The Matrix Revolutions

...that this film is not getting the credit it deserves. It is in my opinion one of the most underrated films of all time along with The Matrix Reloaded. Revolutions is undoubtedly different from the previous films both in general and in terms of tone but why is that necessarily a bad thing? I won't be so arrogant as to say that the people who don't like this film are unintelligent. Whether or not people like a film or not is a subjective matter but I can't help feeling that the people who dislike (or even hate) this film are missing something because Revolutions is an intelligent, entertaining, beautiful, sad and moving picture.

The acting of all three films have been a mixed bag and although I usually join in the bashing of Keanu Reeves I find him strangely fitting for the part of Neo. His voice is not the perfect voice due to its monotonous tone but his body language is very good and sometimes even great and that is the case in Revolutions as well. Carrie-Anne Moss plays her character like she did in film two and that is neither particularly good or bad but a decent performance. Laurence Fishbourne's character has been reduced somewhat for the final part of the series but I found that the lines he did have were delivered with conviction and experience. As most people know Gloria Foster died before finishing her scenes for Revolutions and thus a different actress was cast to take over. The choice fell on Mary Alice and while she is no where near as good as Foster she is decent enough. Ian Bliss gets a chance to show his worth in the third film and personally I found his scenes to be among the most interesting of the film and his uncanny imitation of Weaving was spot on. Most of the secondary cast from Reloaded returns in their parts in Revolutions and they all do decent jobs with their characters. Harry J. Lennix (Lock) improved his character tremendously in spite of limited screen time. Hugo Weaving still provides the best acting in the film and steals every one of his regrettably limited number of scenes. He is probably my all time favorite screen bad guy. He manages to show the change in his character remarkably well considering how limited his screen time is. Agent Smith exhibits an increasing amount of human traits including anger, hatred, jealousy and even a sly sense of humor. This change happens to mirror Neo's growing understanding of the machines. Neo and Smith are linked in that way as well.

The effects are of course extraordinary which was to be expected after the stellar effects in the second film. Although there weren't as many scenes inside The Matrix this time around I still found the effects of the "real" world to be awe inspiring at the least and the battle for Zion was an incredible display of special effects. Of course the directors never lost sight of the people involved in the battle making it more tense had it only been effects. The climactic battle between Neo and Smith is quite simply stunning. It takes roughly 15 minutes and I for one hardly breathed in those 15 minutes. All three Matrix films have been inspired by Japanese animé comics and that is very visible in the final battle as one can't help but think of Dragonball for instance. The action in that particular scene is frighteningly well done and I got the chills when I watched it in the cinema. Very well done.

The story is darker in this film than in either of the previous films but that is to be expected as the first film was about birth and the second about life. Obviously that means that the third is about the inevitable end that must come to us all: Death. This does that the tone of the film becomes much darker and I felt that was good. This did that the film distanced itself from the previous films in the series and rather than become another rerun the film becomes its own entirely and that is both its weakness and its strength. I think it is its strength as it increases the originality of the film but apparently a lot of people didn't like the interpretation that the third film represents as is clear from the bashing the film has gotten from audiences and critics alike. The film does still have great symbolic value and you can interpret the film in a great number of ways like the previous films. For me this improves the film(s) greatly as you can watch it again and again and still find new things that will renew your interest.

Sadly I cannot make you love this film as much as I do because that would defeat the purpose of the film which is to make people think for themselves. My conclusion about Revolutions is that you will either love or you will hate it but in my opinion Revolutions is almost as good as the first one and one of the best films I have ever seen.

9/10 - On my top 10 of best films.

We gorge on the binaries prophesied once again, through an ever increasing bandwidth, as we exponentially widen our dietary desire to become what everyone wants us to be without thought for who or what we really are or could be.

And in the end it all comes down to difference and a right to choose.

