Colleen and I finally saw "Reloaded" on Monday (we had to travel to San Diego so that Gramma could watch the baby). My impressions were pretty favorable. It suffers from a malady that many unintentional trilogies have (let's not kid ourselves, if the first Matrix had not been such a runaway hit, it would have ended there, with Neo flying away): the need to have a bridge episode to prove that there was a trilogy's worth of celluliod there in the first place. This was purely a "positioning" movie, setting a useable bridge between the standalone first movie and the climactic third.

<spoiler><theory>
Since Neo's Matrix powers have begun to bleed into the "real" world, could it not be possible that the final episode has Zion's universe inside just another Matrix? That the true real world is still undiscovered by our protgonists?

I liked The Animatrix too