"Every beginning has a cop out."

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2003)

Don't worry- I'm no spoiler. Even after this- my most disappointing movie-going experience- I still believe in the sanctity of film.

I woke up at 7:15 a.m. today, 11/5/03, Revolutions opening day, to experience what I had expected to be the greatest finale of one of the finest film trilogies in cinematic history. Groggy and circle-eyed, I took my fast-food breakfast to my local movie house and waited with a few other hopefuls for an hour and a half for the film to begin. By 11:00 a.m. my expectations of greatness had been ground to paste and flavored with some special effects only to be served back to me in the form of a thick deceitful sludge.
I left the sparsely occupied theatre, hood covering my head, feeling 'had.' What had been built upon a strong and awe-inspiring foundation had been roofed with nothing sturdier then a few blades of grass. What should have been, and what we as movie patrons and congregants of the church of cinema had been lead to believe could have been, turned out to be the cop out of the century shrouded by millions of dollars of special effects and musical scoring
After returning home, my spark of disappointment had only grown into a flame fueled by the fact that in 1999, the original Matrix broke boundaries not only with its ground-smashing special effects, but delivering to its viewers the idea, nay truth, that life and humanity has no borders. They cannot be contained. In this moment, we are able to break outside of our programming and go beyond our dreams- but obviously worshipping at the steps of this false idol's shrine, and making a cinematic messiah out of these films was the fault only of me.
The brothers Wachowski drew us all into this idea and world of possibility. They drew us into a place where reality had nothing to do with what was truly real, but where reality lived in a realm of option and hope that most people are hard-pressed to find. I now know that after this experience, that the truth that they lead us to believe they were aware, had simply been a fluke- a moment of temporary enlightenment.
To Andy and Larry Wachowski: please be careful with knowledge that you think you have an understanding of. Using that assumed-knowledge to give people hope and lift them from their seats only to allow your ignorance to drop them carelessly back to earth is negligent and immoral.
But one does have to have a sense of humor about art and film. After all, we are talking about entertainment here. However, as art imitates life and vice versa, it's still disappointing to find that after having been lead by the hand through the infiniteness of imagination and meta-physical possibility, that the rabbit hole really doesn't go that deep.