Return of the Pod Producers

Well, unlike the movie I’m going to talk about, I’ll get down to the important stuff right away---The Matrix: Revolutions was the most unpleasant, time-wasting cinemagoing experience I’ve had since Armageddon. It’s bone-crunchingly noisy, it hasn’t got a brain in its head or whiff of poetry in its mythology; its love story is dead on the slab; the acting is ponderous; there are plot holes that will make you gasp; it feels longer than Ben-Hur; you have to work really hard just to watch it and you have to work even harder to care about anything you see. And for the cost of admission for two you can get you and your date a really nice bottle of wine---I know my choice.

Worse, it doesn’t even deliver the goods as an action movie. The Matrix Reloaded, even if it took forever to get moving and was cluttered with marble-mouthed pontificating, at least had a few action set-pieces that pinned you to the back of your seat and made you grin. Revolutions lacks even that.

Virtually no screen time is spent in that wonderful black-vinyl and ray-ban- world of the Matrix; we are for the most part trapped in that dim and grubby world of Zion, where the producers make the same mistake George Lucas made in his second series of Star Wars: and that is, no matter how flashy you make them and how cutting-edge the technology you use to animate them, machines fighting other machines is just not compelling. People we could not give a damn about---and in fact have to rack our brains to even remember from part 2---fight a big meaningless battle against machines that are as anonymous as so many flying can-openers. Actually, the people climb into machines themselves and together with the enemy cutlery, they all dig a hole in the center of this movie that sucks in every whiff of personality it ever had.

For me, it all came to a symbolic head close to the end, when Neo and Trinity have one final squeeze before parting ways. “You have to save Zion” she says. And I thought, Zion is the least interesting place I’ve ever seen in a movie! I thought Neo was supposed to be saving the human race! But no, in this movie, Neo’s working for the producers, not for us. Now, he’s there to save a set.

One of the most intriguing propositions made by the original Matrix was that our world has become a bunch of human bodies kept in pods while all the life and energy is sucked out of them to feed a race of machines. It’s become pretty obvious that the Hollywood that gives us The Matrix: Revolutions is one of those machines. And like Neo, we’re now faced with a choice. Take the blue pill and you’ll keep thinking you’re seeing real movies. Or you can take the red pill, get your ass out of the theatre, and tell the machine to get stuffed. The choice is yours.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, 7 November 2003