The Matrix Revolutions
Cinematography:
Bill PopeComposer:
Don DavisCast:
Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Ian Bliss, Collin Chou, Lachy Hulme, Nathaniel Lees, Harry Lennix, Robyn Nevin, David Roberts (more)VOD (5)
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The Revolution is now: The Matrix Revolutions. Neo. Morpheus. Trinity. They and other heroes stand on the brink of victory or annihilation in the epic war against the machines in the stunning final chapter of The Matrix trilogy. For Neo, that means going where no human has ever dared - into the heart of Machine City and into a cataclysmic showdown with the exponentially more powerful renegade program Smith. For The Wachowskis and producer Joel Silver, that means soaring beyond the amazing visual inventivness of the first two films. (Warner Bros. Home Entertainment)
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Revolutions, while retaining most of the ills of the second installment, quite adeptly reduces their intensity. The digital sequences now primarily involve clashes of dirty metal, which is easier to animate and thus doesn't take away from the intensity of the Battle of Zion with mangled CGI. Plus the exoskeletons are really cool. The dialogue here is aware that we're about to close up shop, so it's finally going somewhere. Oh, and the Zion Respect Festival scenes are thankfully pretty strictly limited to war sequences in industrial dock settings. But why five stars? In Revolutions, The Matrix has finally managed to conclude a truly ultimate cyberpunk masterpiece (or rather, esocyberpunk masterpiece) and has stopped dodging the fact that the only options are that reality is nothing or that reality is everything. Codes are reformatted into atoms, minds create matter, all as a result of electrical connections between neural systems. It's all about electricity. The Matrix is actually a bit of an anti-humanist series, telling us how humanity's only goal is to destroy the machines, while the machines' main goal is to adapt to humanity, which makes them undergo more than just one problem, including fatal ones.
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There are fewer stupid dialogues and more proper adrenaline action with a drive that will plaster the viewer to their seats. The Battle for Zion is brilliantly shot, the greenish camera filters and the typical visual style of the Wachowskis are not missing. Don Davis does a flawless job and composes his best musical score. It is difficult to compare Revolutions any deeper with the previous parts, which only served as a support for the final installment. The biggest, the most monstrous and the most ambitious of the entire trilogy. A grand finale as it should be.
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“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…
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Matrix Revolutions has a more tangible and meaningful plot, less pseudo-philosophising and less gratuitous action for effect than in The Matrix Reloaded. I’m satisfied with that. You’ll find yourself yawning through the first hour, but the subsequent “war of the machines” is amazing. If there were more emotion in the final digital fight between Neo and Smith, Revolutions would have been a class better than Reloaded. The film’s ending has an appropriate amount of the pseudo-depth that the whole saga has been faking. Those who thought that there was something big behind everything will be disappointed. Unavoidably disappointed. Three and a half stars.
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Drops continue to fall, the heroes remain the same, but that code has somehow changed for us. It is indeed green, but it does not fall smoothly. It stutters and instead of a quality storyline, it flows with unjustified monologues, unbelievable dialogues, and sadly dysfunctional action scenes. When I think back to the perfection of the first installment, the precisely defined characters, and the unforgettable two hours that can be watched endlessly without losing their magic, it feels unfair that the Wachowskis have fatally let me down and forever ruined one unforgettable story for me. Morpheus has become just a motivational figure, Niobe herself has no role, regardless of rescuing anyone, and only the tangible bond between Neo and Trinity gives me a feeling of some vitality. And even the perfect final battle does not repair that tainted impression for me. The program has performed an invalid operation and will be terminated.
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