The Matrix Revolutions

Cut Reloaded and glue it together with the best of Revolutions and behold: that would be a film! Yet, after an unbalanced and melted intermediate link, Revolutions is a brisk spectacle that benefits from the chatter of Reloaded (there's no need to think about anything deeply anymore) and the visual mastery that The Matrix is famous for. It’s nice to look at, and the ending is really riveting, as is the message of the whole story. Plus it has a great soundtrack. I love this trilogy because it is not only "one", "two", etc., but is really a conceptual work that, as a whole, creates a huge potential universe that can be further populated. In addition, it allows you to engage your brain and create your own intertextual "matrix" with classics of world philosophy and literature. It may lead to exaggerated constructs, but thank God the "mass" story places such high demands on the viewer at all... (25/01/2004)

The action is bombastic and, most importantly, the seemingly endless battle with the machines has the makings to enter the company of some of the most iconic scenes. But that script! Compared to the lacklustre second part, it’s considerably sharper, with less bullshit, and subordinates almost everything to the great effect, or rather to the exterior, but it again fails to impress the viewer in any way or with any idea, to squeeze at least a pinch of emotions out of them... I admittedly rode the wave of the spectacular action, but I actually kept waiting and waiting and asking myself what the hell can come out of this? And then suddenly the end came and all I could feel was disappointment. That was supposed to be it? Is this what everyone's so crazy about? After the fantastic first one, the directors must have run out of breath and Reloaded and Revolutions are just a bloated bubble, we can only shake our heads in disbelief. This time, there was no déja vu. (29/09/2011)

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. (09/03/2021)

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. (29/10/2003)

A sad and undignified ending to the series. Unarguably it has an underlying thought and depth to it (even though sometimes it is a bit of a problem finding it). But as for the rest; the intriguingly developing storyline around the Merovingian and Persephone trails off into nothing. And the amount of clichés in this exceeds anything seen in any other seriously intended movie over the past years. OK, maybe there are more clichés in Pearl Harbor and We Were Soldiers, but at least those movies don’t ride on the philosophical wave typical of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The effects are just for effect and not for the good of the movie. Needlessly long scenes and a completely different approach to the material than in the preceding parts. I have nothing against change, but it just doesn’t work here. It almost looks as if, paradoxically, apart from who plays Persephone, the only significant upside of the movie is the music in the last third. The chorals are surprisingly suitable for this “techno movie". The only flawless area is the audiovisual treat in the form of the final duel between Neo and Smith and it is a great shame about all of the wasted potential here. As excellent as part one was, despite it borrowing a lot of motifs from other movies, and part two was a great relaxing watch, unfortunately part three is nothing better than criminally mediocre. (13/05/2022)