Friday, November 07, 2003
Note: This Review is a Work In Progress.
I will be updating this slightly in the next couple of days.
Review: The Matrix Revolutions
This movie was good in all of the ways that make it entertaining to watch and bad in all of the ways that make it a lousy third installment in a trilogy.
The movie is entertaining. The action has ratcheted up quite a lot. That might be good news for fans of sci-fi action movies in general but fans of what the Matrix Series was in the first movie, and to a lessor extent in "Reloaded" may be disappointed. Revolutions is almost completely absent of the type of "deep", representative action sequences that really defined the first movie. The martial arts sequences that structured the previous two installments are all but absent here, and it's a real loss. In fact I would say that they were what held most of Reloaded together. In a movie that is all about artificiality there needs to be a strong internal continuity so that the audience can buy into the admitted fake-ness of it all. Most of what would have connected this movie to the others is gone. Hell, even the Matrix is gone. Don't expect to see much of it. Revolutions looks and feel much more like Terminator 3 than the Matrix 3. This is an important comparison that I'll come back to at the end of the review.
Even familiar characters seem different in ways that I can't explain. This as if everyone has been changed by some important event that happened between Reloaded and Revolutions and for whatever reason it's been decided that we don't need to know about it. Or in other words, throughout the entire movie it seems like everyone has something else on their minds. Did you ever go to dinner with a friend who is very obviously wrestling with some important question or decision that they're unwilling to discuss with you? It kind of ruins everything doesn't it? The strange part is that the 'what's missing' seems to be part of the characters and not the actors but the distractions seem to be about something other than the context of the movie.
I'm not going to talk about plot. I don't like doing that in reviews for highly anticipated movies like this. If you're interested then I'm sure you're planning on seeing the movie and I don't need to give you any more information than what you've already seen previewed (and there has been a lot of opportunity to see a lot about this movie in previews, trailers and with all of the tie-ins that are floating around). I will say that overall the movie is sloppy. The story telling here is at it's worst, of the three, character development is non-existent (you don't get any more than what you already had going in). I would say that I don't disagree with this if the movie was busy with bringing the story to some conclusion. In fact I would prefer that the movie not get overly bogged down with character development at this stage. That setting the table type of stuff is better left in 1 and 2. Unfortunately there isn't much development of the story either. What you do get is a lot of mechanized gun play. What little story there is seems is choppy, almost hacked together. There is so little of it, you could have worked the story development into a nice music video. And it's not just hat the development doesn't happen on camera. It doesn't happen at all. There is no evidence that any time or effort has been put into this aspect of the movie (by which I mean to say the plot and character development). That seems like a problem to me, even as I enjoyed most of the movie.
Another big problem here are all of the tie-ins. All of the little pieces that don't come together. The Wachowski's have said that it was important to them that all of the other stuff... the video games and the collection of animated shorts and any of the rest of it ...are as much a part of the what "The Matrix" is as the movies themselves. They may have succeeded (I'd have to think about that question a lot more) but whether they have or not, they've tried to do it at the expense of the movies. A big budget trilogy is simply a more expressive medium than a video game. Making the game as important as the movie has meant dumbing down the movies and taking time and effort away from the development of the movies, something that is obvious from watching both Reloaded and Revolutions. A good example of this type of clumsy treatment of the movies in deference to something that the directors obviously felt was important to one of the the side projects is the story and the character of "The Kid" from "The Animatrix" collection. The insistence on stepping outside of the movie to shove this underdeveloped character down the audience's collective throat marred Reloaded and really disrupts Revolutions. The Kid is to The Matrix as Jar Jar Binks is to the Star Wars Prequels.
I could go on and on about this but I'll end the review, something that the Wachowski's couldn't manage to do with their trilogy in Revolutions. Absolutely nothing important gets resolved in this movie. There are more questions at the end of it than at the beginning and I don't think that you can call that a successful end to a trilogy. I suppose you could argue that this is what the directors had always intended but with the line "Everything that has a beginning has an end" at several key points in the movie, on every trailer, poster and advertisement, I don't agree. I think what we see on screen was a drastically different movie from whatever the original vision of the 3rd movie in the trilogy might have been. I honestly think that the Wachowski brothers as creators had trouble letting go and direction in the movie and character and plot development lost out. The Wachowski's are a parent who simply couldn't let their baby grow and develop as it should have. They loved it to death.
I give the movie Difficulty Rating of: 8
I give the movie itself a 6.
Review total: 40 out of a possible 100.
2:47:56 PM
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