Main cast: Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity), Mary Alice (The Oracle), Collin Chou (Seraph), Jada Pinkett Smith (Niobe), Harold Perrineau (Link), Ian Bliss (Bane), Bruce Spence (Trainman), Lambert Wilson (Merovingian), Tanveer Atwal (Sati), and Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith)
Directors: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski
If you want to experience what it feels like to be keenly disappointed, watch The Matrix Revolutions. This movie is wretched. How can it not be wretched when every time a character speaks, I cringe at how pretentious and banal the dialogues always are? The Wachowski brothers may think that they are writing deep philosophical ruminations in their script, but they come off like the talent-free brothers of George Lucas.
What kind of movie is this, seriously, where the dialogues are more pretentious than a really bad philosophy student’s rushed assignment? The characters in this movie no longer speak as much as they spew cow dung in between dramatic pauses for maximum cringe-inducing effect. I paraphrase:
The Oracle: You are in danger. (Dramatic pause)
Morpheus: What kind of danger? (Dramatic pause)
The Oracle: The danger from making choices. (Dramatic pause)
Trinity: What choices? (Dramatic pause)
The Oracle: The choices you made.
Imagine the entire movie filled with such pretentious monologues and expositions filled with vague rubbish and that’s The Matrix Revolutions.
In this movie, Neo has taught Trinity and Morpheus the Secret Art of No-Emote Mode, because I have seen planks more animated than all three main characters in this movie. Neo is in stasis and trapped in some train station by the Trainmaster, Morpheus and Trinity save him, and they all head back to their spacecraft, the whole Neo in Danger thing being nothing more than filler. Then Neo asks for a spacecraft so that he and Trinity can fly off to Machine City. The others head back to Zion where the machines are attacking. And the rest of the movie is nothing more than shoddy plotting, atrociously bad acting, and an ending that has me howling in deranged laughter, the kind of laughter that people make when they realize that they have wasted 130 minutes of their lives watching drivel.
The machines attacking Zion is a breathtaking spectacle, but the entire scene of battle is cliché heaped upon cliché (the overzealous leader, the earnest kid that plays hero, et cetera). Mopheus is officially a fool in this movie as he is operating solely on blind trust and he is just lucky that Neo doesn’t fail him. Then again, the Wachowski brothers seem to expect the same from me: I’m supposed to be so in awe with Neo that I’m not supposed to care about anything else in this movie (like plot and coherence, for example). The final scene between Agent Smith and Neo is so laughable and overlong that a Dragonball Z cartoon (from which this movie steals most of the fight scenes from) comes off like a masterpiece in comparison. Then there is the horrible portrayal of love. Trinity and Neo manage to beat Amidala and Anakin when it comes to being nauseating and cloying. If Anakin and Amidala makes one suspect whether George Lucas knows anything about wooing a woman, Trinity and Neo makes one wonder whether the Wachowski brothers have even come into puberty yet. The whole “I’m so grateful to know you, I love you so much that I must make a ten-minute speech even when I’m supposed to be dying!” nonsense makes me long for the restrain of a Bollywood melodrama. At least they sing some nice songs before dying in Bollywood instead of talking like a greeting card from the Wachowski crackhouse.
And the ending! Let’s just say that the Wachowski brothers are probably aiming for some Phillip K Dick sort of Very Important Ending but instead, the ending only drives home that when you give a lot of money to two talentless twits more interested in showing off their nonexistent philosophical skills, the result is an awkwardly made movie such as The Matrix Revolutions. These hacks must have gotten really lucky with the original movie. When I compare that movie with this dreck, I’m starting to believe that the original movie is either repaired by a talented script doctor or aliens had indeed kidnapped the Wachowski brothers after the first movie, and put two drunken baboons in their place to come up with this movie.
The only saving grace in this movie is that Niobe kicks ass. She’s the only one to do so. Poor Trinity, she is reduced to being nothing more than a lovestruck, always-grateful Neo groupie. The less said about Morpheus, the better.
Either way, this movie is a huge steaming pile of turd made pretty by very expensive and pointless special effects. For fanboys only.
