just awful

Rating: 1/10 (4 June 2007)

I never walk out of the cinema while a movie is still playing. Though I go to the movies regularly, I choose the movies I watch carefully and inform myself. I build up an expectation based on this and I have rarely been completely disappointed. Most of the time I like the movie I am watching, sometimes it falls below my expectation. But it hardly ever happens that I hate a movie when I walk out of the theater. But there have been two times when I hated a movie so much that I almost left the cinema. The first time was "Boat Trip" (which was a sneak preview, I had no idea they were showing this, I assure you I would never have chosen that movie out of free will), the second time was while I was watching "The Matrix Revolutions".
I liked the first Matrix film. i was never a geek or anyone who could talk about the "meaning" in this movie all the time. Frankly, those people annoyed me and over time, it took a little of my enjoyment of that movie away. But I always recognized it as a visual milestone in cinema.
When "The Matrix reloaded" came out, I went to see it with quite high expectations. I thought it was OK, not as good as the first one, but after all, it was a sequel and those are hardly ever as good as the originals. I loved that it still felt like "Matrix" to me. It had a lot of the original style and most new characters fit into that. What I did not like was all that heavy dialog. The things the Architect said made me mad. Listening to it, I got the feeling that what was actually being said was something completely banal but the Wachowskys wanted it to sound profound and to have people talk about it so they made it complicated. Still, a nice movie and after the climax, I wanted to know how it would all wrap up.
What a disappointment this movie was! Whereas "The Matrix Reloaded" still had a lot of "The Matrix" in it, this movie has barely any of the "Matrix"-feeling in it, but mostly the bad things of "the Matrix Reloaded". I never cared much about all this Zion-stuff. Zion to me was the ideal that was built up in the first movie, not that Star Trek -influenced termite hill of the second film. And yet, most of this movie is about that. To top it all of, most of the film is about defending this city, which is done by characters which were all added later while the main characters just vanish or become cyphers.
Only two scenes of the movie take place in the matrix, one in the beginning and one at the end. The rest is just robot wars in Zion and trying to get to the Deus Ex Machina.
Now, like many others, I also felt let down by the ending. i felt it was a cheap way out of all the stuff the makers of this trilogy had hinted at before. But still, the ending was just the thing that assured me in my overall impression. the entire film had been ruined for me a long time before during all these ridiculous and redundant fighting scenes in Zion.
This third installment is so terrible, that it weakens the entire trilogy and even the first movie as a standalone work.
The only positive thing that can be said about it is that after that, all that annoying geek talk about the matrix allegories stopped. It seemed like the Wachwskies wanted to give a wake-up call to all those freaks.