has encountered a new threat. His nemesis from the first film, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), was thought to be destroyed, but this is not the case at all. In fact, Smith is not only back, but replicating himself at an alarming rate. Neo discovers this when he finds himself in the midst of a massive battle against literally hundreds of Smiths.

Neo also learns that there are renegade programs running throughout the Matrix. These are programs who, facing deletion, ran from the system and operate completely independently of the Matrix mainframe. There is also a complete substructure to the Matrix, full of hidden passages and backdoors, ready to be exploited. The Oracle explains to Neo that there is a Keymaker who may be able to help him gain full access to these underground levels of the Matrix and that this may very well provide the tools necessary to bring down the whole system.

All of this sounds very impressive and is right in the same spirit as the first film. Why, then, does it not work as well? I don't think it's a simple matter of "been there, done that." Reloaded certainly contains many similar elements to The Matrix, but there is still enough fresh visual invention here to make it exciting.

The problem, then, lies in the story. I fully understand that this film is only meant to be one half of a larger whole, but that is no excuse for not providing a satisfying conclusion to this film. Better story-telling would have provided a film that seemlessly ties into the final installment, but that is also capable of standing on its own -- and that is not the case here.

Based on its own merits, and until Revolutions comes out, that's all I have to go on, I have to rate this film low simply because it isn't complete.

And yet, it is still a visual feast and highly inventive. The Wachowski's have a gift for either showing us brand new things or repackaging old ideas in innovative ways that make them seem exciting again. The "burly brawl," Neo's fight with hundreds of Smiths, is just such an example. By now, it would have seemed that we had seen everything there was to see in an over-the-top fight scene, but the Wachowski's prove that there is still room for ingenuity.

Some complain that this fight scene look too computer generated, but I don't particularly see the problem in this. The Matrix is, after all, a computer generated world and as with any computer system, there must be limitations on processing power.

I find the burly brawl to be simply exhilarating in its execution and this is where the problem lies. The fight scene comes so early in the film that we never quite recover from it. By all rights, this sort of spectacle should have been the climax and there is never quite anything to top it. After successfully fighting off a hundred agents, how is Neo supposed to impress us? The simple answer is, he can't, and neither can the film. The more it tries, the more numb we become by the unyielding action.

The first film was paced perfectly. The Matrix Reloaded is paced incessently. I can admire this film for what it is trying to do, and I can be impressed by bits and pieces, but I still can't help but feel underwhelmed by the whole.