Slap her she's the oracle

The Matrix Revolutions

About a year ago, when this one was on in the cinemas, a friend of mine told me, rather empatically, 'Do not bother seeing this, it's rubbish.'

I finally got around to seeing it and, whilst I wouldn't use the word 'rubbish', I certainly shan't be recommending it to anyone in the near future. Which is a shame, because The Matrix was a great piece of cinema, and I wanted so badly the trilogy to be complete, to be equally good in all parts. The Matrix Reloaded suffered from the introduction of too many new characters, an inbalanced raising of the stakes bad guy-wise, and trying to be too clever for it's own good. The plot -- which in The Matrix was easy enough to follow -- takes so many twists and turns that the second movie began to bear little relation to the first. You left the cinema with too many questions and too few wow moments fresh in your memory.

. . . Revolutions suffers from all of the same problems, but it suffers from them twice as badly.

The special effects are now a mixed bag; visually stunning as for the first two, but this sort of thing has been done so many times before that it's really hard to get excited about it. The attack on Zion is impressive, and for shear scale you can't fault it, but everything else disappoints. Neo vs. Smith round III is over-long and unfulfilling compared to the 100-agent rumble in the second film (one-on-one just doesn't cut it anymore, not even now that Smith can somehow fly). There's a shoot-out lifted shot-for-shot from the lobby scene in the first movie. The chase sequence (as the remaining ship tries to make it back to Zion) lacks because Morpheus is left holding the map and making puppy-dog eyes at Niobe. The one fight scene outside of the matrix looks like a fight between two drunks compared to the ballet of fights in the matrix.

Later . . .