The third installment of the Matrix trilogy arrives today accompanied by surprisingly little hype. This summer’s release of The Matrix Reloaded came amid a flurry of media coverage touting its eye-popping computer graphics and the $40 million extravagance of a 1.4 mile section of highway built specially for the film.
In contrast, relatively little has been said about The Matrix Revolutions, which makes a stark declaration about the movie: we’ve seen it.
Don’t get me wrong, the film is pretty. It has all the elements we’ve come to expect from the Wachowski brothers—surreal martial arts and gun battles, unconventional camerawork, and near-seamless merging of live action and computer animation. Plus, there are robot suits with big wonkin’ guns, and you can never go wrong with that.
But we have come to expect all that, which leaves us asking, what else? Perhaps, um, a plot?
No luck here. The story opens where it left off in Reloaded—the last remnants of the free human race are preparing for a life-or-death struggle against the invading machines. Most of Zion’s ships have been destroyed. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is in trouble, and his companions must bravely face the programs inside the Matrix to save him. A new, terrifyingly powerful program is loose and preparing to do who-knows-what.
And they live happily ever after.
That about sums it up, aside from a hefty amount of special-effects action. The plot elements are predictable: The young volunteer gets to prove he can be brave; the pessimistic commander’s concerns are vindicated; the exceptional hero gets to venture off and risk everything to ultimately save the day.
There is certainly nothing on the mind-bending scale of discovering your world is nothing but a dream, conjured by machines to enslave the human race. Why, we could be in the Matrix right now.
Except the Matrix doesn’t look anything like the real world anymore. The entire “world” seems to have put on a long, black trench coat and a pair of sunglasses. If you’re not in a mysterious, pearly-white room, then you’re fighting your way through an underground rave controlled by programs that never do anything except sit at the head table and chat.
The most grievous offense of all is the overplayed role of love. What could have been a tasteful undercurrent becomes an action-determining influence that makes smart people do dumb things and just comes across as hokey.
All this is disappointing, considering the potential this trilogy had to be among the greats of science fiction. Maybe I was foolishly holding out hope that the Wachowskis had another big surprise in store for us, but it just seems that this story could have been a lot more than it was.
However, if you like to see things getting blown up, then The Matrix Revolutions is still probably worth seeing on the big screen, despite its dramatic shortcomings. Just don’t go expecting anything more than eye-candy.
