70 mm film + 4 story screen + Laurence Fishburne's face = lunar surface. Seriously, he's got a lot of pock marks and craters on his face. I'd seriously be inclined to believe that he's a recovering burn victim. The only other person I've ever seen with skin that bad in a movie was Orlando Bloom in The Fellowship of the Rings. It's just a little harder to notice, since they seemed to use shalac as his makeup.
     So now I've seen Matrix Reloaded twice, once in the normal theater and once in IMAX. I definitely recommend going to see it in IMAx, especially if you're near one of the really really large ones (8 stories I think is the largest). You get a really sweet sense of motion off of all those camera pans and bullet-time effects. The highway scene was a work of art on IMAx, as was the last Neo-flying scene (if you saw the commercials or the end of the last movie, you know Neo can fly... so don't bitch at me about spoilers).
     If you're nit-picky, though, you might not wanna see it in 70 mm and 4-8 stories tall. There are lots of problems with the computer graphics, and a lot of the "cool" stuff they did in the first movie comes back to annoy me again (some stuff explodes, and like the helicopter crashing scene in the first, said stuff ripples before exploding... ugh). Also, they used CG characters in order to make a couple of shots longer and more continuous. This didn't add to the scene (in my opinion), and made the computer generated character look extremely fake. I hate to say this, but as far as computer-generated characters go, I'd have to say Lucas still has the best scene for the Jengo Fett/Obi-Wan fight scene in Episode II. It's hard to tell when those two switch between real and generated.
     In the first Matrix, some of the coolest stuff came out of the incredible panning bullet-time shots. That's of course due to Paul Debevec, who pretty much wrote the book on geometry reconstruction and texture retrieval from photographs. His more recent work has really been impressive. His "Rendering With Natural Light" and other derivative work is just amazing, and I'm sure it was used for a lot of the Graphics in Matrix Reloaded. After all, Neo fights Agent Smith in a playground in broad daylight. When Agent Smith moves, his *achem* shiny forhead leaves a distinct motion blur path that makes it obvious that they're using HDR lighting. On top of that, I think they probably used Debevec's methods for retrieving surface colors and properties from a series of controled-lighting photos. Specifically, I'm thinking they used it for the interiors of the office building since it yeilds unbelievably accurate results in closed environments.
     Well, that's probably getting a little too geeky for all of you, so I'm gonna digress a little. Also, I need to get some sleep before work tomorrow... so bye for now.