The Matrix Revolutions
Cinematography:
Bill PopeComposer:
Don DavisCast:
Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Ian Bliss, Collin Chou, Lachy Hulme, Nathaniel Lees, Harry Lennix, Robyn Nevin, David Roberts (more)VOD (4)
Plots(1)
In the third installment, the epic war between man and machine reaches a thundering crescendo: the Zion military, aided by courageous civilian volunteers like Zee and the Kid, desperately battles to hold back the Sentinel invasion as the Machine army bores into their stronghold. Facing total annihilation, the citizens of the last bastion of humanity fight not only for their own lives, but for the future of mankind itself. But an unknown element poisons the ranks from within: the rogue program Smith has cunningly hijacked Bane, a member of the hovercraft fleet. Growing more powerful with each passing second, Smith is beyond even the control of the Machines and now threatens to destroy their empire along with the real world and the Matrix. The Oracle offers Neo her final words of guidance, which he accepts with the knowledge that she is a program and her words could be just another layer of falsehood in the grand scheme of the Matrix. With the aid of Niobe, Neo and Trinity choose to travel farther than any human has ever dared to go a treacherous journey above ground, across the scorched surface of the earth and into the heart of the menacing Machine City. In this vast mechanized metropolis, Neo comes face to face with the ultimate power in the Machine world--the Deus Ex Machina--and strikes a bargain that is the only hope for a dying world. The war will end tonight, with Neo’s destiny and the fate of two civilizations inexorably tied to the outcome of his cataclysmic confrontation with Smith. (official distributor synopsis)
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Matrix Revolutions has a more tangible and meaningful plot, less pseudo-philosophising and less gratuitous action for effect than in The Matrix Reloaded. I’m satisfied with that. You’ll find yourself yawning through the first hour, but the subsequent “war of the machines” is amazing. If there were more emotion in the final digital fight between Neo and Smith, Revolutions would have been a class better than Reloaded. The film’s ending has an appropriate amount of the pseudo-depth that the whole saga has been faking. Those who thought that there was something big behind everything will be disappointed. Unavoidably disappointed. Three and a half stars.
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Revolutions, while retaining most of the ills of the second installment, quite adeptly reduces their intensity. The digital sequences now primarily involve clashes of dirty metal, which is easier to animate and thus doesn't take away from the intensity of the Battle of Zion with mangled CGI. Plus the exoskeletons are really cool. The dialogue here is aware that we're about to close up shop, so it's finally going somewhere. Oh, and the Zion Respect Festival scenes are thankfully pretty strictly limited to war sequences in industrial dock settings. But why five stars? In Revolutions, The Matrix has finally managed to conclude a truly ultimate cyberpunk masterpiece (or rather, esocyberpunk masterpiece) and has stopped dodging the fact that the only options are that reality is nothing or that reality is everything. Codes are reformatted into atoms, minds create matter, all as a result of electrical connections between neural systems. It's all about electricity. The Matrix is actually a bit of an anti-humanist series, telling us how humanity's only goal is to destroy the machines, while the machines' main goal is to adapt to humanity, which makes them undergo more than just one problem, including fatal ones.
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“Hey Larry, Joel Silver was here.” - “Yeah? And what did the old bastard want?" - “He said he had a lot of money for us if we wanted to shoot another two parts.” - “That’s great, bro! Let’s put something together, then. We have loads of ideas, we can put them all together and something will come out of it.” - “Cool. So, here we put this, and we put this here, here we drop that long dialogue scene, it’s just verbal filler, but who cares, they’ll survive. And, bro, it’s ten minutes long, and you know, ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and we have four hours, two hole films!” - “Yeah, you’re right. And here we could squeeze some sequence inspired by anime, the Japanese love that and they’re the second biggest movie market in the world. We can’t go wrong.” - “Yeah, and some love-story, too.” - “Hey, Andy, those heroic moments wouldn’t hurt and...” Enough with the snark, now I'm going to be dead serious, I'm going to be as serious as the heroes of the Matrix; so serious and lofty that in the wonder of their own loftiness they sound, in the words of Amadeus, as if they shit marble… One way to grasp the Matrix is to search and search for meaning, search for the key to the truth. But it's a bit like dropping the key to my place into a puddle, I’d have to find it because otherwise I wouldn't be able to get into my apartment, but truth be told, digging in a puddle is not very "interesting" fun. Just as much as digging through a pile of verbal ballast and suffering through seriously meant pathetic dialogues that lack a shred of insight. I would so much like to search and find the meaning, but the Wachowskis won't let me because of the form of their narrative. And yet The Matrix Revolutions could have been a great movie. The scene from the subway station, from the "intermediate section", was funny and awesome. Likewise, the ending itself, I'm not afraid to say, was breathtaking! But everything in between? Awful! Pathetic battle scenes cut from the Soviet film Liberation. The Wachowskis proved that I remembered my childhood years, when I went to see shitty Soviet war films for free that were full of pathos of the coarsest grain. “How old are you, kid?” - “Eighteen.” - “Should have said sixteen, I might have believed that.” - “All right, I'm sixteen.” - “The minimum age for the Corp's eighteen. Sixteen's too young.” - “The machines don't care how old I am. They'll kill me just the same.”... This is not a sample from a Soviet war movie, but from this film. The American kid wanted to fight and he accomplished a great thing. No, really some patterns don't change even after fifty years and it doesn't matter the country of origin. But despite these excesses, The Matrix Revolutions is not a stupid movie, although some of the interpretations are ridiculous. For example, the shape-shifting of the Oracle is explained by Matrix advocates as a Merovingian punishment, but the reality is much more prosaic. Gloria Foster, the actress who played the Oracle, died during the filming, so the Wachowskis helped themselves to this pathetic ruse. I have nothing against the concept of the Matrix, but the form, my friends, the form…
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The action is bombastic and, most importantly, the seemingly endless battle with the machines has the makings to enter the company of some of the most iconic scenes. But that script! Compared to the lacklustre second part, it’s considerably sharper, with less bullshit, and subordinates almost everything to the great effect, or rather to the exterior, but it again fails to impress the viewer in any way or with any idea, to squeeze at least a pinch of emotions out of them... I admittedly rode the wave of the spectacular action, but I actually kept waiting and waiting and asking myself what the hell can come out of this? And then suddenly the end came and all I could feel was disappointment. That was supposed to be it? Is this what everyone's so crazy about? After the fantastic first one, the directors must have run out of breath and Reloaded and Revolutions are just a bloated bubble, we can only shake our heads in disbelief. This time, there was no déja vu.
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Cut Reloaded and glue it together with the best of Revolutions and behold: that would be a film! Yet, after an unbalanced and melted intermediate link, Revolutions is a brisk spectacle that benefits from the chatter of Reloaded (there's no need to think about anything deeply anymore) and the visual mastery that The Matrix is famous for. It’s nice to look at, and the ending is really riveting, as is the message of the whole story. Plus it has a great soundtrack. I love this trilogy because it is not only "one", "two", etc., but is really a conceptual work that, as a whole, creates a huge potential universe that can be further populated. In addition, it allows you to engage your brain and create your own intertextual "matrix" with classics of world philosophy and literature. It may lead to exaggerated constructs, but thank God the "mass" story places such high demands on the viewer at all...
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