MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, THE

Rating: 2

Why is it that when filmmakers get a whole truck full of money, they always think that they should use it to make things blow up in lots of interesting, cool ways? The thought crossed my mind again as I watched MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, the third and putatively final chapter in the MATRIX cycle. In this installment, we stray even further from the intellectual roller coaster that was the original and even the intellectual merry-go-round of the sequel.
REVOLUTIONS, be warned, picks up exactly where RELOADED left off, with less than a day before Zion, the rebel stronghold that is literally underground, is breached by the machines, and with Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Bane (Ian Bliss) comatose. Although, Neo’s odd brainwave activity looks as though he’s jacked into the Matrix. Impossible, of course, because he’s not physically plugged in. As for Bain, he’s not so much comatose as not himself, what with channeling Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) into the real world.
If none of that makes sense, go back and watch parts one and two before proceeding.
Neo, as it turns out, is neither here nor there, but rather in a CPU version of limbo. It looks like a subway station, albeit a spotlessly immaculate one, and is inhabited by three computer programs, a loving couple and their cute-as-a-bug’s-ear daughter who are trying to save said daughter from being deleted. The station itself is run by the snaggle-toothed trainmaster who is, in turn, run by the Merovingian, whom we met in part two. Don’t get attached to him or snaggle tooth and for pity’s sake, don’t expect to learn anything more about either of them. Aside from a brief visit to the Merovingian’s after-hours S&M club, we are not given any further illumination about him or his lovely if unhappy wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci), who has even less to do here than in the last installment and is reduced to doing nothing more than looking annoyed and displaying some structurally impressive mammary glands.
As for hero Neo, he’s a pale echo of his former self, exchanging dialogue with his lady love, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), that wouldn’t cut it in a Harlequin romance. And despite Bliss’ eerily precise mimicry of Agent Smith’s enunciation, ticks, and general aura of lethalness, Neo fails to notice that Bane is hosting said Smith. Even when he calls him “Mr. Anderson” in that particularly silky way we’ve come to know and love.
That’s the short version of what’s wrong with MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. Here’s what’s right. Weaving takes Smith, a literally one-dimensional character, and infuses him with enough spiteful vitriol to make him the most interesting character in the film while never breaking faith with the conceit that he’s a rampaging program. The special effects, while not the visually groundbreaking stunners from part one, are nonetheless eye-popping, particularly during the battle for Zion. There the color palette changes from the trilogy’s iconic greys and blacks into a riot of fiery excressences that evoke the terrors of Hell worthy of Bosch. The sentinels, those spider-like machines with the zapping tentacles, merge into ever larger iterations, becoming sinuous columns with graceful heft and murderous purpose. The humans are left with only their guns, but they are big guns, very, very big guns, humongous, in fact, spewing endless rounds of ammunition with orgiastic abandon and if you can’t help but infer a symbolic underpinning there, well, neither can I.
Also well handled is the explanation for why the Oracle (Mary Alice picking up nicely from the late Gloria Foster) looks different. The explanation even brings up one of the few philosophical propositions left to the franchise, that of making a choice and seeing beyond to the consequences. The other proposition places Neo, the savior, and Smith, the program run amok, in context so that when we come to their confrontation, there is something to ponder through what seems like an infinite loop of punch, counter-punch and counter-counter-punch. Does any of this make REVOLUTIONS worth seeing? Barely. But only by fans who are determined to find out what happens next. Others are advised to seek entertainment elsewhere.
As I mentioned before, this is the putative end of the Matrix cycle. I say this for two reasons. One, a suitable cryptic exchange between two characters, whom I will not name, that ends the film and, two, no studio worth its marketing department is going to bid farewell for a franchise that might still have some moneymaking life in it. I give you ROCKY and RAMBO as examples and as object lessons. I won’t be sorry to see the saga end if it continues down the path its chosen, devolving from a thoughtful exploration of reality to just another effects-laden shoot ‘em up. But if the Wachowski Brothers should retrace their steps and return to an unapologetically philosophical exercise spiked with dazzling visuals, no one will be happier than I will be to see it return.