The Matrix: Revolting

Despite the bad reviews in most major media outlets (Kate has a nice collection of snarky quotes), we went to see The Matrix: Revolutions on Saturday. We knew it would be bad, but figured it was probably worth seeing, just to know how bad it was.

For the first half-hour (or so-- up until the club scene with the Merovingian), it was actually fairly entertaining. And then it went right to Hell. The scenes with Bane were sort of entertaining (the actor did a wonderful Hugo Weaving impersonation), but the battle scenes were just amazingly bad, like the filmmakers were working off a checklist of the worst war-movie cliches of all time.

As Kate notes, this is a movie that desperately needs to be given the Red Mike treatment. It's hard to know where to start with the battle scenes: Why is it that a machine civilization able to build the many remarkable devices we see has completely abandoned the concept of ranged weapons? Why is it that the humans are unable to come up with a better strategy than yelling "AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!" while firing huge numbers of tracer bullets seemingly at random? Why can't they come up with a better resupply system than a bunch of kids with shopping carts full of ammunition? And, for that matter, why is it that a human culture capable of building and maintaining Zion is populated entirely by people in filthy cable-knit sweaters? Did they renounce laundry technology along with the Matrix?

The biggest problem with the movie, though-- bigger even than the gaping logic holes in the plot, and the incredibly awful dialogue (which makes J. Michael Straczynski look like David Mamet)-- is that the filmmakers forgot what made the first movie such a big success. The glory of the first movie was its sense of style, and the almost balletic grace of the wire-work combat scenes.

That style and grace is almost entirely lacking in this movie, aside from a few scenes at the beginning. The great bits of the first film all involve people doing things that are just outside the range of the possible, in the context of combat that is almost one-on-one. The few bits of the third movie that actually work are the same. Problem is, the middle hour of the current film involves anonymous masses of people blasting away indiscriminately at equally anonymous masses of machines. There's no individuality, no subtlety, and no style, and thus, there's no interest.

Even at the end, when the whole war comes down to a mano-a-machino confrontation between Neo and Agent Smith, it doesn't have the magic of the first movie, because the combatants are too powerful. They're not just dodging bullets, and hanging a bit too long in the air, they're flying around like kung-fu Supermen in black suits, and it's just silly. There are limits to what you can do with special effects and wire-work and still have a movie resonate with the audience-- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon pushes them-- but The Matrix: Revolutions completely ignores them, and falls flat as a result.

There are lots of complaints to be made about the utter incoherence of The Matrix's cosmology, and no end of logical holes in the way the plot plays out. There are even valid moral and ethical complaints to raise about the way the movies treat civilians in the Matrix. But all those flaws are present from the beginning-- the first movie works well in spite of them. The third movie is terrible not because it doesn't make any sense (it doesn't, but the original didn't, either), but because it discards everything that did work in the first movie in favor of budget-busting CGI.

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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