infinite improbability

I've finally figured out what I think about Matrix Revolutions

I saw Revolutions opening night, and I think that I've finally sorted out my opinions of the movie enough to write a review.

As usual, no review that I read seems to have gotten anything right--one review even complained about "why do people in the future always have to wear such drab clothes?" Hello, it's a post-apocalyptic dystopia, what exactly do you expect people to wear? The latest from Versace's new fall line?

The following review contains spoilers, so be forewarned

Stylistically, the filmmaking was excellent, and as Holton pointed out it is very much inspired by anime. Because of what I think that they were trying to do visually, I'm not going to complain about the extended mech battle sequence, though I do want to know why exactly it was that they didn't have any protection for the people operating the things. Though, judging from the military decisions that the commanders made, the guess is that they weren't the most comptenent individuals. They could have totally defended Zion if they had hundreds of EMP devices in the dock, which they could have activated one at a time to stop each wave of sentinals. Again, bad strategic military decision. My one complaint about the filmmaking is that it seems to have lost the attention to little details that we saw in the first film. The first film, despite all the special effects, had a kind of elegant sparseness to it, which wasn't there in this movie.

The final battle between Neo and Smith was a beautifully choreographed fight sequence, an epic fight for the ages. There was one shot in that fight that was totally worth the price of admission, just to see that one punch. My brother complained that the fight was too much like the train station fight in the first one, only longer, which is a sentiment that I partly agree with. It did seem to parallel the train station fight, but I think that was an important parallelism, because of the way that it showed how both Neo and Smith had grown in power since the first movie, and it fit in with the theme that everything that has a beginning has an end.

What I didn't like so much was the story in Revolutions. True to the other movies, the brothers mixed religions together, but in a way that was much less satisfying than in the first movie. For one thing, in the first movie, Neo, as the Christ figure, dies and is resurrected, and is then showed ascending into the sky, so one would think that following the whole Neo as Christ thing, you would have the second coming of Neo and have him triumphantly running everything, but instead it ended up with a bunch of Hindu religious themes. Combining this with what we learn in Reloaded, Neo was the seventh avatar of 'The One,' which fits in with Hindu beliefs about their god Vishnu, who appeared as various avatars (some Hindus have said that Jesus was really one of Vishnu's avatars, Krishni, I think). So, in the end, the movie turns out to be a strange mix of Christian crucifixion imagery with Hindu reincarnation. And, we also discover that while love may be a driving force, it's not what separates man from the machine, the ability to chose does. Neo freely chose to give up his life to save everybody (another big-time example of Neo as Christ figure), and that's what separated him from Smith, and the Architect, and the Oracle, and of course the Merovignian who kept talking about how there are no real choices--for a program, there aren't real choices, it's all an intricate construct, but for a human, there is the possiblity of choice. Now, the question is, since all of that happened within the construct of the Matrix, are the Wachowskys saying anything at all about real life, except for the choice separating man from machine part?

Finally, on a lighter note, it would have been a hilarious ending if it ended with Keanu Reeves stepping out of a phone booth (as in the end of the first film), at which point the camera cuts to Bill S. Preston Esquire in San Dimas, California, and we find out that all of this was an alternate future that would have happened if Bill and Ted hadn't time travelled to save the planet once again.