There's also a bit of overspray with some of the lighter metals, but it doesn't spoil the overall effect of the toy, which is very nice. The entire Sentinel features a nice mix of dark metallic colors highlighted with those glowing red eyes at the front, which look awesome from a short distance but are very splotchy up close. Not quite so nice is the detailing and paint, sadly. Count 'em, there are fifteen of them tentacles emerging from the back, all long and bendy with one of three types of claws at the end a permanently closed claw, a permanently open claw, or an articulated claw that can open and shut nicely - there's even a part of the plastic sculpted in to keep them open if needed, very nice.

The enormous head is perfectly sculpted with all of those terrifying eyes, the little robotic arms at the front and the bigger arms underneath, stretching back to where all of its squid-like tentacles emerge at the back. Out of the box with its tentacles all stretched out, it's almost two foot long, and it's nice and heavy too. The first thing you notice about this toy in its box is that it's huge. No, of course not, and this fella here is exactly the reason why! A reminder of how McFarlane became one of the best in the business in the first place, the huge and heavy Sentinel was one of the coolest toys of 2003, despite the monstrous disappointments from the sequel films that spawned it.

Let's not dwell on the bad - just because all of the basic figures were completely ridiculous (' Go long, MISTer Anderson!') and just because the other 'deluxe' figure in the line, the stupid APU, fell apart in the box, that doesn't necessarily mean it was the worst line of 2003, does it? Even though both Morpheus and Trinity looked like they were straining to take a dump, and because Neo was frozen in a dancing pose, that doesn't mean that we should boycott McFarlane and their Sports Toys forever, does it? I mean, we shouldn't FIREBOMB THEM NOW, should we? While we're still in Retro Month, I'm going to jump back a few weeks to take a look at my most cherished Christmas present (or maybe a few years to when this character was actually interesting) - the awesome Matrix Sentinel, the silver lining to McFarlane Toys' insanely terrible Matrix action figure line. B u y t h e t o y s, n o t t h e h y p e.

Matrix sentinel