This did not need to be a trilogy

Rating: 5/10 (20 December 2003)

Perhaps we can blame the overblown attitude of the studio management, but does everything need to be a trilogy. It occurs to me that "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" might have been quite good as a single film. As two films, they are ponderous, meandering and pointless.
My history is this: I loved "The Matrix". I considered it a revolutionary blend of disparate cinematic sources. While no piece of it was truly original, the combination of elements was. There is still nothing like it...sadly, not even its own sequels. "Reloaded" was a massive disappointment, and I felt that at least it had left its final chapter with nowhere to go but up. After nothing but lead-up and dangling plot threads, "Revolutions" had to be a step up.
I was so very wrong.
"The Matrix Revolutions" is a big, loud stupid redneck of a movie. The mis-steps here are so catastrophically boneheaded in nature that I find it difficult to believe that the men behind "The Matrix" and "Bound" could have conceived it. It is interested only in creating big, loud battle sequences, letting them go on far too long, and ending them in as disappointing a manner as possible.
To begin with, the first rule of creating a tense battle sequence is in making us care about the characters involved. So what do they do? They make certain that none of the characters we've followed through the previous films are even IN these battles. Instead, we spend a good twenty minutes watching no one we care about scream and fire machine guns at endless hoardes of robots. Meanwhile, Morpheus, the spiritual leader of the human race, is playing Ensign Chekov to Jada Pinkett while Neo, the savior of humanity, gets in a dull fistfight with a possessed crewman.
In addition there is the recasting of the Oracle. It seems to me that there were two reasonable tactics here: either cast a similar actress and go on as if nothing's happened, or cast someone completely different, and make it a plot point. Sadly, they choose exactly the wrong combination of these tactics.
And where is the Matrix? Wasn't that the focus of this series? We barely see it here, being subjected instead to the dull, colorless and thoroughly uninteresting "real world". Admittedly, when we finally do get jacked in, we're treated to what may be the best super-battle since "Superman II". Unfortunately, the ending (combined with a concept introduced in "Reloaded") insinuate that this was all rather pointless, since it's all going to happen all over again. Thus, the sacrifices and struggles we've witnessed essentially mean nothing.
To my mind, the first film had a perfect ending, and did not beg for a sequel, let alone a trilogy. I prefer to remember that ending, and leave the world with its possibilities open. This simply cheapens the entire idea.