The Matrix Revolutions

“Hey Larry, Joel Silver was here.” - “Yeah? And what did the old bastard want?" - “He said he had a lot of money for us if we wanted to shoot another two parts.” - “That’s great, bro! Let’s put something together, then. We have loads of ideas, we can put them all together and something will come out of it.” - “Cool. So, here we put this, and we put this here, here we drop that long dialogue scene, it’s just verbal filler, but who cares, they’ll survive. And, bro, it’s ten minutes long, and you know, ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and we have four hours, two hole films!” - “Yeah, you’re right. And here we could squeeze some sequence inspired by anime, the Japanese love that and they’re the second biggest movie market in the world. We can’t go wrong.” - “Yeah, and some love-story, too.” - “Hey, Andy, those heroic moments wouldn’t hurt and...” Enough with the snark, now I'm going to be dead serious, I'm going to be as serious as the heroes of the Matrix; so serious and lofty that in the wonder of their own loftiness they sound, in the words of Amadeus, as if they shit marble… One way to grasp the Matrix is to search and search for meaning, search for the key to the truth. But it's a bit like dropping the key to my place into a puddle, I’d have to find it because otherwise I wouldn't be able to get into my apartment, but truth be told, digging in a puddle is not very "interesting" fun. Just as much as digging through a pile of verbal ballast and suffering through seriously meant pathetic dialogues that lack a shred of insight. I would so much like to search and find the meaning, but the Wachowskis won't let me because of the form of their narrative. And yet The Matrix Revolutions could have been a great movie. The scene from the subway station, from the "intermediate section", was funny and awesome. Likewise, the ending itself, I'm not afraid to say, was breathtaking! But everything in between? Awful! Pathetic battle scenes cut from the Soviet film Liberation. The Wachowskis proved that I remembered my childhood years, when I went to see shitty Soviet war films for free that were full of pathos of the coarsest grain. “How old are you, kid?” - “Eighteen.” - “Should have said sixteen, I might have believed that.” - “All right, I'm sixteen.” - “The minimum age for the Corp's eighteen. Sixteen's too young.” - “The machines don't care how old I am. They'll kill me just the same.”... This is not a sample from a Soviet war movie, but from this film. The American kid wanted to fight and he accomplished a great thing. No, really some patterns don't change even after fifty years and it doesn't matter the country of origin. But despite these excesses, The Matrix Revolutions is not a stupid movie, although some of the interpretations are ridiculous. For example, the shape-shifting of the Oracle is explained by Matrix advocates as a Merovingian punishment, but the reality is much more prosaic. Gloria Foster, the actress who played the Oracle, died during the filming, so the Wachowskis helped themselves to this pathetic ruse. I have nothing against the concept of the Matrix, but the form, my friends, the form… (11/11/2003) (less) (more)