Why the rabbit-hole ends here *MAJOR SPOILERS*

Rating: 1/10 (10 November 2003)

In my comments for Reloaded, I criticised the film heavily as a stand alone work, but refrained from casting final judgement, as I would never walk out of a film half way through, particularly one so (as we have been told) profound as The Matrix. It's comparable to turning a song off before the chorus and then whining about how it wasn't memorable enough. There was no way of telling exactly where the story was leading to at the end of Reloaded, and too many threads had been dangled in front of the audience for us to properly judge its merits. However, as I said at the time, the action scenes were overlong, dull and artificial thanks to some inelegant use of CGI (which is something of a curse these days); dialogue and acting were both borderline woeful on the whole; and the philosophical pretentiousness wasn't half as clever as it thought it was. However, I was willing to give Revolutions a fair crack - in fact, I was fairly excited to see how accurate the theories I had of the continuation of the story were, and where the significance in apparently superfluous scenes from Reloaded would be found.
Unfortunately, Revolutions is possibly the worst film I have ever seen at the cinema. It is so bad, in fact, that it completely degrades both Reloaded and the original. Of all the theories of where the plot may go I had read, or come up with myself, the Wachowski's answers were so incoherent and downright unintelligent that none had even suggested themselves as possible solutions. So, Neo seems to have powers in the real world? Surely, we must be dealing with a secondary matrix, another form of control, because Reloaded continually rammed this notion down our throats, and it must be significant? Well, actually, no. The Wachowski's explanation consists literally of the Oracle telling Neo that his powers extend to the real world, and that's it. This is shameful laziness for a film of (supposedly) such profound scope. As for the rest, the plot is full of holes that, bizarrely enough, make it more difficult to comprehend exactly what is going on (coming out of the cinema, I had to explain to a friend what had happened, but only because the plot is so incoherent he assumed there was something deeper he had missed). Do not be fooled. There is no significant deeper meaning to this movie, besides the embarrassingly blatant Christian symbolism, which I can't imagine anyone failing to get a handle on. The common defence of this film by users here is that anyone who didn't like it didn't understand it. Well, I've done university level philosophy on both mind and body and religious philosophy, and the only thing to understand is that this movie is a distinctly skin deep affair.
As I felt about Reloaded, the acting, writing and action in Revolutions is very poor. Technically, the action is second to none, but like a band who are great on their instruments but can't write a song, the technical wizardry on display is rendered irrelevant by action scenes that are too long, clichéd and soulless. It doesn't help that almost every time a computer rendered Keanu Reeves or Hugo Weaving is on screen, the action goes into slow motion to make the CG patently obvious. Therefore, fights have the thrill taken out of them, as they are so obviously artificial. The one high point of the movie (setting aside Monica Belucci, who is, for various reasons, eminently watchable) is the last ditch defence of the Zion dock by the human army, which despite being poorly directed, and of course overlong, is a triumph of effects based cinema, reminiscent of the Helm's Deep battle in The Two Towers, as well as the obvious Aliens comparisons. However, this sequence is in the singular minority in terms of an exciting action scene, and even then relies heavily on cliché and suffers from predictable writing.
As for the writing, this is easily the weakest area of the movie. Almost sub-soap level, some of the corniest dialogue ever seen in a cinema rears its ugly head (my favourite hour was when Trinity used every cliché in the book while saying her goodbyes - or was it longer?), and characters are paper thin, particularly secondary characters such as the detestable Link (his lucky charm sub-plot enraged me - they should have paid Tank whatever he wanted to return). Incredibly, interesting characters like Morpheous, Seraph, the Merovingian and the delightful Persephone are hideously underwritten, while nonentities like Link and his wife Zee, and the Kid (from Animatrix) eat up screen time like nobody's business. Morpheous' relegation to Niobe's incompetent sidekick is especially baffling, as Laurence Fishburne is easily the hero you most root for in the previous 2 films, and along with Hugo Weaving and Monica Belucci (for slightly different reasons), the best thing in the trilogy.
The acting in Revolutions is equally appalling. Once again, charisma and chemistry manage to comfortably elude Keanu Reeves and the quite dreadful Carrie-Anne Moss, while the supporting cast fare little better, particularly Gloria Foster's replacement as the Oracle, Mary Alice. It is left to Hugo Weaving, and with the relegation of Fishburne to minor role, Jada Pinkett-Smith, to save face with good performances (and having said that, Weaving's Revolutions performance was the weakest of the three films). I simply did not care what happened to any of the characters (although it was mostly thoroughly predictable), and was in fact rooting for Smith, because at least he wasn't boring me.
Overall, the plot is what rankles, because it is such an unsatisfying conclusion. We have a trilogy where fundamentally nothing has changed as a result of the character's actions, in the end. Some questions are answered lamely, while others are not attempted. No, the rave/sex scene wasn't significant in the end. Oh, yeah, and be ready, for the last scene is the worst ever committed to film. Ever.