The Matrix  Revolutions
(Warner Region 1 DVD)
(2003)
review by Big McLarghuge

Booo!!!! Hissss!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Okay, now it’s well established in the Horroview Freak Forum that I am no fan of The Matrix, while I found it visually interesting the story was both derivative and, well, boring to anyone who’s even a casual reader of modern science fiction. And while I appreciate the cinematic language of the film, much of it taken lock-stock-and-barrel into every science fiction and action adventure film since, the dialogue, acting, pacing, and plot just don’t work.

At least The Matrix can be viewed as if the two sequels never existed.

The second Matrix film, Matrix Reloaded, offered an expansion of the initial story to such belabored and ultimately ludicrous proportions. What results is approximately 100 minutes of Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus relentlessly preaching the gospel of Neo, then a couple of long action sequences. There is ONE cool bit in Matrix Reloaded, where we learn that Agent Smith may be the key to saving Zion from the coming invasion of robot Sentinels.

I was completely unmoved otherwise.

By the time we get to conclusion of the trilogy the Wachowski Brother’s abandoned any pretense of entertaining the audience in favor of stuffing the screen with gray-brown CGI robots and enough Christian iconography to give Mel Gibson a run for his money.

By now the Sentinels are about to breech walls protecting Zion at a choke point known as “The Dock”. The humans will put up their last stand here. Meanwhile, the last remaining submarine/spaceship doodads that Morpheus is a captain of, recover from the EMP at the end of the last movie. One heads for The Dock (piloted by Jada Pinkett Smith) the other takes Neo and Trinity to the Robot City on the Earth’s surface.

The first near hour of this film is annoying circuitous dialogue where everyone learns, from the Oracle, that they will know what they have to do when the time comes. Seriously, this is the Oracle’s big announcement. Them every single character has to have a doubts-about-their-place-in-the-universe soliloquy that simple repeats the same damn thing the Oracle said to them. I was ready to fast-forward after 20 minutes of this tripe, but I stayed on.

The middle year of the film is one enormous battle between the humans and the robots at The Dock. This sequence is really um… what’s the word I’m looking for?.. oh yeah, LONG, as humans in robot suits shoot millions of shells at the robots swirling around them. There is a rule in comedy that should definitely be applied to CGI battle sequences, “leave the audience wanting more”. What the Wachowski brother’s do is run the battle, essentially, in real time, so for like 30 minutes we watch CGI robots shoot CGI robots. Since very few of the characters matter to the story, and very few of them have any definition at all, the entire sequence is monumentally boring. The visual “wow factor” wears off in about 10 minutes, and after that 10 minutes I was ready for something, ANYTHING else to happen. I would have even enjoyed a sermon or two from Laurence Fishburne. Sadly we cut between the submarine racing towards The Dock, and The Dock under attack.

There is supposed to be some tension in the fact that Jada Pinkett Smith takes her sub through a tiny maintenance tunnel. I dunno, since it doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t generate ANY tension.

The end sees the death of Trinity, the blinding and crucifixion of Neo, the rebirth of the Matrix and a tenuous peace between the humans and robots. Agent Smith appears much less frequently in Matrix Revolutions, and that’s to the movie’s detriment. Smith was the most interesting character in the first and second films, but here he has nothing to do but laugh maniacally and create clones from the residents of The Matrix. The end fight sequence is okay, but CGI-fu is really old now.

The cinematography is okay, but goes to prove that the Wachowski brother’s don’t understand widescreen. Whenever ANYONE speaks they occupy the left or the right side of the screen. Inter-cutting between speaking characters renders the enormous and annoying dialogue stilted and choppy.

The Wachowski brother’s crib endlessly from the preceding films for visuals including the modern scourge of filmmaking, “bullet time”, flippy wire work CGI-FU, and slow motion gun fights that just go on and on and on and on and on.

Another problem is that making any sense at all of Matrix Revolutions requires suffering through the first two films. Fools who wander into the third film first will be baffled beyond belief, and those that HAVE suffered through the first two will be bored, and probably annoyed. I also get pissed when blatant Christian ideology is stuffed down my throat, and by the time we get to the end of Matrix Revolutions it’s like spending three days at a Fundamentalist Christian preach-a-thon.

The DVD is stuffed with behind the scenes shit that I didn’t bother to watch because I was struggling to remain conscious until the credits.

Bah! Skip this one, believe me, you aren’t missing a thing.