(I later mugged up on the first two, but still couldn't work out the shades thing.) It is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the film-makers that The Matrix Reloaded is a sensory experience rather than an intellectual one: you turn on, you plug in, you drop out. Anyone coming to this film without seeing the first one will be absolutely flummoxed by the plot convolutions, the portentous antiphonal dialogue, and the ubiquitous wearing of black sunglasses in even nightclub-level gloom. This is, after all, the first of two longish sequels to be released this year - The Matrix Revolutions is to follow in November - so the brothers W had plenty of room to be expansive, to help clue us in.

Surely The Matrix Reloaded would provide a quick refresher course for slackers on the evils of the system. But I still couldn't put my finger on why the 'reality' of a dingy space module where the good guys live could be preferable to the chimera of the Matrix, where you could at least get a decent steak if the fancy took you. Yes, I recalled that it was a malignant construct designed by machines to keep humankind in thrall that Keanu Reeves was anointed as The One who would somehow liberate the world from this slavery and that the guerrilla warfare involved a great deal of balletic chopsocky performed at high speed. Four years on from The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers' hugely influential sci-fi fantasia, I found myself trying, and failing, to remember exactly why 'the Matrix' is a bad place to live.

Matrix reloaded