Worst one, of course - 6 (endurable)

Rating: 6/10 (22 February 2005)

The best Matrix movie is the second one, Reloaded, in my opinion (probably a 10 in my book). Why? Because it seems as if most of the production resources were poured into that one. If you watch the very first Matrix again, you'll see that the clothing and hair styles are a cheap shadow of what they become in the second installment. Reloaded is black, slick, and restrained like a team of crouched ninja's surveying the Tokyo cityscape. Also, you can see that the production in other areas like editing, CGI, acting, and martial arts, jump up several notches from the first to second.
Where does that leave REVOLUTIONS, the third installment to the Matrix trilogy? Let's imagine those crouched ninja's again, except the sky opens up, and a junk-load of tubes and shiny cars are rained down on them for three hours. That's the idea: all the sleek cool feel of the movie is drowned out in a cranky CGI mess. Although there were some cool scenes here and there, basically the idea was: while the actors and main crew are working on Reloaded, let's just plow through the third installment with our CGI team and forget about all that real-life action stuff. What you get is a lot of flying widget things and bullets and war-rumble shouting from the Zion soldiers. That's fine, but when did a CGI project like that actually work? If you up 10 minutes of CGI distraction, that means that you lose 20 minutes of valuable story-time and probably derail the whole flow of the movie all together. I think they should have animated the entire REVOLUTIONS movie and released it through a separate production company. Then the audience would be asking themselves, how does this new production mesh with the Warchowski productions, rather than, how much worse is the Marchowski movie than the first two.
As there is too much machinery flying around, there is hardly any human action. All that first-rate martial arts that was featured in the first two movies become so watered down, that one is left thinking, did the actors get fed up with the workouts and decide to take a break on REVOLUTIONS? In fact, it would be worthwhile examining what the actors have to say about REVOLUTIONS. Most of what I heard are generalizations like love conquers all, or exciting machine-human war epic, or something like that. Probably what they want to say is, boy am I glad to take a rest for once!
Although REVOLUTIONS tidily wraps up the Matrix storyline cleverly, it's just too long and too busy. I would rather watch the entire Animatrix several times over before watching REVOLUTIONS any time soon.
JY
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