With The Matrix Revolutions finally comes the end of the Wachowski brothers' bombastic sci-fi trilogy, following the immensly disappointing Matrix Reloaded in May. Having been let down by the second film, I entered with very low expectations, and yet Revolutions still did not manage to meet them. It begins 'profoundly', with Neo stuck in an otherworldy train station (be sure to brush up on what happened in the last film, or you'll find yourself trying to remember why everything's going on for the first 15 minutes) and soon leaps into the ending of the war between humans and machines, taking place almost exclusively in the real world. Although the visual flair that has always existed in the films remains, the film is ruined by an excrable script with some of the flattest dialouge I've heard in a long time. Not only that, but the characters we know and love take a backseat to excurciating, massively cliched sideplots, the choice ones being a grizzled army general and a plucky young recruit bonding over the war, and two women nearly single-handedly taking down a machine the size of a skyscraper with some homemade missiles. Meanwhile the brooding zealot Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) of the first two films does nothing but sit back and let the faily dull Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) drive them to Zion, and Neo & Trinity are missing for what seems an age during the middle section. Of course, the visual effects are very impressive, but often they seem wasted, especially in the huge war sequence, where humans in large machine-gun toting robots take on a mass of squid machines--entertaining for about a minute or two, then just dull for the next 20 as the same shots are rehashed again and again. The film has a total lack of tension from start to finish, especially during the final fight between Neo and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, once again the only thing worth watching) and ends in the most boringly ambiguous way possible. All in all, a total mess.
*