Director: Wachowski Brothers
Release Date: November 5th, 2003
Rating: R (for sci-fi violence and brief sexual content)
See it on Amazon
Most regular moviegoers have a rule about not getting too hyped about a movie to avoid the fear that they’ll be let down. And why shouldn’t they live in such a fear? So many movies have been released with killer trailers only to leave us wanting more, or worse, wishing we had never seen the movie.
This year’s big let-downs include The Hulk, Lara Croft, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and now The Matrix Revolutions.
The latter is probably the biggest let-down of all.
I have received a lot emails asking when I was going to post my review of The Matrix Revolutions. Although I had hoped to have my review posted the day the movie was released, I have been avoiding this task like the plague since I saw the film.
If you look at the articles that others and I wrote concerning The Matrix Reloaded, we never actually “reviewed” the movie. I simply found myself unable to review it. After the initial viewing, I knew that it would take some time to fully understand Reloaded.
After the second viewing, I started analyzing and analyzing the movie. From those initial articles, some of the most in-depth (and long) comments were posted on this site. Eventually, other readers of the site had written articles explaining their theories.
The Matrix Reloaded was more than a movie. It was two hours of ground-breaking special effects coupled with a plot line that hasn’t caused people to think so hard since the first Matrix film. I’ve listened to people talk for hours about why they loved or hated the film. No matter which side of the fence they were on, the movie had them thinking and talking.
Sadly, all The Matrix Revolutions has me saying, “What the hell?”
I kept putting off my review of this film in hopes that I had missed some amazing piece of the puzzle when I first saw it, but it’s time to stop living in the dream world. This movie was sub par compared to its predecessors.
Not the kind of effects we wanted
Once again, the Wachowski brothers brought forth some amazing special effects. They are sure to make any 14-year-old infatuated with robots drool. But even though most of the effects take place in the “real world”, they are not nearly as real as the effects inside the Matrix.
What is more real: Morpheus jumping from a moving car onto the top of a semi or 100’s of humans in giant robot suits fighting off countless octopus robots? Hard to say on paper, but the Morpheus jump hits closer to home to for most people. We live in a world of semi trucks and cars – not giant robots.
One of the many things that made the first two films great was seeing humans in everyday life do impossible stunts. These stunts were so realistic looking that the camera slowed to a crawl to show us everything single detail as the action took place.
There are some fight scenes at the beginning, but they are very tired and overdone. Neo and Smith have another battle, but it is almost entirely computer generated (And, yes, we can tell).
Lame ending
After months of speculation, debates, and arguments, the ending was predictable and disappointing. The first two movies left me wanting more. Revolutions left me wishing I had only seen the first two.
Key plot lines suddenly end or disappeared without any conclusion. It’s as though the makers of the film just needed a way to end the trilogy.
What is really sad is we were able to explain away any plot holes from the first two movies by thinking they would be covered up in the rest of the series. Now what? The ending left everything wide open for… another sequel? Or maybe just more video games.
Final thoughts
I couldn’t stop talking about the second film; I want to pretend that Revolutions never existed. Even writing this article about how lame this movie was is agonizing.
I just wish the makers had done something different. There were plenty of decent concepts posted by the readers of this site alone if they were short of ideas.