The Matrix
Regurgitated
At least
you can't accuse Matrix Revolutions
of being predictable. It sucked in new and quite unexpected ways.
I keep
trying to summarize the plot. I can't manage it. But "plot" is just a
word: what matters is the relationship which that word implies. When I went
into the cinema, I didn't know the answers to any of the questions set up in
the first two movies. Do you know what changed in the next two hours? Nothing.
Unfortunately, no-one can be told how bad Matrix
Revolutions is. You have to experience it for yourself.
At the end
of the last film, Neil was mostly dead. He wakes up in a public lavatory and
has a conversation with a family of racial stereotypes, who tell him about
karma. I am fairly sure that the little Indian girl, who crops up all through
the movie and is in the final scene, has some significance, either in the
Matrix cosmology or as a symbol. I have no idea what that significance or
symbolism might be.
There's a
sub-way train that will take Neil back to the Matrix. His ability to get onto
it is in some way connected to Trinity, Morpheus and that Chinese guy having a
pointless fight with the Meringue in that nightclub. They win. He gets on the
train and wakes up.
My memory becomes
hazy at this point. The squids have apparently burrowed through to Zion. So it
is really, really, really important that the spaceship Nebuchadnezza gets back
to Zion in time for the battle. I have no idea why. I think I must have missed
an exposit in the last movie. But Neil can't go with them. On his way back to
the real world he met the Cookie Lady (who has died and regenerated into
Patrick Troughton) and learned that he has to fulfill his destiny by going to
the city of the robot squids. So the Fellowship breaks up.
I really
quite liked all the post-cyberpunk kung fu in long anoraks from The Matrix
and as mentioned, I enjoyed the sub-Dick metaphysics about the The Real World
being Only An Illusion. There were lots of ways in which I expected Revolutions to be crap; I thought maybe
the Matrix would reboot into a world where everyone was a superhero or a roman
knight; or maybe there would be a chunk of undergraduate philosophy in which
"reality" turned out too be a Russian doll nest of Matrices, each
world being a program inside a program. What I was not expecting was for the
film to be given over to a three-hour (or maybe it just felt that long) space
battle, which would have looked really cool in 1977. (Or, to be fair, 1983.)
I will say
his about the battle: it was big. There were an awful lot of giant squids,
which behaved exactly like video game aliens, coming in wave after wave, and
neatly forming patterns to make it easy for the good guys to shoot them. The
heroes fought in sort of industrial mecha power Armour tank suits, like the one
Ripley had in Alienses, only less so.
It was very impressive when the camera pulled back to show the serried ranks of
the things. So impressive that I said "Oh look, a cartoon". Or more
precisely "Oh look, a collection of Games Workshop miniatures."
(Digression:
We know that CGI makes it very, very easy to create lots of instances of the
same model: once you have rendered out the textures on your robot, or orc, or
dragon (which takes hours), it doesn't take much more computer time to show a
hundred or a million of them. Therefore, the scene in which you see a robot in
close up, and then pull back slowly to see thousands and thousands of the
things is already a horrible cliché. Four or five years ago Babylon Five was terribly pleased with itself because it could go from a
close up of Bruce Willis's face to a long shot of the space ship in a single
take. We were bored with it by the time of the close up of Picard's eyeball in Star Trek
17: The One With Bondage Borg Chick. The trailer for Troy does the pull-back stunt with Greek longships, but happily resists the
temptation to talk about faces, ships and the number of the latter it takes to
launch the former. Where was I?)
Empire Strikes Back remains the
best sci-fi battle scene ever filmed because we have a clear idea of who is
fighting, where they are on the battlefield, and what they are fighting about.
The scale and confusion of the mess in Matrix
Revolutions eliminates any
personality from the conflict: all we get is a few cameos from some stereotypes
who I had forgotten about: a hard-bitten general, a couple of black girls who
are related to someone even more subsidiary, the hot young kid who is scared
but comes through. And I had no sense at all of geography or tactics.
At the
last minute our heroes arrive on board the Prophet Ezekiel, and push the magic
button. All the aliens die. However, the magic button also destroys all the
electronics in Zion. This is apparently a bad thing, but the subject is not
raised again.
