Bryan Keefer is co-author of the New York Times bestseller about
find me...
Get Updates
Find Posts
“The Matrix: Revolutions”
I went and saw the last movie in the “Martrix” trilogy the other night. It is so bad it almost works. Visually, it’s quite entertaining (though the graphic violence of characters getting run through with pipes, cut to pieces, and deeply burned was a bit much). The best scene in the movie is probably when Trinity and friends break into a club run by the Merovingian; the guards and the clubgoers look like Marilyn Mason meets Clive Barker.
Sadly, the characters and plot aren’t nearly as good as the costumes and set design. There are whole sequences that accomplish nothing; meanwhile, characters get picked up and summarily dropped (the last we see of the Merovingian and his crowd, for example, he has a gun to his head and his Euro girlfriend is discoursing about love).
The backstory is similarly discombobulated. The first movie seemed like it was heading towards some kind of interesting background philosophy, dropping Baudrillard references and the like. This one, though, throws about 5000 years of philosophy into the meatgrinder and comes out with a bloody, incoherent, postmodern mishmash. There’s everything from yin-yang earrings on the Oracle character to an extended discussion of karma (lifted mostly from Merriam-Webster’s), with a heavy dose of classical iconography thrown in just for kicks.
And the penultimate scene is completely ridiculous. After a fight that busts up lots of walls and carves a big crater in the street, the bad guy says to Neo “Why do you humans do it?” and launches into an extended tirade on the meaninglessness of life. Neo tells him he keeps fighting “Because I choose to.” Oh, really? I liked that movie better the first time, when it was called The Stranger. Or maybe Bartleby the Scrivner, if you want to really dig deep.
Then again, I did miss the first minute or two while I was out getting popcorn. Maybe that explains the whole thing. Somehow, I doubt it.
The really sad part is that the whole movie was so bad (though the action scenes were generally fantastic) that, by the time Zion is cheering, the movie was so bad it was good. But then there’s a lame sequence clearly tacked on because the original, more ambivalent ending (which at least had the virtue of being an interesting plot move) didn’t sit well with test audiences. It features a silly discussion between the two god-like characters to give it a much happier ending (from the view they have of a city across a river, they evidently live in Hoboken, which just totally ruined the suspension of disbelief). So, as far as I’m concerned, it went all the way past bad to good, and back to bad again.
Given all the loose ends, though, they’re clearly setting themselves up for another bunch of movies. I wish they had just left well enough alone and ended the series here, for better or worse - they could always go back and disgrace themselves with prequels a la “Star Wars.”
- November 18, 2003
filed under: Movies