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 (4)
Plots(1)
In the third installment, the epic war between man and machine reaches a thundering crescendo: the Zion military, aided by courageous civilian volunteers like Zee and the Kid, desperately battles to hold back the Sentinel invasion as the Machine army bores into their stronghold. Facing total annihilation, the citizens of the last bastion of humanity fight not only for their own lives, but for the future of mankind itself. But an unknown element poisons the ranks from within: the rogue program Smith has cunningly hijacked Bane, a member of the hovercraft fleet. Growing more powerful with each passing second, Smith is beyond even the control of the Machines and now threatens to destroy their empire along with the real world and the Matrix. The Oracle offers Neo her final words of guidance, which he accepts with the knowledge that she is a program and her words could be just another layer of falsehood in the grand scheme of the Matrix. With the aid of Niobe, Neo and Trinity choose to travel farther than any human has ever dared to go a treacherous journey above ground, across the scorched surface of the earth and into the heart of the menacing Machine City. In this vast mechanized metropolis, Neo comes face to face with the ultimate power in the Machine world--the Deus Ex Machina--and strikes a bargain that is the only hope for a dying world. The war will end tonight, with Neo’s destiny and the fate of two civilizations inexorably tied to the outcome of his cataclysmic confrontation with Smith. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (11)
Rating the entire trilogy. Like in Reloaded, there are moments that really pissed me off, but as a whole it’s amazing, and the climax, when white is reunited with black, can’t be described other than superb, unexpected (though actually inevitable) and incredibly deep… PS: In the great order of things, the Battle of Sion is just eye candy, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it made my jaw drop.
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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.
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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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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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As I mentioned with The Matrix Reloaded, these two films should be evaluated together because they work best as a pair. Yes, at times it's overly commercial, and on the other hand, it's sometimes overly philosophical without the philosophy saying much of anything. One ends up going in circles without anything substantial to grasp onto. But when it comes to the final scene, where Neo is supposed to reach the mainframe and either win or lose, it always grips my heart and gives me chills. Certainly, it didn't fulfill the promise of the first film, but I can't help feeling that, with some distance, I'm not actually that disappointed with it.
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