Decent action film, But Unworthy Sequel

Rating: 5/10 (8 November 2003)

Well...And I guess that's kind of where this left me. Just well...ok.

(some minor spoilers)
The first Matrix was great. The second was much less so, and you could sense Hollywood creeping in around the edges in the stock characters and cheesy moments. Now in the third installment Hollywood has taken over -- complete with the Fallacy of the Talking Villain (multiple times!) and people gasping out 5 minute long death speeches wherein they get to spit out their entire philosophy on life and ask you to kiss them -- at which point they abruptly die. You also have thousands of casualties, a destroyed city, but of course all we care about is the swelling music as two secondary characters come together to embrace. Sigh. So cliched in a series which was once so original. All that was missing was a Red Digital Readout counting down to exactly 1.0 seconds before stopping.
As an action flick, this movie does fine. Its better than most, and has an excellent, although flawed 45 minute action sequence at its heart (although somebody will have to explain to me why the squids school around like fish allowing themselves to be shot rather than swarming and overwhelming the defenders -- oh yeah, because they would have swarmed and overwhelmed the defenders and that wouldn't have been good.). And I think I really have to talk to the machines about their city defenses -- all you have to do is fly up and "oops", we didn't think anybody could attack from above? Hey -- maybe this war could be won yet. Unfortunately, the movie it lacks the guts to be truly grim, and at all times we have to be pestered by cute Hollywood moments, and characters who once were interesting and deep have now been reduced to cardboard cutouts going "whoa!" as special effects blow up in their face.
And as a thinking movie -- well it doesn't do much of that. And that's the real disappointment. It is so obvious at this point that the first movie was intended to be a stand alone movie, and really should have stayed that way. Not only is there a real inability to capitalize on the mind blowing concepts of the original in this film, they are largely discarded along with most of the details and rules therein. In fact there are a large number of flat out discontinuity errors not only between Revolutions and the the original, but between Revolutions and Reloaded as well. And characters and events critical to the first two movies are just tossed aside here -- why, oh why, have the Architect come on at the end of the second one to give us the I am God speech and hope for the trilogy's intellectual premise, only to throw it away within the first half hour here and say "oh he doesn't know anything"? Why do the ships suddenly have guns when in the first we knew that "EMP is our only defense against the machines"? Wouldn't it perhaps have been a good idea to try to shoot the squids in the first one rather than throwing the EMP and almost blowing up Neo's mind?

Anyway, the movie is fine for eye candy. But the matrix itself is all but discarded now as totally irrelevant, and the interesting philosophical concepts and questions about the nature of reality are all gone. Answers of a sort are given, but they are unsatisfactory at best, and just flat out dumb at worst. Action has triumphed over brains, and one more time you get the feeling that Hollywood has entirely missed what made the first movie so interesting and respected even among those who don't normally go in for sci-fi or action flicks. The extravagent explosions in this one just can't cover up its essential emptiness. Bottomline = disappointing.