It's Like Chickenpox, Good to Get It Out of the Way…

Please note: I have no qualms about giving away important plot points, though how I could possibly ruin Matrix Revolutions any more than the directors did is beyond the scope of this review.

Saw the Matrix: Revolutions. My god, what a load of crap. For some reason the line, "You're much prettier when you keep your mouth shut," kept popping into my head.

It's like the Wachowskis went from Lucas to Lucas in less than five years. At least with Lucas he had a good two decades before the drunkeness on his own power caused massive liver failure. Somewhere in the whole trilogy, is a good movie struggling to get out. This is because around the making of the first movie the lunkhead directors kidnapped it and pressed it into the service of a pretentious, overly-special effected, kung fu romp.

Of course, the Star Wars Trilogy comparison doesn't really hold up since I rank the first Matrix somewhere lower than Return of the Jedi (Ewoks and all), and Reloaded was clearly no Empire Strikes Back. Another difference: I kept looking for Trinity's ghost at the big Ewok celebration.

Just to throw in another spoiler, the Matrix is actually: The Quadratic Equation! which apparently has to be constantly balanced out.

And that mildly interesting idea brought up at the end of Chapter 2 about how all the events in Matrix land were cyclical? No worries, the guy who said that was just trying to sound cool. Which seems to be the entire purpose of Matrix dialogue anyway.

And what the fuck was this bad news bears shit? "Put me in coach, I can do it!" I was just waiting for the hardened Soldier (who does give him that chance) to tell that ratty little boy, "You remind me of me when I was young."

And you'd think, that with all the super powers Neo and agent smith have, the directors would have been able to come up with something more interesting than flying Kung Fu. Of course, if they'd stuck more closely to the Hong Kong cinema they plagarized, they would have used more wide angles to actually capture the action, rather than some guy's elbow, or a few rain drops.

Here's my theory, they had that one good idea at first, then plundered every comic book, video game and anime they could think of to flesh it out into a full-length film, then they squeezed every drop out of whatever relatively obscure sources they could for the
second one, so for the final movie they're left plundering the straight-to-video market for ideas and daytime soaps for dialog.

The other theory is that since they got their start directing music videos, all they know is how to make things seem cool. Except what seems cool to a level
ten dungeon master may not be cool to the rest of us.

But here's my favorite theory: Sure, the series has always had a lot of overblown and pretentious religious references, but I though they were just bad habits left over from the Wachowski's ninth grade writing workshop. In fact, the entire Matrix series is actually Jesus fan fiction. What would Jesus do? He'd learn kung fu.

My advice: The Wachowski's should stick to movies about lesbian criminals.