Way Over the Top

Rating: 10/10 (28 June 2011)

I was so excited to see this film come out, there were some VERY good things in it - We finally get to see Zion. But Zion was not how I envisioned it after Morpheus describes it in "The Matrix" - We can see that even in the "City of God" there are still Politics to deal with. Those Politics reveal meatheads that cannot see the facts in front of their faces, and so we have to have a film like this in which Neo has to deal with and mostly work around said Politics.
Like The Matrix, most of that had to be said about the film, maybe was already said by the guy who said "Matrix Reloaded Sucks" - But I don't agree, Matrix Reloaded is a very well made film... There were fights and car chases that we had never envisioned could happen. People standing on ceilings, CGI that seamlessly blended in with practical elements, and of course the Wachowski Brothers trademarked stop-and-rotate filming which I loved in The Matrix and I loved in Reloaded.
But the thing that brought me into the film, that interested me, was the ability of Agent Smith to duplicate himself and even take over a Human. So we are set up for the final confrontation between Neo and Smith although it does not happen here. But my complaint with the whole series has to be stated here in this review. And that must include Spoilers, so I apologize in advance for that.
At the end of this film, we have "Three Captains - Three Destinies - Where some might see coincidence, I see Providence" as Morpheus states.
And so the three-pronged attack on The Source begins, one crew is destroyed by sentinels in short order, causing Trinity to have to enter the Matrix to fulfill that crew's part of the attack - Meanwhile Neo, Morpheus and The Keymaker enter the Corrodor of Back Doors... With Smith guarding the door to The Source, which is actually the door to The Architect, who lays out the choices for Neo, who opts to save Trinity rather than do what the architect says he must do, as Neo is nothing but a piece of code leftover which must be reinserted back into The Source. This Mimimised Neo greatly in my eyes.
So Neo saves Trinity, returns to the Nebuchadnezzar which is destroyed by sentinels.
Neo holds up his hand and destroys the sentinels, then passes out. We do not know, at the time, somehow he had ended up in the Train-Man's little pocket universe simulation, we are not introduced to that character at this time. All we know, is that suddenly, Neo is showing he has actual control over the machines in the "Real World".
This is where I was disappointed, Neo taking out the Sentinels, suggested to me, that the world OUTSIDE THE MATRIX was actually YET ANOTHER COMPUTER CONSTRUCT, IE, a world within a world- Similar to the plot device of The Thirteenth Floor.
But this was not the case, and I thought Neo's sudden apparent control over Machines, inexplicable. I was HOPING this was to be shown in Matrix Revolutions, in my mind I thought - Matrix Revolutions is going to have to explain this, and there were SO many places the story could have gone after the end of Reloaded, Reloaded set up so many possibilities, but none of them were explored in the last film... It was just Too Hopeless, although there was some amazing CGI, the story, which up to that point had my interest completely, suddenly started to suffer.
So, as good as this film was, it basically took apart everything that was said about Neo in the first film, took away the mystery of who he was, took away his Power, gave Smith TOO MUCH power. There had to have been a better way to tell this story, Wachowski's should have either quit after Matrix, or gone in the direction I was expecting... That the Matrix itself was the bottom of a series of levels of virtual realities, if that had been the story, the Wachowski's could have built something incredible out of that, but they didn't.