And then the roof caved in

Rating: 4/10 (16 August 2009)

How can a series of films that began in such good faith, underpinned by some staggeringly heavy philosophical theory (Jean Baudrillard's Simulacrum) and heart-stopping ground-breaking visuals (the 'bullet time' visual effects) end with this: the final instalment of the Matrix trilogy? After watching Matrix Revolutions I went back to the first film and realised that with some time, distance and a little bit of 'God, wow, I loved the bit when' we easily forget about the first film's wooden acting and its glittering bag of Hollywood prerequisites: a totally needless love interest, one man saving the whole world against all the odds, some unbelievably cheesy lines and a moment of 'happy ending'-ness that nearly ruined the whole gig SPOILER (Reeves is kissed back to life... *sighs* for God's sake). It is these things that repeat and outweigh all of the many positives of the third film.
We begin at the end-point of Matrix Reloaded: Neo the electronic knight is incapacitated; a new threat is descending on a weakened and somewhat demoralised rebel fleet and the new bad guy, the Architect, knows how this will all end as he has seen it. Ostensibly, we are watching a mix of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Betwixt all the action is a large and dense bag of philosophy and mysticism that inspires the mind and evokes conversation akin to those 'under the influence of choice' moments where we talk about what is real and what is perception. Unfortunately, we just can't see it in this film for all the running up walls and such.
The Architect, it turns out, is the antithesis of the Oracle, the former being the mathematical foundation of the matrix and the latter reading tea bags and frying our noodles with puzzling quotes like: Would you still have knocked over the vase if I hadn't mentioned it? They are pretty much the Ying and Yang of the matrix and are battling for peace the irony. Neo is the Oracle's main man and Agent Smith was the Architect's. Smith has now gone AWOL, has unplugged himself and is out for Neo, infecting other programs and making them into carbon copies of himself in order to build an army.
For me, there is too much time spent outside the matrix and in the real world where an unwinnable war between man and machine takes place in all its Independence Day glory. Cheesy quotes like: Your move. Give them hell. Damn, that woman can drive. and Goddamit are in abundance and the goddamed love story between Neo and Trinity blocks up the holes where the good stuff threatens to shine through. The rebel fleet never made sense anyway (when you recall Morpheus' tone and words to Neo in the first film), but by this point I was far past caring about being convinced; I just wanted out.
How to conclude? Overall, watch the first film again, ignore the cheese as best you can and then forget the next two films ever happened. Read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and fry your noodle, because the Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions will fail to do this for you on all counts.