Ouch...

Rating: 4/10 (10 December 2003)

Oh dear Oh dear.. I really didn't like this film at all. To be quite honest I think Revolutions is like a boulder chained to the feet of the previous two films before they're thrown over the bridge into the river... I honestly wish Revolutions had never been made, it marred the experience of the first two so much..
Anyway.. why do I feel like this? Am I just band-wagon jumping here? Well here's my reasoning..
The first film is generally expected to be a masterwork of cinema. A modern classic if you will. It was a damn good movie. It had style, it had flare, it had action, it had plot and it had enough little hidden subtexts to make you want to see it till your tv screen burned out. The second one got slated but in my opinion it was exactly what people should have expected, the first film, only blown up onto a big scale. Whereas the first film focussed upon a select group of people, the second pulled back to show us the full scale of the conflict. It had complex (some would say pretentious?) sub-plots and again, it was fun to watch.
So Revolutions. Ack ack ack... My first gripe is that it's barely Matrix. There's hardly any of the Matrix in it, and what we do see consists of *POSSIBLE SPOILER* about 20 minutes in a bleak train station and an underwhelming and often ridiculous duel between Neo and Agent Smith with a predictable conclusion *END OF SPOILER*. The rest of the film is spent either watching hovercraft buzz around the place (admittedly the chase through the mechanical line is quite impressive) or daft looking mechanical combat suits shooting at a seemingly endless swarm of sentinels while their pilots constantly shout battle cries before being torn to bits one by one. How nice... this smells way too much like generic C-grade Sci-Fi to me, not the Grade A material that the original film and Reloaded have lead us to expect. It also seemed to have a ridiculous amount of plot holes. Who the hell was Seraph, what happened when Seraph and the girl get confronted by the Smiths? What was the effect of Smith absorbing the Oracle? And over-all... WHY THE HELL did you give us such an underwhelming ending? I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it, although to be honest I'd recommend not seeing it at all since it will mar your experience of the other two films. I genuinely wish I hadn't seen it now, I'd have rather drawn my own conclusions. A disappointing end to a previously fantastic trilogy. What a crying shame..
4/10