Matrix Revolutions (***)

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 2004)

The Matrix Revolutions is a movie that suffers due to a colossal miscalculation on the part of the Wachowski brothers. Neo, the messiah avatar of Zion, continues his quest to fulfill his destiny and make peace with the Machines who have conquered the world. As we recall, virtually the whole of humanity have been jacked in to a virtual world called the Matrix. The first Matrix shows us how Neo escaped this world, only to return as a potential Saviour of humanity. The Matrix Reloaded showed the extent of Neo's apotheosis, culminating in a cliff hanger ending with Neo's powers seemingly to extend to the waking world. In the finale, Neo must travel to Machine city to make peace with the Machines and take on his arch-nemesis, the rogue Agent Smith, in a final showdown to determine the fate of both man and machine.
In the first Matrix, there is a spectacular escape and showdown with Agent Smith in the Matrix world. In Matrix Reloaded, there is a spectacular freeway chase with multiple levels of action in perfect counterpoint with each other, a superbly choreograph frenzy of incredible special effects. The action sequences in the Matrix world is what gives the franchise it's staying power.
In the final episode, the Wachowskis make a dire miscalculation. They misappropriate an inordinate amount of screen time for the battle of Zion. This takes place somewhere in the middle of the film, a long, exhausting sequence that shows the metal octopi of the machine army streaming into Zion and the humans blasting them out of the sky with their machine guns. Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Agent Smith, the Oracle, in essence all the characters that we have made a connection with throughout the preceding three hundred or so minutes of the first and second films, are nowhere to be found. Instead, we are suddenly asked to care about a bunch of second string characters in Zion  General whatsisname, the boy who he, the Zion leaders whatchamacalit. This posits a situation that is diametrically opposed to what Hitchcock does quite often, a reverse- Macguffin. What's in the briefcase? It's not important, what is important is the connection the object has for the main characters. Here the Macguffin takes a life of its own, like a lurching, CGI created mutant. The metal octopi stream, scream and shred, the Zionists grimace, shout platitudes and shoot stuff up. This goes on and on for forty five minutes. This colossal miscalculation throws the whole film out of balance, and as a result, the movie never really recovers. Not even when the movie eventually snaps back into focus as soon as we rejoin Neo's final journey to machine city.
I sat down to watch Revolutions again yesterday evening on DVD. I skipped the whole battle of Zion, relying only on memory for the general details of how the war went. Suddenly, the movie seemed much better. The narrative arc was taut and sure. The fight choreography at the S&M club weapons room had an electric charge. The sacrifices of the characters were felt more deeply. The fight with Bane-Smith in the Lagos felt more urgent. I began to appreciate the wonders of the machine city  a luminescent play of lights, the ghostly apparition of the machine leader made up of thousands of shifting flying machines. Everything felt improved - the excitement of the Lagos' flight into a cloud of metal octopi, the one moment of sunshine as our heroes burst through the black cloud cover shrouding the planet, the spectacular showdown between Neo and Smith. The pulpy references to a Christ figure and the new world where the Oracle and Sati sit and watch a sunrise at the conclusion gain in poignancy and resonance. When will filmmakers with a bigger budget ever realize, less is often more.