First, the theater screwed up the projection, so the top 20% of the movie was projecting off the screen and so was invisible. Then they stopped the film 8 or 9 times trying to get it right, each time losing two or three minutes of plot, so the confused writing became even harder to follow. They finally got it down to 5% off screen before they gave up, so we watched the rest of the movie with everyone missing top inch of their hair. Everyone could have been bald, I would never know.
Second, the movie itself was badly directed and cut. The pacing was all wrong -- some of the fight scenes were intolerably and pointless long, for example. Why have a fight scene drag on for 20 minutes when the hero can, apparently, simply choose to fly off at any moment? It is illogical! And the writing made no sense. One speech by M, and the entire populace goes from frantic worry to sex orgy. Yeah, that could happen. And how come there were no old people or children at that meeting/party? It was just very dumb.
And there were a number of logical flaws in the basic writing. I admit that the premise of the first movie was weak, an old SF cliche from way back, but on the whole I really enjoyed the original. The writing made sense within its own logic, it was consistent and the mayhem was original. The sequel, by contrast, was confused and derivitive, repetitive.
The two things that annoyed me the most, however, were (1) references to things that hadn't happened in the original, but in the video games, so non-gamers like myself were left hanging, and (2) the explicit "to be continued..." ending. If it says "to be continued next episode", it television, not movies. Even Star Wars draws to some kind of self-contained conclusion at the end of each episode, but this was just lame -- tune in next $30 to find out what is happening? And even then, not really know unless you've seen the intervening video games?
Bite me.
