Matrix Reloaded
Blu-ray | DVD
Directed by The Wachowski Brothers
Starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Laurence Fishburne
Warner Bros Home Entertainment
Release date: September 7, 2010

Ah, remember the halcyon days of early 2003? When everyone still loved The Matrix and we all waited with anticipation to see the genius that would be Matrix Reloaded? You remember those days, don’t you, and you had bought into the hype just as much as everyone else. Nowadays, there are more people who complain about Matrix Reloaded than those who try to defend it. The Matrix trilogy has been available on Blu-ray for a number of years, and the first film has been available by itself for a while, and now Warner Bros Home Entertainment has gotten around to releasing the second movie by itself. The question you will have to answer for yourself is whether you just want to watch the first film and forget the others exist, or if you want to watch the entire trilogy as a whole.

I’m actually not as much against this movie as a lot of people are. Sure it gets a bit, shall we say, goofy towards the end, but it’s filmed with some pretty incredible and memorable action sequences. I still marvel at the execution of the highway chase scene that is very much the high point of the film. Hugo Weaving still turns in an entertaining performance as Agent Smith, and makes any scene he’s in worth watching.

As promised, a trailer for the Robert Rodriguez produced and Nimród Antal directed reboot, Predators, has been unleashed online.

The trailer is pretty awesome and it begins by showing us the group of humans after they’ve first been brought to this mysterious jungle planet. After that, you’ll get to peek at each of the cast and see a lot of tense moments as the humans fight to survive, as well as a few peeks at the vicious Predators who are hunting them. Overall, it’s a very effective trailer; it looks like they nailed the tone of 1987’s Predator while adding some nasty new creatures and a hell of a lot more of them than the one deadly alien from the original film.

Remain in the shadows and cautiously make your way over to the other side to watch the first trailer for Predators!

The Matrix
10th Anniversary Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
Starring Keanu Reeves, Hugo Weaving, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne
Warner Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 31, 2009

Forget for a moment how you felt when you watched The Matrix Reloaded and then The Matrix Revolutions. Forget that those movies may have tainted your feeling on the original. Forget the pseudo-philosophical babble and the height of the story nearly causing the entire thing to collapse on top of itself. Forget that you ever knew the term “bullet time.” Forget all of that and try to remember how you felt back in 1999 when you sat in the movie theater and first saw a stranger new sci-fi action flick called The Matrix.

To call The Matrix a revolutionary film (even for the time) would be to completely miss the point. The Matrix wasn’t anything new — it was just a new way of bringing that style of story to audiences. Anyone that was fond of comics or anime was already familiar with the storytelling style of The Matrix. What it did was introduce that style to the masses. Remember, this was before “˜geek’ was considered cool, so being into comics or anime made you more of an outcast than trendy.

Mission: Impossible III
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring Tom Cruise, Michelle Monaghan, Ving Rhames, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Billy Crudup
Paramount Pictures
Rated PG-13 | 126 minutes
Release Date: May 5, 2006

In Mission: Impossible III, Tom Cruise returns as IMF Secret Agent Ethan Hunt to face his deadliest foe yet Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an international weapons and information dealer — and as second sequel law dictates, if it’s not in 3-D, then this time it’s personal.

The opening sequence shows Ethan and his love, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), captured and bound by the villainous Davian, who’s threatening to kill the couple unless Hunt hands over the “Rabbit’s Foot.” It doesn’t look good for our hero, but hold on, you’ll have to wait an hour to find out what happens while the movie flashes back a few days to the “good” stuff: Ethan and Julia’s engagement party!