I thought it would stink but it doesn't

Rating: 9/10 (14 November 2004)

Possible spoilers
After all the negative comments about Revolutions, I didn't have much hope for it when I popped the DVD in the player. I was pleasantly surprised.
Most people don't understand what's going on in the Matrix movies. They liked the dynamics, 'bullet time' slomo and cool style of the first one, more or less grounded in our world, then were disappointed greatly by Reloaded, and ignored Revolutions in droves.
I didn't like Reloaded much either, but thats another movie. Revolutions, on the other hand, is more my cup of java. They had a difficult casting problem with the death of the Oracle (Gloria Foster), and they managed an adequate 'patch' to their program. The Matrix is quite a bit like a computer program all the way through. In Revolutions, the final battle pits Neo against Smith (again) in the ultimate superhero-style battle. Any comic book fan should enjoy the fight sequence between them, but most people miss that that particular Agent Smith was really the Smith/Oracle, who at the critical moment does an interrupt of Smith's program and gives Neo the way in, so that main computer can delete the Agent Smith program (at the end of the fight in the crater). That is why Neo had to go to the machine city, so he could get plugged into the matrix at its mainframe core, or bus as it were, so the mainframe would get hooked directly into Agent Smith. Some of that stuff reminds me of the old movie Tron.
I'm a pretty crappy Mech game player but I really like the whole Mech thing, so the huge Siege battle with the Mech 'APU's lined up and fighting the losing fight against the hordes of Sentinels warmed my Target Lock and HUD display. A truly awesome display of combining multiple technologies to get something believable and lots of it on the screen.
I don't quite get the meaning of the 'Den of BDSM' and why the Merovingian hangs out there, unless the old file server just likes all his porn and it was an excuse to get Bellucci in a revealing red leather/latex outfit, and local BDSM shops had sales that week so it was an economical thing to do. Or it could be that being French says it all about the Merovingian and that was really decadent digital hell, as the mythical Persephone/Bellucci would indeed spend half her time there. Her only line was on perceiving Trinity's love for Neo, and thus underlined her own deal with the devil.
Of course there's lots of wirework in this movie. All the actors clearly worked hard, as it is a very physical movie. The acting is so-so. Hugo Weaving aka Elrond as Agent Smith is my favorite. The Matrix trilogy is deeper than most give it credit for.
The DVD presents the movie very well. You can see the actors pits, pores and goobles in great detail, and the audio works out all the speakers. There's a Making Of that I would've liked a lot more if the crew didn't spend so much time pimping their work. The DVD gets a high 8/10