The Matrix Revolutions

This may go without saying but spoilers on here.

We’ve reached our final destination.  The saga of Neo and gang battling a crusade against the machines concludes here.  After four years and two movies we get to witness the blissful destruction of the evil Matrix.  OR NOT!  One of the weirdest things about this series is they don’t give the audience what they set up way back in the first film.  Playing with expectations is good but we’re basically back to square one by the time Revolutions ends.  What the frickin’ fuck?

This is a sci-fi war movie and generally I’m not a big fan of those.  There are exceptions for sure like Starship Troopers and the original Star Wars trilogy (special mention to the Terminator franchise that undeniably belongs in this category but found a way to mostly sidestep the actual war part) but due to my inherent disinterest I do not like this picture.  It’s pretty monotonous.

Unfortunately all the non-war stuff isn’t very exciting either.  Aside from the attack on Zion the other big showpiece is the Neo and Smith fight where they float around punching and kicking each other in the rain.  Similar to Reloaded the hand to hand combat seems fluffy even though these two ram each other into the ground and smash through buildings and shit.  Now I haven’t seen Man of Steel but this fight reminds me of that infamous ending where two supreme beings pulverize one another while causing catastrophic damage to the city around them.  It lands flat because they can’t really hurt each other and this bout has the same low stakes feel.

Then there are just time wasters.  The beginning where Neo is stuck in limbo and Morpheus and Trinity have to lean on the Merovingian to get him back ends up being completely pointless.  Nothing is gained or learned by going through this exercise.  Neo’s back to his shitty existence like at the end of Reloaded and no one died in the process.  It’s total padding to fit in another couple of action sequences and spout some more cryptic religious philosophy.

And as I mentioned earlier the ending isn’t all that satisfying.  Sure Smith is defeated but that wasn’t the original goal.  What happened to the plan of destroying the Matrix and freeing the human race from slavery?  Now the objective is to save the last human city left and execute a peace treaty with the machines.  I don’t know why the Wachowskis decided to change course along the way.  Maybe it has to do with the soul crushing post-apocalypse reality they created.  I remember hearing an argument once that life is better inside the Matrix because you can have a job and live relatively comfortably and experience how the world should still be.  I get that it’s a total fabrication but if it’s a hundred percent convincing and you don’t know any better then is it really worse than living underground in constant fear of machines coming to annihilate you at any moment?  Maybe the Wachowskis thought about it and were reminded of Morpheus declaring that most folks aren’t ready to be unplugged from the Matrix yet.  It would probably lead to mass suicide and there wouldn’t be enough resources left to sustain that large of a population.  It would be a death sentence to free everyone.

I dunno.  I’m not into this movie.  Revisiting the franchise was interesting though.  Ambitions were set sky high from the start but I would’ve preferred keeping the story more intimate like the first picture.  Shit got too big and lofty to where I stopped caring by the time it was over.  With that said they’re definitely a cooler spectacle than I gave them credit for twenty years back.  The Matrix is sorta perfect, Reloaded has more fun moments than I remember and Revolutions is still a weak finish that gets crushed under its own grandeur.

So yes, I do recommend taking the journey.  Unplug your mind from the notion that action films are stupid meathead trash and witness what unlimited Hollywood bucks can do to creativity.  The results are fascinating and frustrating all at once.