It suddenly dawned on me that after my (brief) comments on Reloaded earlier in the year, I forgot to follow through with comments on The Matrix Revolutions.

I’ve seen The Matrix countless times now, Reloaded a few times, but I’ve yet to have a repeat viewing of Revolutions after that first time back in November. After having a few days to think about the movie, I went on something of a rant (which includes serious spoilers for those who haven’t seen the movie yet) on a social mailing list I’m on …

*Bleah* All the fantasising, philosophising, and daydreaming in the world doesn’t make up for the following […]

• The Matrix was made to be a great kung-fu action flick with some head-scratching sci-fi overtones (i.e. “ooooh, real life is a sim?”). Carefully thought out zeitgeist allegory of our times / religions / philosophies, it is not.
• Neither The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions grant Neo with anything more than uber-Matrix-manipulation skills and a “connection to the Source”. Pie in the sky discussions about Neo’s implants, being a program, being a cyborg, et cetera are purely speculative, as the only people who *truly* know managed to sign a pretty amazing contract with Warner Brothers to assure that neither Wachowski brother has to talk to the press unless they actually want to.
• Trinity’s pointless death due to her bad driving trivialises everything she did prior to that scene. Neo’s complete and utter lack of revenge-seeking rage post-Trin-deathness simply exacerbates the pointlessness of killing her off.
• Virtually every major character from the previous two movies are reduced to caricatures of their prior selves – I found myself rooting more for Captain Mifune and The Kid than I did for Neo. Morpheus flicks a few switches and pisses off Niobe, the Hammer (aka the Mjolnr) flies to Zion in a pale imitation of Square USA’s (vastly superior Animatrix short) “The Final Flight of the Osiris”, Link answers the phone a couple of times, Councillor Harmann gets to ask after the Neb (and takes some shit from Locke, who spends the rest of the movie in Lieutenant Gorman mode) and The Oracle gets stung with a stupid plot device [1] to explain away Gloria Foster’s untimely death during production. Only Agent Smith escapes with a dash of humour – “Well, you should know, mom” – and an even-eviler-than-last-time streak.
  

  [1] if programs can escape into other ‘shells’ (presumably inhabiting actual humans via wetware), why did the Merovingian give a shit about Trin’s “give us Neo, or I blow your head off” threat?

• The Super Burly Brawl is better than the Burly Brawl, but the last 30 minutes of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 outclasses both Matrix sequel uberfights on several levels, the utter lack of unnecessary CG being amongst them.
• Every “fan” in the world who tries to write off the unanswered questions in Reloaded by saying the (non-)answers in Revolutions are made to make the audience think further and use their imagination are simply bullshitting to cover for bad scriptwriting and a sloppy ending.

… and so on. I’m *vastly* disappointed with Revolutions, and becoming more so by the day :(

There are interesting rebuttals to comments like mine, with the one I’ve linked to there essentially pointing out that Revolutions is one for the real movie geeks and fanboys, and not necessarily the mass-market commoditised audience Hollywood™ usually seeks out. My main problem with comments like this is that Revolutions is essentially a bad movie.

How can I get away with saying this? I don’t know if I can. In retrospect, it turns out that I’ve fallen in love with Reloaded. The whole chateau/freeway sequence really sold the whole thing to me, in the process somehow making up for the nonsenses that were the Burly Brawl and the Persephone Kiss. I even liked the cheesy cliffhanger ending, which I know pissed off a couple of my mates.

Jump forward to November — Reloaded had been out on DVD for a couple of weeks, Kill Bill had been out for a bit too. Revolutions was shaping up to be the movie of the year for me (in the end, that accolade has fallen to RotK, with Kill Bill a close second), but the very shoddy writing, badly constructed plotting and frankly callous and disgusting character “development” left me feeling stunned by the movie’s end. The length of time it took a central character to die off prompted a mate of mine sitting beside me to mutter, “for fuck’s sake, die!” I got annoyed at him for saying that, but as the seconds continued to interminably drag on, I started to agree with him.

The dock defence scenes with APUs and dock guns blazing, and Zion rebels crawling around with rocket launchers in an Aliens-stylee absolutely rocked, there’s no doubt about that, but even in those there was a level of unwelcome cheese and amateur writing. Was there really a need for a scene between tutor and pupil mid-battle which included dialogue such as “But I didn’t finish my training?!” “Neither did I”? I know that these movies have at times very knowingly paid homage to a myriad of movie genres and instances, but to slip into mouldy 1980s war movie bravado seemed very much out of place to me and a mate of mine.

I admit, it took me a while to pick up the Neo/Smith balance/imbalance ending to the Neodammerüng fight near the end of the movie, but what true resolution was there to the supposedly epic struggle between man and machine? To leave the audience to assume certain things at the end of what’s basically, and let’s be honest here, an action flick isn’t “clever”, it’s amateur.

I still want to like Revolutions. Perhaps my feelings will mellow once I’ve seen it on DVD, but I can’t shake off this fucking irritating feeling that it’s been a movie opportunity missed large.