The Matrix Revolutions - Whimper or Bang?

my rating: Nathan's rating:

"Everything that has a beginning has an end," is perhaps the key fortune-cookie platitude of The Matrix Revolutions. For the Matrix trilogy, that end comes with a bang. And a whimper.

I've tried to ignore the buzz about the film in the past couple days since it opened, but I've picked up that a lot of people were disappointed with the ending. Which is hardly surprising, because the philosophical ponderousness of the premise precludes the kind of simple (happy) ending that people really want. Plus, it's been so loaded with random bits of profundity that it would've been impossible to produce a coherent, satisfying conclusion.

The theme of the Matrix has almost as many interpretations as fans. Or perhaps more modestly, as many as it has lines of dialogue. It is about humanity vs. machines? Choice vs. fate? Chaos vs. order? Freedom vs. slavery? Reality vs. illusion? Faith in others vs. self-reliance? Take your pick. Someone on screen suggests any of these at one point or another.

The most disappointing aspect of Revolutions was its frequent predictability or repetitiveness. Several times during the movie, the young man who kept bumping knees with me would mumble a character's next line moments ahead of her/him. And, no, he hadn't seen it already... but I'm willing to believe that he'd just had dinner at the same Chinese restaurant as the Wachowskis and received the same fortune cookies. The daring exploits, the heroic sacrifices, the surprising courage... weren't very surprising.

Even the special effects and action sequences tended to suffer from "been there, done that" syndrome. A scene early in the film tries vainly to recapture the excitement of the wall-and-ceiling-climbing gunfight of the first film. The throngs of Agent Smith duplicates lose their impact after seeing it done several times in the second film. And the slo-mo-and-pivot martial arts bits are old hat by now.

There's an extended FX scene in the middle of the film as the machines attack Zion and the humans try to fight them off. I suppose it's a disservice to the considerable effort that went into producing it, but in the end it was just an ongoing barrage of animated machines and noise. I'm sorry, but unless you're impressed by the sheer quantity of virtual ammunition fired, it just won't do anything for you. There are bits of human drama cut into this and other scenes of this sort, but they're almost incidental. A substantial chunk of the film's running time is devoted to these scenes. That's the "bang".

The "whimper" is the ending. I don't want to spoil it, but it's neither a victory nor a defeat for Our Heroes (or maybe it's some of both), and when you've had characters like Morpheus the zealot, and Neo the messiah proclaiming a victory up ahead, that's disappointing. The ending doesn't even address what was supposedly the key conflict set up in the first film: the enslavement of humanity. I guess the machines aren't the enemy after all, just Agent Smith? Too much of what was brought up before is dismissed with just a shrug. It just doesn't hold together, and whatever philosophical message it might have been trying to make, just doesn't make sense.

One aspect I did enjoy was the fight between Neo and Smith, snippets of which appeared in the adverts for the movie. The Wachowskis wrote some superhero comics years ago, before they got their film production underway, and this background shows: This sequence was one of the best-realised film depictions to date of a battle between beings of superhuman power. Christopher Reeve hanging on wires was good enough in 1978, but when Superman returns to the big screen someday, the producers will have to use staging and effects like these to properly impress the audience.

But if he spends half as much time chattering about concepts without really addressing them, it'll be the whimper that more people remember, not the bang.