Not being at all interested in the unending blah blah blah of the Super Bowl pre-game whatever, I finally saw the last of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix Trilogy. The second film, Reloaded, was a terrible disappointment to me and this one was mainly interesting because of some recent conversations about the nature of consciousness. Revolutions was better than Reloaded but not even close to The Matrix.
I’m willing to chalk this up to bleed over from having seen Hellboy yesterday but I really felt like Andy and Larry Wachowski made this movie flailing around for an ending that would convey the weight of their concept while delivering the power and action enabled by innovative computer technology.
You may recall that as we left our heroes, Zion was facing imminent destruction while Neo and Agent Smith had just left the Matrix for flesh and blood; that’s where the action picks up. The two hours of screen time are filled with well done action, energy all over the place, masses of swarming machines charging into Zion and the humans fighting back with oversized machine guns. I certainly never got bored, wondering how long until the end.
But everything was the equivalent of a magician’s big hand wave, distracting the audience from the real movements that accomplish the mechanics of a trick. All the bullets fired from those machine guns, outrageously acrobatic hand to hand combat and the interpersonal emotions that are supposed to draw us into the characters fail. The man behind the curtain is exposed despite all the trickery.
Here’s the secret: everything we’ve seen, across all three movies, is unnecessary. The key to this revelation is Neo’s penultimate conversation with the Oracle, when he asks why she hasn’t given him the answer just supplied earlier; you weren’t ready, she said, and Neo is filled with understanding. Then he jumps in a ship with Trinity and runs off to Machine City so he can speak directly with the machines, who take him at his word and provide a connection to the Matrix where he and Smith stage their final, all or nothing martial arts bout.
Let me rant a bit now over egregious nonsense in Revolutions. The Zion army has very impresive technology, the ability to enter and leave the Matrix without notice of the Agents, vehicles with ultra-sophisticated power supplies and machine-killing weapons, and even those huge exoskeletons, but even though the machines that control the world can send nearly unlimited fighters to attack they’ve held off until just when the one human able to stand them off comes into the picture. And what is this Machine City?!?!?! Nothing less, apparently, then the controlling core of Earth’s masters, known to Neo and everyone in Zion, but not worthy of mention to us viewers until near the end. This is exactly the kind of hidden information that storytellers use when they’ve worked themselves into a corner and need a way out.
“Everything that has a beginning has an end.” This sentiment is expressed repeatedly and yet the Wachowski brothers evade facing it with their ending. The worst nonsense of all, suggesting volumes and saying nothing that any 12 year old doesn’t already understand. That’s perhaps the last piece of this puzzle allowing us to return to the trilogy’s origin: you got it, The Matrix started out as a comic book series.
not recommended
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