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November 09, 2003
It Could Have Been Worse...
... if they'd been actively trying to make it so.
There will be spoilers here because... well, who cares? Either you've already seen this and they spoil nothing or... well, they spoil something already completely spoiled by its makers.
The Matrix: Revolutions continues the textbook example of how to watch a work stumble down chapter by chapter. The first was original, hip, smart, and, above all, carefully structured. The second was dull and empty, repeating the first in ways that ensured lack of originality. It failed to update itself to stay hip. It was full of characters too dumb to let the movie be smart. And it meandered pointlessly from set piece to set piece in defiance of storytelling structure.
And now the third and (if fate smiles upon us) final chapter.
Nothing original. The same SFX, and now steals from other movies... The Zion battle armor is lifted directly from Aliens (a film it is foolish to invite yourself to be compared to)... but at least in Aliens the driver was exposed because it was a cargo hauler forced into military duty. Here, the driver is exposed because... well, I suppose because the people of Zion are idiots. It certainly wasn't to let us see the faces of characters we knew and wanted to cheer on, because no character we knew from chapters 1 or 2 donned a suit.
Nothing hip. Zion is still the land of the unwashed, despite all the cool tech they have. The Merovingian's techno-goth-leather club was embarrassing in its "we're still hip, see?" desperation.
Nothing smart. The character's actions were dumb, dumb, DUMB! It takes no study of strategy to know that a "hopeless last stand" made with 2/3rds of your forces just means both it and the hopeless stand-after-the-last-stand will both fail. And what kind of general has a perfect weapon that instantly destroys all of his enemies and designs his strategy not only without using that weapon, but in such a way that using that weapon when someone else brings it to save the day costs him significantly? And let's not even get into the fact that Neo still seems to have forgotten all the abilities he learned at the end of the first film and reverted to brain-dead punch'em'up as his best option.
And structurally? After the crazy-quilt final action scene of the second part, here we see the perils of the other extreme. Here, a pair of sequences that happened simultaneously and begged to be edited together to provide tension for both (the "next-to-last" stand of Zion and Neo/Trinity's race to the machine city) are allowed to run back-to-back, unmixed, turning both into monotony.
And the great, deep questions of "what is real"? Abandoned. Worse than abandoned, turned into jokes as the miscellaneous "programs" (the one faction in the series we know isn't real) are given center-stage in the conclusion.
Yes, there are a good number of visually spectacular bits, but they are in service of nothing at all. This is a glitzy, big-bucks, and no doubt destined to be hugely successful bad movie in every significant way.
Posted by ghoul at November 9, 2003 05:27 PM
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>> Snooze. from The Creative Guy
I just got finished reading yet another tiresome complaint by an otherwise reasonable person about The Matrix Revolutions. I don't know why I even bother subjecting myself to stuff like that. As is typical for these sorts of complaints, the... [Read More]
Tracked on November 21, 2003 01:48 PM
Comments
ugh
Posted by: Arref at November 10, 2003 11:19 AM
So not going. :)
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at November 10, 2003 01:10 PM
Ugh, what a waste.
I liked some ideas from the second movie, but it was nowhere near as good as the first. Call it the first derivative. This sounds like a derivative of the derivative.
It reminds me of any number of series which go downhill from a promising first movie. Jurassic Park (for all of its flaws) was far better than II and III. Highlander...ditto.
And now the Matrix.
Posted by: Paul at November 11, 2003 11:52 AM
I disagreed with your assessement of RELOADED, so I guess it's unsurprising that I disagree with your assessment of REVOLUTIONS. Oh, well.
By the way, Captain Mifune DID appear in RELOADED.
Posted by: James at November 21, 2003 01:12 PM
He did indeed, and I did recall him when seeing him. But like Ghost, his role was so tiny and underdeveloped that I hardly claim to "know" him at all.
Posted by: Ghoul at November 23, 2003 09:45 AM
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