My senses
felt fairly overloaded by this point, and I was gibbering in the corner of
Camden Odeon saying "I can't believe how bad this movie is, I can't
believe how bad this movie is." But we were scarcely at the half way
point.
Back to
Neil and Trinity, on their way to Squid City. Some people think this was a
reference to Frodo and Sam going to the land of Morrrrdorrr but I didn't think
it was anything that interesting. (Every 80s sword and sorcery flick involved
the hero going through the back entrance to the baddies lair: think Conan, Dragonslayer, Beastmaster,
Dark Crystal, others too numerous to mention.) Someone whose name and
motivation I forget has hidden in the ship. There is a big fight. Neil is
blinded. This means he can go around with a bandage over his eyes, like
Tiresius or Gloucester or Oedipus or Geordie LeForge. It doesn't notably effect
his eyesight.
There is
another fight, or possibly even the same fight, and Trinity gets killed. Again.
She overacts a lot. Neil is quite put out. Resurrections are limited strictly
to one per customer, however, so she stays dead. Eventually, he gets to Squid City, and all the little squids form
a gigantic face in the sky and talk to him. (This is same special effect as the
Pharaoh's face forming out of the sand in The
Mummy, the previous holder of the
Rilstone "worst film ever" award.) Apparently, the real problem is
Agent Smith, (the fellow who says "Mr. Anderson" a lot and wants
Arwen to go to the undying lands) who is now an autonomous programme and just
as dangerous to the robots as to humans and Zion. He's going to crash the
Matrix, or something. If Neil can beat Smith, the humans and squids can be
friends.
Now we get
to the big fight scene; which, I must admit, did sort of make up for the six
hours of my life I have wasted on this rubbish. I cannot help thinking that
this was the scene which the brothers had in mind at the end of The Matrix and that the whole of Reloaded and Revolutions
were an (entirely failed) attempt to provide a context and rational for it.
Basically, the whole of the Matrix now consists of nothing but Agent Smiths,
and the whole thing is resolved manno to manno, Smith and Neo fighting in a big
puddle, initialing punching each other, but then flying around the city like
Christopher Reeve and Terrence Stamp. It is a great scene; almost as great as
when it was done by Alan Moore in Miracleman
in the early nineteen eighties. The flapping tie; the dark suit; Smith's crazed
grin; the rainstorm—it's all there, to
the extent that the scene feels less like a swipe, more like a loving tribute.
However, the point of the Miracleman
scene is that Moore treats superhero fights "realistically" and asks
what would happen if two people as powerful as Superman really did have a fight
in the real world? What would happen to all the fragile humans caught in
between? But, of course, we have established that the matrix is not really
real, so, mamma, nothing really matters at all.
After a
lot of pyrotechnics, Neil realizes what we spotted half way through part two,
that the way tot beat Smith is too let Smith beat him. Smith sort of merges
with Neil, which sort of crashes the programme and destroys him. Err...I don't
really know. But it made a cool scene. Neil is mostly dead (again), and the
squids carry him off to robot city, like King Arthur in the barge, or Joseph of
Arimathea and Jesus, or something. But they stick to their side of the bargain
and stop attacking Zion. So everyone cheers and says "hooray, we
won." They let off fireworks and dance with the ewoks. (I made that up.)
Meanwhile
the Cookie Lady, the Architect, and the Indian Girl meet up on a park bench in
the Matrix. They speculate that Neil isn't dead as long as we remember him, and
the sun comes up. I crawl out of the cinema in state of shock, my mind pummeled
by the two fight scenes, unable to believe the Alan Moore lift, unable to
believe that none of the open questions from the last film were resolved, or
even mentioned, somehow feeling absurd and silly for ever having thought that The Matrix
is "really not that bad if you don't have anything better to do with your
time." I mutter "what was that film about, what was that film
about." In the pub afterwards, I argue that Dungeons and Dragons had many good features.
The film
saved its best joke for the closing credits. The "big face that speaks out
of the cloud of squids in the robot city" is credited as
"deus-ex-machina".
I think
that just about says it all.