Comments on: Revolutions?

By: BT

BT — Sat, 08 Nov 2003 21:43:43 +0000

Whoops—apologies for the misattribution, Jake. But you were both wearing the same color beret…

By: KF

KF — Sat, 08 Nov 2003 04:50:13 +0000

Ah, Jake, you clearly hung around me too long if people are taking you for me.

That said (or perhaps unsurprisingly), my review is much the same as yours (and folks worried about spoilers should stop reading now): all the potentially interesting ambiguities of episode 2, which really relied on episode 3 to make pay off, crashed and burned. Episode 3 returns to a sense of absolute belief in its own savior narrative, a belief that I find just the tiniest bit pathetic. The result is Star Wars, Episode 1: We’ve Got the Technology, We’ve Got the Mythology, and We’ll Keep Going Until You Can’t Take It Any More.

By the by, that’s not just rhetorical: I’ve heard a rumor that the Wachowskis have signed for a 4 and 5. Can anyone confirm?

By: Jake (not KF)

Jake (not KF) — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 21:42:39 +0000

Thanks for the compliment, but I can’t let you blame KF for my ignorance. I take full responsibility and regret the pain my gaffe may have caused.

By: BT

BT — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 20:56:22 +0000

Oh, come now, KF, did you really think there was no graphic novel?

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1932700005

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 20:35:42 +0000

Trying to avoid spoilers….

I’ll start out with something nice. There were some great scenes and powerful moments that I’m sure would have blown my mind in IMAX.

Now that that’s out of the way:

It wasn’t as good as the first one. WAY wasn’t as good as the first one. Still worth my money and everything, but I have to say that I was counting on Revolutions to bail out the obfuscation and loose-threads of Reloaded and, well, that’s not exactly how it worked out. Plot took a huge backseat to watching things explode, and as for the philosophical/intellectual layers that were laid in Matrix and expanded/pretentiously-spewed in Reloaded… they pretty much disappeared with the original Oracle. The audience shouldn’t be responsible for creating elaborate rationalizations to explain the otherwise inexplicable, and it would have been nice if the hour we spent in Zion involved characters we actually care about.

A friend of mine had an interesting insight re: Reloaded/Revolutions: Reloaded was substance, Revolutions was style. I think that’s pretty accurate, although I’d make sure to point out that neither was particularly effective or successful. There was a ton of content in Reloaded (endless run-on monologues that made little sense at the time, e.g. the Architect’s machine gun ergoing) but nothing tied together; There was so much freaking style in Revolutions (religious allusions all over, new visual motifs and overwrought romance) but no real material. Symbols everywhere, but nothing to attach them to. What a cool single movie they could have made, with a little bit of integration, but instead we got two movies that were letdowns in very different ways.

Oh. And once you can fly and are nigh-invincible, fight choreography gets a little silly.

At least we know how it ends, sort of. Maybe. Until the prequel. Or video game. Or graphic novel (that seems like the only media they haven’t tried to work in yet, I think, but I might be forgetting something).

The biggest problem is simply that there’s no real way to follow a genre-defying, once-in-a-generation, shocker masterwork like The Matrix. Part of this is just story-telling: in the first film, we were told that if Neo were truly The One, he could basically do anything he wanted to within the Matrix, and the exciting part was following his path from clueless battery geek to super-cool kung fu master omnipotent being. That was all great, but once you are all-powerful the story loses an element of suspense, a feeling of “what’s going to happen next?” that seems essential to the popularity of the first film. So the sequels were doomed to be disappointments, to a degree, from square one. That said, I think they could have and should have been much better than they were. I was thrilled when I first heard they were being made, but knowing how they turned out I can’t help but wish the story had concluded triumphantly, with flying Keanu and Rage Against the Machines, and not a sequel in sight.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 14:29:41 +0000

Well, I’m imagining that the film could have been 3D, in real time, with Take-Home-Party-Ninjas (TM), and most people would say:

“Wasn’t as good as the first one.”

As long as there are no Ewoks, I’m happy.

By: Jill

Jill — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 08:44:53 +0000

And we are all going to see it, whether it’s said to be good or not… Obviously the MYTH of the Matrix is in good shape, anyway.

I’ve already got tickets for Sunday.

;)

By: KF

KF — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 21:18:48 +0000

Note: repunctuated for better effect.

By: KF

KF — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 17:29:06 +0000

Oh, I like that—a freemarket aesthetics:

–The film’s philosophizing makes no sense.

–But it does make sense: because it made money. See? Money, sense. Sense, money.

–Ah, yes. Now I understand.

By: jeremy hunsinger

jeremy hunsinger — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 17:04:12 +0000

i think we just have to understand the film not in terms of art or entertainment, but clearly from what i can see the standard should be ‘gross revenue worldwide’ which is the neoliberal aesthetic category.