Exit The Matrix
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW
I went to see Matrix – Revolutions on opening day. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. I wanted to see it eventually since I really enjoyed the first two movies and was really looking forward to having some of the amazing philosophical questions answered that were brought up in the second movie. I should have known better than to trust Hollywood. Where entertainment is concerned, we should always be cynical.
I mean, the second movie was the set-up of the century. The series had all the trappings of a really great triad. Great characters, amazing special effects, a whopper of a plot, and even deeper meaning… no wait… I guess there really wasn’t any deeper meaning after all… Oh yeah, and I guess the plot was bogus too, at least if you look to the third movie for explanations.
A part of me really wishes that I had never seen the third installment of The Matrix. Then I could continue my illusionary hacker world without having it fall to the intellectual level of a twelve-year-old. This movie doesn’t simply let you down, it shatters completely the whole technological dream and makes it just another futuristic shoot ‘em up. One critic said the Wachowski brothers “sold out,” and I think that’s a pretty good description of this film. It’s everything a non-thinking, hormone-jacked, wetbehindtheears, male teenager could want… Except sex, but that was in the second movie. It has action galore. Alienesque strobe-light fights (which stop the moment the fight is over of course), mecha (the pointless “APU’s” – why not put the guns on something with a tad bit more mobility? – but hey, they look cool…), a spiky master control program that looks like a high-tech version of the Wizard of Oz, and of course lots and lots of guns, kung-fu, and impalings. The blood as well as the action film cliches ooze throughout this movie, and if you felt the previous two flicks were a bit too “clean” for your taste, then you shouldn’t be disappointed with Revolutions.
We went from –
“What is the matrix?” to…
“What is the matrix, really?” to…
“What is the point?”
Yes, the effects are probably worth the price of admission. Yes, it will make lots and lots of money. Yes, the acting was about what you would expect from an average episode of Star Trek TNG (okay, maybe a little worse), and yes, it basically cops-out at the end and leaves you with… nothing. No answers, no real conclusions, and about a billion “loose ends” that you start to think about an hour after you leave the theater (“So… what happened to Smith again?”).
This movie left me so wanting that I found myself “filling in” holes in the plot with possible explanations, just so that I could hold on to the Matrix world that I knew from the first two flicks. I saw most of the Animatrix shorts. They were great, and it was obvious to me that the makers of those anime knew the Matrix reality that we all did… all of us save for the Wachowski brothers apparently. The collection of stories prior to Revolutions painted a world with the same kind of depth and “believable” life that can be found in works such as those of J. R. R Tolkien. But now, I feel like my Middle-Earth depth has been replaced with a bad episode of StarBlazers.
Damnitall, forget my money, I want my dream back!
Oh well, there’s always “Return of the King” this Christmas…