The Power Outage Ending

I like Matrix Reloaded. It wasn't a great movie, but I liked it. (Just ask Laurence Fishburne how "awesome" he thought it was, though.)

I ended up seeing Matrix Reloaded a total of 3 times in theater. This is the memory of the first time.

The movie opened May 15, 2003. We saw it at midnight, opening day, a thing we used to do back in those days. I'm less sure who exactly "we" were at this point. It was at least myself, Sentell, J., Lehman. Brandon was probably there, but I'm not sure. Robby probably wasn't, though.

We liked the flashes and the pretty action sequences and the music and the whole Neo being unstoppable and Agent Elrond kicking ass and all that jazz. We were less jazzed about the pointless twins, the keymaker, the Merovingian, and the ending.

A word about the ending ... around 2:15 AM, or thereabouts, the Southeastern power grid of Texas failed. Hospitals and businesses were on emergency power only. What did this mean to the AMC 30 Gulf Pointe? Lighting to get people out and no movie projection or air conditioning.

The Power(s?) That Is (Be?) chose this power failure to happen when Neo jumps into the Source. All we saw was white screen followed by the emergency lights coming on. I laughed. I applauded. Who would have the audacity to have an ending like that? It was brilliant. I told my friends that it was like those old movies: a gimmick and it worked so well. We sat in our chairs chatting about the movie excitedly. The majority of my friends (I think all) thought that this was a malfunction of some kind. They were right and an employee came in and told us to come out with our ticket stubs to get a free pass to come back another day to watch the movie. We had to go all the way back to the customer service desk, aided by power of flashlight and limited lighting. By the time my group neared the front of the line for passes, we heard the power had come back and the movie was restarting.

We rushed back to our seats and watched as the Architect explained everything and Trinity took forever to die for the first time.

In our post-movie mandatory Denny's discussion, the "Power Outtage Ending" was vastly superior to the actual ending.

I saw Reloaded twice more, in theater. It was possible that the ending was so bad because the flow of the experience was interrupted. This was not the case.