Going into this movie I had one wish: To leave feeling that it was a successful conclusion to a two-part film. Taking Reloaded/Revolutions as a single (very large) movie with an intermission is the best way to evaluate it. Viewed that way I think it succeeded. I thought Revolutions was the equal of Reloaded, yet I can see how many will think it failed. The ending gave us everything we needed to know, but did not show us all we wanted to see. I'm speaking of the last twenty minutes or so here. After a visually robust middle, in which I felt my eyes grow larger in their sockets more than once, the ending seemed like an anticlimax. It needed to be longer, and I would gladly have traded some of the fx flair used earlier to give the final part of the film it's justified due. It will be awhile before I can look at it more objectively (perhaps I'll have to wait to view the two parts as one on DVD). I only suggest now that anyone seeing it let it sink in completely before being too critical.

'The Matrix Revolutions' is the much-anticipated conclusion to the Wachowski Brothers' cultic sci-fi trilogy, whose previous entries were 'The Matrix' and 'The Matrix Reloaded.' In the series' final installment, the messiah figure, Neo, does battle with the diabolical forces that have imprisoned most of humanity in a world of cyber unreality via a massive computer program known as The Matrix.

Of the three films, 'Revolutions' is definitely the least imaginative and the least interesting. What separated the first two episodes in the series from most other action films was the willingness on the part of the filmmakers to bring some thematic depth and narrative complexity to a genre that, all too often, finds no room for such qualities. The previous two films didn't always succeed in their endeavor - often emerging as more hollow and pretentious than meaningful and profound - but they managed to remain intriguing even in their moments of failure. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for 'Revolutions,' which spends so much time on repetitive action scenes and special effects that there is little time left over for storyline and theme. In a strange way, Neo himself ends up getting lost in this film, dropping off the radar screen for astonishingly long stretches of time, only to re-emerge periodically to remind us that there really is supposed to be a purpose buried somewhere beneath all this ear-splitting commotion (this could be re-titled 'Finding Neo'). The sad fact, though, is that, once we arrive at the climactic scene to which all three films have been building, the resolution turns out to be a ham-handed muddle, utterly lacking in clarity and coherence After an almost six-hour-long buildup over the course of the three films, the audience is left scratching its collective head wondering just what it was that happened before the closing credits started rolling by. Perhaps smarter people than I can figure all this out for, frankly, after the overall disappointment occasioned by this film, I couldn't muster either the desire or the effort to probe very deeply into the matter.

It goes without saying that the special effects in this film are spectacular - we would expect nothing less - but what we don't get from 'Revolutions' - which we did from the two previous 'Matrix' films - is that little something extra in the form of intelligence and sophistication that made them more than just the bland, over-produced, assembly-line products they easily could have become - and which 'Revolutions' very nearly is. Even the stolid earnestness of Keanu Reeves can't convince us this time around that there is anything hidden under all those cool gadgets and explosions worth our looking into.

Thus endeth the Matrix series, not with a bang but with a whimper - intellectually speaking that is.

It is hard to believe that the original Matrix's philosophical subtlety came from the same authors of the two sequels.

It seems the brothers must have cribbed the original story for the first Matrix, since the last 2 show none of the original's subtlety or interest, just rehashing and CGI multiplication.

One evil robot, two evil robots, many many evil robots. Wow, what an idea, what creativity!

Viewing the behind-the-scenes on DVD disc 2, you can see the reasons for the incoherence of story and scenes - the huge fractured design team, numerous 'senior this' 'senior that', all contributing to some corporate creation lacking any inspiration. Maybe the corporate cube-farm culture works for making cars, but it doesn't seem to work for films.

I would have liked to have seen another level of reality exposed behind the mindless machines, and why are they so mindlessly evil when they can think up such a subtle ruse to enslave the humans? It isn't consistent. Why not introduce an alien ET culture who is really the master culture enslaving the machine culture by some similar hallucinatory ruse. Or, have the humans escape by transcending their bodies, as in all the traditional gnostic spiritualities.

All in all, the Matrix is just a retread of the movie TRON. TRON at least had some insight into what the machine mindset and motivation for domination might be, e.g. tyrannical game addiction, much like the decadent Roman emperors. The Matrix, after the first film, gives no thought to any subtle motivations of the machine culture, preferring the tired cliché of 'alien villain = mindless unrelenting violence'.