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February 2, 2004

The Big O Reviews
Matrix Revolutions

Once again, we’ve pinched an older, more distinguished article from the past and stuck it up here (with the author’s permission, natch).

Ol Shirley, the gifted Sydney writer\boozehound, has kindly allowed us to republish yet another of his pieces - a review of the last Matrix movie. Insightful? Bitter? Mentions a macaque? You betcha. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Last night I finally got around to seeing the third installment in the Matrix movie franchise.

You know its been a tough night when you spend most of the drive home talking about the trailers before the movie. It’s even tougher when one of those movies is a jungle romp starring “The Rock”. (Incidentally go and see this movie - it has a rather angry looking macaque in it.)

I’ve never been a huge fan of the whole Matrix machine. I thought the first one was pretty cool however. As a computer nerd I found the whole idea of computers simulating a virtual world whilst enslaving people in a hellish reality was quite intriguing. Kinda like working at Microsoft and having an X-box at your desk to distract you from leaving the building.

Anyway, Matrix was released way back in 1999 and its special effects scenes have been copied by everything from “Shrek” to “A Beautiful Mind”, and as such a whole bunch of internet geeks became pseudo-cool by sporting black trenchcoats and saying “There is no spoon.”

The sequel, Matrix : Reloaded came and went earlier this year, to mixed reviews and some conjecture. “Reloaded” raised more questions than it answered, and turned what was essentially a plot worthy of a Sega Master System game into a biblical struggle of philosophy and technobabble. However, “Reloaded” was redeemed by jaw-dropping special effects and fantastic fight sequences.

Several months later “Revolutions” turned up on our doorstep like the proverbial flaming pile of shite and slipped into cinemas everywhere. Critics had already rubbished the movie for its pretentious dialogue and non-existant storyline, but I was still open minded. These same critics are the ones who awarded a Best Director Oscar to Ron “Richie Cunningham” Howard over Peter Jackson back in 2001.

Anyway, clearly I’m stalling. It behooves me to have to write this review. I really don’t need to tell you how bad the movie is, you’ve probably heard it a hundred times over from your neighbour, your local magistrate, Keanu Reeves himself.

Speaking of Keanu, perhaps the best thing about the trilogy is that he gets less and less lines to speak as it progresses. Mr Reeves is best known for his work playing himself in the sublime “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” but this was at least 15 years ago. The world has moved on from “Woahhhh”, but clearly Keanu hasn’t. As the movie’s protagonist Neo, he sleepwalks through his lines with all the enthusiasm of Big Kev at a vegan restaurant.

Lawrence “Boys N The Hood” Fishburne has clearly been eating pies with Shane Warne since the first Matrix film and as such has really stacked on the kilos. Unable to fit in his sleek leather jacket any more, he spends most of the movie in a heshan sack quoting from Socrates and Plato and eyeing the off-screen buffet longingly. He clearly doesn’t want to be in this movie. Neither does Carrie-Ann “Ian” Moss as Trinity, Neo’s love interest. As my good friend Steve Fellows pointed out , she is very severe looking. So much so that you almost feel that if she were to smile once it would shatter her face. Although, I suppose there is little to grin about when you are named after Sydney-based private school and spiritual home of the boatshoe “Trinity Grammar”.

A cameo appearance from great Australian actor Bruce “The Mouth of Sauron” Spence as the Train Master adds initial promise to the movie but he disappears about 20 minutes in and is never seen again. Nor is uber-babe Monica Belluci, who is there to provide some much needed but all-to-brief cleavage distraction for the restless internet nerd boy fan base.

Even the trilogy’s one redeeming character Agent Smith , as played by Hugo Weaving, is reduced to a hammy comic book villain. The film’s finale, in which he battles Neo along a crowded street and then kilometres in the air “Superman” style, feels more like a Dragonball Z cartoon than a serious resolution to the trilogy’s only interesting storyline. As an aside, I found myself chuckling when I saw the thousands of Agent Smiths lining up on the road to watch the battle - the resemblance between Hugo Weaving and Roseville’s own Michael Anderson is uncanny!

The movie’s inherent flaw is in the fact that it is set almost entirely in the sci-fi equivalent of Wollongong, the last human bastion of Zion. And the problem here is that Zion is just plain boring. Caves, cabling and pipes everywhere. It looks worse than the supposed horrible machine city on the earth’s surface, which at least has a decent light show and clever looking buildings.

With all the action set in this yawnworthy cavern of boredom, there is very little time devoted to the film’s namesake, the Matrix itself - hence there are few new special effects or physic-defying battle scenes. The ones you do see seem almost tired and rehashed, as if they finally ran out of ideas in 3D Studio Max.

Special effects wise, the movie chugs along with some robotic warriors stolen from “Aliens” and some spidery robo-bugs stolen from cult Japanese anime flick “Akira”. Whilst admittedly some of these battles are quite spectacular, the novelty wears thin after 45 plus minutes of the same footage from a different camera angle and you find yourself caring so little for the unwashed humans that you almost wish the machines would just hurry up and finish them off.

Which brings me to - yet another- plot flaw. The crew of the “Nebuchadnezzar” (named after the ancient Babylonian king and thrown in by the writers to sound biblical and clever) spend half the film racing through tunnels with an EMP bomb in order to try and save the city. Apparently these ElectroMagnetic Pulse bombs are the ONLY THING that can stop the robots, yet the city of Zion has absolutely ZERO of these bombs in their arsenal, yet they have 1000 incompetant Robocop rip-offs which are more machine-like than the actual machines they’re trying to defeat?!!

The lowpoint of the film is clearly its dialogue. I understand the Wachowski brothers don’t give interviews to the public, and its clear to see why. They are clearly ashamed of themselves and their psycho-rambling. The same thing happened to George Lucas - he wrote a good movie 20 years ago and then when he couldn’t find a decent plot for its prequels, he tried to deceive everybody by confusing them with technological jargon and plot threads that make no sense. Cue Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clowns.

Idiotic lines such as “Neo… I believe now!” ( as spoken in the heat of battle by characters pausing heroically to gaze into the distance while bullets whir over their heads) and “You saved me through love…” are excerpts from dialogue the Home and Away writers would cringe at. This, juxtaposed with tech-speak read directly off the back of a Sony VCR manual, makes for an awful cinematic experience.

One of the most confusing scenes of the movie involved the mysterious “Oracle” character. Now, it seems the actor playing the oracle died between the filming of the second and third movies. Not being a hardcore fan, I didn’t notice and I’m sure many others wouldn’t either. The woman cast in this role does a pretty good job of emulating the performance from the previous films. However, at one ludicrous point she starts babbling about how her face has changed! Yet they give no explanation as to why!

Interestingly, why is it that all the villains of the trilogy are all white and middle aged? And why is it that all of the heroes are anything but white? Either African, Pakistani, Rastafarian, Maori, Torres Strait Islander, Easter Islander, you name it they all get a run. Even Keanu is part Hawaiian! It feels almost as if the citizens of Byron Bay are rebelling against leafy Vaucluse. Political correctness at its finest.

Anyway, in conclusion this is a disappointing end to a trilogy that should have been much better. The Sellout Brothers cashed in long ago and their story suffered greatly because of it.

I gave this one surly star out of five.

Ol.