Revulsions (spoilers)

Rating: 3/10 (7 November 2003)

I saw the movie the night before last. I enjoyed watching it, partly because I was surrounded by a bunch of friends. As I left the theatre, I was pretty pumped. But the more I think about it, the dumber it seems. I've put off posting a review because this movie has made it uniquely difficult for me to articulate my opinion. But I'm going to put in a few thoughts that have solidified themselves, and maybe I'll add more later:
Some things that didn't make sense:
-If the people of Zion had enough time and resources to build their robot-exoskeleton army and elaborate holographic security system to fight the sentinels, why didn't they use the time to saturate the perimiter of Zion with EMPs?
-Why was the commander from Reloaded so freaked out about letting a couple ships go find the Oracle, when the remaining ships didn't have any part in the final battle?
-Why did the machines bother sending a quarter million sentinels to Zion, when a couple nukes strapped to the digging machines would have done the same job far more efficiently?
-Why did the Merovingian release Neo, when it would have been far easier to say he would until Trinity put her gun away and then have his people shoot them, or, even better, tell the train man to drop their asses off in limbo and leave them there with Neo, since they all went there to pick him up anyway?
-Why couldn't Neo beat the train man? If the Merovingian knew enough to be able to design a world and agents that are Neo-proof, why was it so hard for the Architect to do the same thing with the Matrix? If the train man could be programmed to be that much stronger than Neo, why wasn't he the one that the machines hired to defeat Smith?
-Once Neo defeated Smith and died, what stopped the sentinels from finishing off Zion? And how was a truce that was far less stable than anything ever signed by Israel and Palestine supposed to be a happy ending?
Other parts I didn't like:
I didn't like how they tried to cram as many movie cliches into the film as possible, with none of the development to pull them off. There was the plucky little soldier with the gruff commanding officer, who met in one scene and the next time they saw each other was the touching death scene. "I never completed the training" "Neither did I" Boo hoo hoo. There was the little girl who got assimilated by Smith, and we were supposed to feel bad because she's a cute little girl, even though we barely knew who she was. There was the wife that we saw once coming back to fire a crucial and contrived shot to save her husband. There was Trinity's schmaltzy death scene. Trinity's lines for that scene were straight from Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it had absolutely no emotional resonance. All that sex in the second movie, and I still wasn't involved in the relationship enough to care.
I also didn't like the fighting. It's gone steadily downhill since the first movie. In that film, the characters were able to bend reality, but it was still based in real life. In this film, the only fighting that was at all interesting was in the parking lot outside the club, and that was over in 10 seconds. After that, there was the bullet-spewing fight in the hat check room that was so concerned with showing off the villains' pointless skill of standing on the ceiling that it forgot to be exciting. And the final scene with Neo vs. Smith was one of the dullest fights I've ever seen. When two characters spend an entire fight flying at each other like Superman and showing that they won't ever really get hurt, no matter how hard they're hit, it loses some of its urgency.
I won't go over how cartoonish, emotionless, uninteresting and overly-digitally-produced the Zion battle was, compared with the action centerpieces of either of the other movies (rescuing Morpheus or the freeway chase), other than to say that it would have been more at home in one of the Star Wars prequels than a Matrix movie. All I can say is that it held my attention in the theatre.
I just watched the original Matrix. I had forgotten how much I liked it. And it's not because it had any fewer plot holes or pretentiously silly techno-babble than the newer one. It's because of the emotion. Neo spent much of the movie confused, excited, scared, happy, angry or tired, and the audience felt what he felt. He was confused at the beginning, and so were we. He was frightened when he woke up, and so was the audience. He was excited to learn kung fu, and the idea excited us as well. He was scared to fight Smith in the subway, and we felt his fear, which added a layer of depth to the fact that he did it anyway. By the end of the film, when he finally found his power and threw off his timidity and confusion, I was more excited that I'd been in a long time. It was a payoff that made the journey worthwhile.
The folly of the sequels is that the filmmakers tried to give the payoffs without the cost. They knew how much we loved to see these characters finally find the power to go after the antagonists without fear, so they gave that to us through the entire movie. They were perpetually calm and composed in the face of whatever danger they were in. Their clothes never wrinkled, and their sunglasses stayed on. There was no emotion to latch on to, no suspense, and the journeys of the characters seemed completely pointless. It made the plot exposition feel contrived, and the action scenes feel like tedious filler between scenes of plot exposition.
But I think the biggest folly of the final two movies is that they were made at all. The conclusion of The Matrix was completely satisfying. They accomplished the rare feat of taking an interesting (though not flawless) idea, exploring it completely, and finishing with neither loose ends nor excess. If they had let it stand, it would have been remembered as an anomoly. An incredibly fascinating, well-made and original movie that came out of nowhere, influenced film and culture in a way that few pieces of art can aspire to, and stood as an icon in film history. As it is, the studio and the filmmakers got greedy. And now The Matrix will never be seen as anything but a good beginning to a mediocre and somewhat disappointing trilogy.