Let's not pick on multi-millionaires

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2004)

**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**SPOILER ALERT**
Since The Matrix Revolutions is the finale to the Matrix series, I want to talk about the finale of the movie, so, WATCH OUT I'M GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE END OF THE MOVIE.
First a brief synopsis of the backstory: Matrix--loved it, watch it once a week. Matrix Reloaded--don't know, I fell asleep halfway through. Matrix Revolutions--close to the first Matrix, but there's only one Matrix, so why are we trying to compare apples and metaphysicists?
I want to start by saying "hats off" to the Wachowski brothers, creators, writers and directors of the Matrix, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I hardly ever wear a hat anyway. Today, however, I'm wearing two hats--that of a fan and that of a critic. I think it's testimony to the power of the Matrix concept and execution that those of us who love it most still feel a vital need to pick at it. Sorry guys, they treated Shakespeare the same way.
As I understand it, the Brothers W had conceptualized and storyboarded the complete trilogy long before they made their first pitch. They had acquired their artistic vision via lives spent poring over comics, particularly the large-panelled action genre, whose highly-foreshortened visual framing shows in the directors' apt use of eccentric, heroic camera angles. And when they had finished shooting and editing the last scene of the last movie, the entire trilogy is said to be almost exactly true to their original storyboards. These guys knew what they wanted to say, and persevered in their vision through the excrutiating task of wrapping three action/FX features in the space of four years.
Therefore I think it's interesting what they seem to be saying in the last movie. Originally, we're led to believe that the Matrix is a microcosm, a virtual world that most of us who lie huddled dreaming in our network-enabled pods believe is the real and only world. We're just here to supply electricity. But when Morpheus hacks into the Matrix and flushes Neo out of his pod, he welcomes him into the real world, a gritty, post-apocalyptic place where people are wiser but not happier. Life may not be easy here, but at least it's real life and people are in control of their own destinies, as meager as they are. And they're fighting to regain their former world.
But Morpheus is a chump--he's being used by the Oracle. In the Matrix Revolutions we see that what humans want for themselves is of no account, that the battle for Zion is an illusion, a vanity, and that Neo and the warriors of Zion are in fact pawns in a political macro-contest of will between rival factions of renegade software. We were better off hooked up to the electrical grid, when our highest thoughts and aspirations were at least good for a few kilowatts, and nobody starved to death.
I thought it was interesting that at the end the Oracle was addressed as "Oracle" that just before death Neo and Trinity glimpse the "Sun", and that Agent Smith, the dominant, evil software entity, replicates himself until he's ninety-percent of the software available.(Mr. Bill?) Surrealists see a world where we are nothing more than puppets dangling on strings; the Wachowskis see a world where we are nothing more than fuelcells that have the power to stand on two legs and be deceived, in this case by the all-powerful Software Creator, who manages our destinies as disinterestedly as we manage our own pet's destinies.
But come on, Senors Wachowski, if the Matrix and the little lives of the people within it is a meaningless illusion created by self-serving renegade software, then what are you trying to say about yourselves, the all-powerful creators of the Matrix movies, a world of rich experince certain to excite and entrap us humans, but ultimately just an attractive illusion. Are you playing God here, guys, a brutal and disinterested Oracle? Or more ominously, are you trying to become God's boss, Mr. Bill?