Dimension

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2003)

Spoilers herein.
Projects like this contain a promise that they will deliver in three areas: style, dimension and cosmology.
The promise of style is probably the primary one and the easiest to deliver to judge from other projects. The first `Matrix' did a pretty good job on this, at least so far as the leather-and-shades, the design of the machine world (Metropolis with lightning and tentacles) and the crypto screencharacters.
The second fumbled incredibly, especially in defining Zion.
Now the leather is transformed to bondage vinyl and the style overall takes another step backward. Instead of different styles for the different worlds, they all blend into a blandness determined by what was cheap for the animation software, with a lack of detail covered by quick cuts. But they are not the deliberately paced cuts of, say `Once Upon a Time in Mexico,' instead speedy cuts designed to distract.
The matter of dimension is what engages us after the first fifteen minutes, after we have already paid to sit and we begin to pay attention. `Virtual Dimension' was handled well in the first by the introduction of the various dimensions of reality that intersect in complex ways. The second film added little to this but exploited the matter of physical dimensionality - many of the spaces were pretty exciting, including the framing shootout in the skyscraper.
In this edition, it seems that different art directors were assigned different parts of the film (as in `The Cell') and we get a hodgepodge of spatial philosophies. The battles in the ducts, in the dock and in the machine world all had the same blandness, similarly all the kung-fu business that nominally was three-d. Where the first one introduced the `bullet-time' notion of exploring space, we have nothing interesting like that here.
Only in the last ten minutes - the fight in the rain - is it spatially engaging. But by that time the story is worn out.
The matter of cosmology is the most interesting and challenging of the three, because this is where you intend to enmesh the lives of your viewers with your fiction. It is a cheap trick compared to the old fashioned values of narrative, but interesting as hell in what works. You have to have demigods warring; you have to have love (and similar `human' foibles) as assets; you have to have light and evil; every event affects the very future of the world. You have to slowly reveal higher and higher levels of plotters and counterplottering deities.
Lucas was able to postpone judgment on `Star Wars' until the sixth movie. Tolkein had already conquered the major problems before the LOTR movies were conceived, so they had a far lessor challenge. Harry Potter's cosmology never presumes to the scope of religion and always registers as adolescent, so they can even be humorous.

To my mind - as a reader of classic science fiction - the first film promised but this third film just lacked the imagination it needed to build a cosmology worth criticizing.
Essie Davis was appealing and real, far more convincing as a human than the women tossed into this mess to carry various stereotypes. Fishburne again reminds that he is too fine an actor to blow his influence as a serious black man (one of few public figures it seems) on this tripe.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.