Profoundly Stupid

Rating: 3/10 (6 November 2003)

The Matrix: Revolutions is a profoundly stupid movie. It competely disregards all of the questions, philosophical problems, and basic premises of the first two movies and devolves into a boring, wasteful exercise in franchise-killing. The title of this movie is the only thing that is going to keep it from the HBO at 3 AM sci-fi bargain bin, and even that might not be enough.
This movie is less to be understood as a Matrix film, and more to be understood as roughly on the par with the Carrie Ann-Moss flick "Red Planet." This is a movie in which people and robots have a series of nonsensical fights for unclear reasons in which characters you don't like or care about shoot things and blow things up. I'm as much of a fan of robots as the next guy (probably more), but Revolutions doesn't have nearly cool enough robots to justify its huge expense or ponderous pacing. You could have made this exact same movie with only a slight drop in quality for roughly one tenth of what was spent on it.
Keanu puts in a solid performance in this one, doing everything that is asked of him, even though most of those things are the result of either idiodic or inattentive writing. Still, this movie ranks slightly below _Johnny Mnemonic_ (the Ultimate Hard Drive) in terms of quality, with all of the sloppy cyberpunk wankery, but none of the wry humility or charm.
What is most surprising in this movie are the things that do not happen. No new characters are introduced. Not a single point in the movie is there depicted a person inside the Matrix who does not already know it is fake. There are no "bullet-time" special effects to speak of. There is no acknowledgement of the situation presented at the end of the second movie, let alone the situation presented at the end of the first movie (each of which, it should be noted, is entirely incompatible with the other). There are no Twins. There are no vampires or werewolves (which, as you may recall, were promised in the second movie). There is no resolution to any of the problems, nor remotely plausible answers to any of the questions. There are many Agent Smiths, but you never see them fight.
It is a movie in which the only thing that saves the incredibly stupid and useless protagonists are the marginally more stupid and useless robot hordes. Among other silly things, the humans build robot suits that offer very limited mobility and no protection to the wearer. The combat contraptions don't even have doors or windshields. And they don't give the poor pilot guy a helmet, either . These giant robot suits are perplexingly built, not to fire mounted heavy weapons, but to carry hand guns "gangster-style."
The only reason they have even a marginal level of success is because a malevolent artificial intelligence that can construct an entire artificial human world indistinguishable from the real can't figure out how to utilize complex "gun" or "bomb" technology, and instead arms all of his minions with tentacle-knives and instructs them to geometrically swarm like bees in a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. It turns out that "gangster-style" robot suit handguns work pretty well against an enemy that can fly around in large groups, but doesn't know enough to so much as drop a rock on your exposed and easily-crushed head. But well enough? You won't hear spoilers from me.
The previous two paragraphs, as well as an extended sequence in which a hovercraft flies in a straight line for twenty minutes, make up the middle 45 minutes of the movie. At least.
My God, this movie is stupid. I can only wonder what sort of terrible accident might have befallen the original concept for the Matrix Reloaded, because I cannot conceive of anybody sitting down at a table and thinking this particular sequence of moving images was worth making.

Unless, of course, this is an incredibly intelligent meta-movie, and that the tagline "Everything that has a beginning has an end" is a reference to a deleterious view of the progress of the human mind, moving from acuity and philosophical rigor to retirement, idleness, senility, and finally oblivion. Because this is a senile, oblivious movie. If "Everything that has a beginning has an end" is the final moral of the story, the movie is an incredible metafilmic success, because I cannot imagine a movie that would make a stronger case for there never ever being another Matrix movie ever again.