Limp Ending to What Should Have Been a Great Trilogy

Rating: 4/10 (13 November 2003)

I've taken 24 hours to reflect on this movie and why I was so disappointed when I left. Many folks seemed to have loved this movie because of the philosophical underpinnings. I guess the problem was that I came to be entertained. There are a few spoilers, not many though.
What intrigued me most about the original, and to a lesser degree the second installment, was the element of surprise. To find out that the world as we know it is a computer program - whoa. To see the characters in the Matrix, both the "plugged" and "unplugged", interact and bend the rules was very cool. In Reloaded, we learned more about the existence of "programs" that appeared as human. We knew that the good guys would win, but were thrilled by the freeway chase and the agent smith cloning thing.
As I think about great trilogies - Indiana Jones and Back to the Future are two great examples - all of the films in the series stand on their own. Even though the third installment of each series couldn't touch the first two, they were films that could be watched and enjoyed having never seen the first two. If you've seen Revolutions, ask yourself - if you had never seen the Matrix or Reloaded, would you have enjoyed or understood Revolutions? There wasn't much substance to this one outside of what you brought to it.
I didn't watch the Animatrix or play the Reloaded video game, which I've been told includes a lot of the back-story referenced in Revolutions. I watched a film that tried to take itself too seriously and failed to deliver the thrills that made the first two installments such a treat. I wish more time had been spent INSIDE the matrix. Characters such as the Trainman and Merovingian should have been explored more and not toppled so easily. For the fifth or sixth time I heard the Morpheous/Niobe conversation about "everything changes and stays the same". That was annoying in Reloaded.
I was expecting to see something that I'd never seen before. CGI cities and robot battles have been done a million times over. Hand-to-hand fights, whether on land or in the sky, have also been done before. The original gave us bullet time, lots of cool shots (the hand on the doorknob, eyeglass reflections, slow-mo lift explosion, bullet casing falling from the helicopter, etc.), and lots to think about. Reloaded gave us the twins, the burly brawl, the freeway chance, and a bunch of agent smiths, and the fact that this was the 6th occurrence of The One. The third gave us a little Matrix, lots of philosophical dialog, a bunch of robots that should have been able to kill everybody pretty quickly, and a happy ending that we all knew was coming.
Overall, I was pretty disappointed. 4/10 is my vote. Sadly, I don't even see myself buying this one when it comes out on DVD. I guess this is what happens when you give the Brothers freedom to do their thing after making 1 classic. Oh well. It was a fun ride. I hope Star Wars doesn't suffer the same fate.