New Matrix Movie Hardly Revolutionary
By Tim Anderegg
A&F Associate

Unlike most people, I was not disappointed by the Matrix: Reloaded. I had low expectations for it, admittedly, so there was not much to disappoint. While the original Matrix was a creative and new way to do action, apart from the interesting philosophical ideas it brought up that’s pretty much all it was. I didn’t expect much more from the second movie, nor the recently released Matrix: Revolutions.

So again, I was not disappointed. While the ending was a cop-out, there really wasn’t any other way for the series to conclude. They could have wrapped it up a little better, perhaps, as we don’t really know what’s going to happen next, and the victory of the good side isn’t at all complete. Too many ideas were put out there throughout the first two movies for the third to wrap it up and still be a special effects laden action movie, which is what the Matrix movies have been from the start.

People may complain about Keanu Reeves’ increasingly less expressive acting or the dialogue that hovers on the border of pure cheesiness, but no one goes to the Matrix movies for the acting or the dialogue. People pour money into theaters across the country for the revolutionary special effects techniques and action scenes that the Wachowski brothers pioneered. The futuristic, pseudo-philosophical mood and style of the Matrix world that the brothers created helped make the first movie so popular as well.

Matrix: Revolutions has more action than philosophy, however, which is unfortunate, because that’s only half of the Matrix success formula. This action focus is due in part to the ever present feel that this movie’s only purpose is to tie up the loose ends of the previous two movies with as little explanation as possible. The implications of the second movie were almost completely ignored. Neo saves the day in a confusing, quasi-religious manner, never addressing the previous “Ones” alluded to in the Matrix: Reloaded or the significance surrounding the “The Architect” revealed at the end of that movie.

The movie seemed less coherent than the previous two, and in a way felt like two movies in one. More than the typical division between the events inside and outside the matrix, the two worlds seemed not to really affect each other much at all. It was almost as if each brother wrote one portion, perhaps.

The first “movie within a movie” would be a typical science fiction thriller, typified in the battle between the humans and the machines, which draws in influences from science fiction worlds of the past. This was done well in its own right, I thought, as the”“APUs” that the humans fought the machines with were, if not creative, at least cool to look at. The industrial, post-apocalyptic feel and design of Zion was well done, the cinematography was interesting, and the drama going on wasn’t too hokey. Overall, this part of Revolutions was my favorite, as the battle was ambitious and well executed.

The second movie within Revolutions would be Neo’s story, which kind of brushed over the previous plot twists and resolved with a pretty traditional ending. While the myriad characters presented in Matrix: Reloaded managed to successfully make the fight scenes interesting, despite the fact that we knew Neo was pretty much invulnerable, we don’t get to see much of that at all in Revolutions. There is a brief blurb about the Train Man and the Merovingian that did little to expand the plot. Neo’s main role was just to “fulfill his destiny,” and his success at the end, unfortunately, serves only to make the efforts of the humans vs. the machines almost irrelevant. His epic final showdown was pretty well done, but brief.

We could also consider a third movie within Revolution, which is the opening part with the Train Man and a random computer-program family. The presence of the family is never really explained. The overall purpose of this part is unclear, although it seems to attempt to explain how Neo awakes from the coma he was in at the end of Matrix: Reloaded.

I may seem to be giving Revolutions too hard of a time though. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot, as I got what I expected: some really cool fight scenes, computer graphics, and heroics. Matrix was definitely a revolution in action movie technology, and even if Revolutions wasn’t a great movie, it didn’t disappoint in that department. It’s time for someone else to take the next step in the evolution of movie magic though, or maybe to see what the Wachowskis can come up with next..