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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Apocalypse now and Zen: The trilogy's gloomy finale ties up the plot's loose ends but leaves the imagination hungry.
Nov 5, 2003 | "The Matrix Revolutions" isn't a terrible movie, but it is a tremendous disappointment. It has great things in it: a creepy, semi-mystical subway train that takes people (or entities, or programs, or whatever) from one world to the next; a prodigiously exciting last-stand battle between humans and machines that equals any action sequence in the series. But it feels like a lot less than the sum of its parts. It will certainly be a letdown for anybody who believed, or hoped -- as I did -- that the Wachowski brothers were capable of producing an epic for the digital era, a combination of pomo philosophy and old-fashioned storytelling that could simultaneously enthrall a mass audience and question the very system of enthrallment, the society of the spectacle, that had produced it.
In fairness, I believe the Wachowskis got two-thirds of the way there, plus a little more. I'm sticking to my guns on the subject of "The Matrix Reloaded," which broadened and deepened the entire "Matrix" saga, adding new layers of political and cultural commentary while raising the action-movie stakes. Critics who didn't like it, I suspect, had their signal-to-noise ratio confused: They missed the hypermodern fashion and design sensibility of the 1999 original (and maybe the technophile, boom-market world it signified). The cumulative effect in "Reloaded" of Cornel West, that multiculti rave scene, and all those black people with dreadlocks seemed to provoke some kind of kneejerk anti-p.c. backlash. Oh, no -- an optimistic, even egalitarian social vision! Please don't serve us that with our black leather, our wraparound shades and our sci-fi apocalypse!
You might actually argue that "Reloaded" went too far and did too much, throwing so many narrative and/or thematic challenges and conundrums into the air that in this movie they come crashing to earth with a thud. Think you're going to learn something new about the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), that aristocratic Francophone piece of software code, and about his impossibly curvaceous and possibly treacherous wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci)? Uh, think again. (I'm not counting the info all Matrix-heads have now gleaned from the Internet, to wit, that the Merovingians were a dynasty of Frankish kings, descendants of the perhaps mythical Merowech, who ruled much of present-day France and Germany from the 5th to the 8th century A.D.)
Is some light to be shed on the cryptic encounter between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) in "Reloaded," in which it appears that, yes, Neo may be "the One," but he also may be trapped in a reiterative cycle he can't control or escape? Well, not much, frankly. Is the Architect himself a machine, a flesh-and-blood being, or something else? Hmm. What about the Oracle (still a cookie-baking black lady, but now played by Mary Alice in place of the late Gloria Foster, a transition handled about as well as it could be) -- who is she and what's her relationship to the Architect? Um, well, see ... Why exactly do Neo's powers over time, matter and space begin to assert themselves outside the Matrix? I guess, er, just because they do.
"The Matrix Revolutions"
Written and directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski
Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving
OK, in fairness, the Wachowskis do provide answers to a couple of those questions, in between the shootout scenes that seem longer and slightly more pointless than ever before. But they do so pretty much with the air of two guys desperately checking things off a laundry list. There's just too much plot to untangle, too many semi-naked girls dancing in bogus S/M outfits, too many flying kung fu moves over empty, rain-slicked streets, and that's all this ever narrower, ever more literal-minded movie can handle. "Revolutions" basically jettisons all its plot complexities as it plunges toward its final splashdown, dumping every larger philosophical or epistemological or whateverological question that's been hanging over the series. In the end, this is neither more nor less than a solid action-adventure flick (with some vague New Age ideology in the margins), maybe the third- or fourth-best one I'll see this year.
