Matrix Revolutions: A Franchise Crashes and Burns

Last week I went to see Revolutions. I was outside the cinema by chance (Swiss Cottage Odeon), changing buses, and saw that a show was due to start, so I went to see if I could get in for free, vi a little stealth maneuvering. I could, so figured it was meant to be. The movie starts well enough, and the first 15 mins are fun; but then it goes to hell. Revolutions is really a terrible movie, but like Reloaded, it is kind of touching too. There is some great imagery here, and Neo's trip to Hell (Machine world) is quite moving, and obviously apropos. But it is truly a disaster. Nothing makes any sense. The whole profound question which the Architect brought up in the last movie (as to Neo being a program) is totally forgotten, just as if it never happened. Neo is the One and he saves Zion (which is real, not another matrix as we had hoped), and of course he dies doing so, right after Trinity does.

It is almost unbelievable that the moviemakers could be so out of whack with their own vision, their ideas, as to fob us off with this. The second 2 movies have no plot at all, really, save this race against time/war against the machines bit, and these weird interludes that make no sense within the greater "structure" (of which there is none, finally). I can only deduce from all this that the Wachowskis didn't actually write the first movie at all, but stole the idea from somewhere or someone else. Either that, or they "channelled" it, and then fooled themselves that they had come up with it themselves, and that they knew how to develop it into two more movies. I don't think there can be any doubt left that they just didn't. I'd like to say we can commend them for trying, but I don't think they even really tried.

As an explanation for what has happened to the Matrix franchise, however, this is probably too simplistic. Things are always more complex. The fact remains, there are some great things in Revolutions, probably more than there are in Reloaded, at least thematically speaking. Since I think we can all agree that the movie stinks (and if you don't agree, why are you reading this?), then I'm going to focus on the good points, or rather, the unfulfilled potential of the movie.

By far the most beautiful and moving moment in Revolutions, for me, is when a blinded Neo arrives at the machine world, and sees it as pure energy. He sees the lines of the world, the Eagle's emanations, as Castaneda describes them, and as a result, he sees Hell as a world of radiance and beauty. He says to Trinity, "I wish you could see what I see."

This is such a sweeping, profound vision on the Wachowskis' part (as well as Neo's) that it is doubly confounding that the rest of the movie is so shabby and stupid. How could the Wachowskis be capable of such poetry and insight while simultaneously assembling such a dumb-assed behemoth of a movie? We may never know the answer to that one, but I suspect it has something to do with the brothers succumbing to (and being overwhelmed by) both the depth and scope of their own vision (if it is really theirs) and the over-reaching and all-obscuring magnitude of the Hype. Certainly, they lost sight of the need to interweave, as in the first movie, plot, theme, and visuals. Revolutions has visual power, and it has some thematics, but it has next to no story, that is, no characters driving the action onward. Who cares about another super-FX, ultraviolent, mega war movie about the battle between man and machine? We've had Terminator 3 for that. It is boring, boring, boring. At least an hour of Revolutions is so dull that even the amazing visual accomplishment of these scenes (those flying machines) can't relieve the tedium. In fact, it only adds an additional sense of disgust, at the monumental waste of time, money and talent that went into such an empty display.

Neo's trip to Hell is so rich in mythical significance and visual poetry that, alone, it might have formed the basis for a fine movie (just as the Architect scene in Reloaded might have). But dramatically, it is creaky and unconvincing. We never really learn how or why Neo knows that he must go to the machine world, or what he expects to do there. It all just happens. Why does AI even recognize him? There is no ingenuity in the way AI is presented, either, we just get a big male head with a deep satanic voice (they might at least have used the inverted pentangle, the goat's head; what is most missing from the sequels is any sense of the occult, of the mystery and magik which the first movie promised us). Neo's speech to the machine is cursory at best. If Neo promises to stop Agent Smith in return for the machines sparing Zion, this seems like a Pyrrhic victory at best. The matrix will not be destroyed, and humanity is not going to be freed. So it is really a defeat for Zion, a surrender. The movie never suggests an actual alliance between man and machine, which is the only way any peace treaty could ever last.

If you were to write down the plots of Reloaded and Revolutions, step by step, you would quickly see that they don't make any sense and/or are mostly superfluous. The whole Keymaker/Merovingian plot of Reloaded and the battle with the machines of Revolutions are just arbitrary excuses for action sequences. Even the various trips to the Oracle don't actually further the story as such, but at best serve as catalysts for more action, contrived rationale for the characters to run around shooting each other and blowing things up.

(In the first movie, all of this was necessary to free Neo's mind; in these movies, it's no different from Die Hard: action and violence must justify itself, and exists for its own sake. Apparently there really IS a spoon, after all.)

Those scenes which do have the kind of depth and drive of the first movie--the meeting with the Oracle, the Merovingian, and the Architect in Reloaded, Neo's getting lost in limbo and his trip to Hell in Revolutions--aren't tied into each other enough to ever seem integral to the "plot." So they appear finally to be almost superfluous, lost fragments from different, and far more interesting, movies.

The Wachowskis dangle challenging, mystifying questions in front of us, with the implicit promise that all the questions will be answered in the end. But they never are, and so our worst suspicions are confirmed, and the questions are meaningless, just obligatory mystification to embellish the empty spectacle and hoodwink the fans, make us think there is really something deep going on underneath. There really might have been, if the Wachowskis had taken their own ideas seriously enough, and if they had taken the time to find satisfactory answers to these questions. But they didn't.

Maybe Joel Silver and Time-Warner didn't let them. More likely, since JS and co never understood the Matrix idea to begin with (how could they, they are all plugged in up to their bad toupees), they never even realized that the sequels didn't make any sense. After all, legend has it a lot of HW people felt the same way about the first movie, were surprised when it turned out to be a hit, and utterly baffled when kids and academics discovered all the hidden meanings. The sequels are bigger and louder and more expensive, and easily as difficult to understand as the first movie. Ergo, they must be better! But if the first movie was a freak occurrence, a miraculous mutant art work in which all the components came together into a thing of beauty, the sequels are just plain freaks. They are lumbering and retarded beasts of burden, twisted out of shape by a combination of too much external baggage and not enough internal substance or meaning. They are touching, and we want so much to like them. But finally they are just too painful to behold, and best buried, and forgotten.

The most interesting thematic in both sequels must be the resolution, in which Agent Smith defeats Neo, Neo dies, and then, somehow (again the movie makes no effort to clarify this for us), all the replicated Smiths burst open from some inner light (just as Smith did at the end of the first movie) and so, by dying, Neo is triumphant. Why the movie doesn't ever show us the agents turning in Neo, as in the first movie, I can't imagine. But this is surely what we are supposed to think?

In Matrix Warrior I wrote that Neo's job as a virus was to devour and replicate, to turn everyone into himself. I also wrote how he had to become the shadow to defeat the shadow. Tie these two ideas together and the climax of Revolutions is seen to be in perfect accord with this understanding of the mythos. Like Abel, Neo allows himself to be slain by his evil brother; and so, by pas sively absorbing the adversary into himself, he overcomes the enemy. Since evil is the active principal, it must always be the killer (the apparent victor). But since good, by being passive, by not resisting, absorbs all the energy of evil, and since evil burns itself out in its final act of murder--since it is destroyed by the synthesis with good, just as good is transformed by it--then good (Neo) must finally prevail. This is necessary, inevitable.

Since passivity is what makes goodness good, Neo must be "defeated." He wins by not fighting, just as Smith's hatred and rage and aggression cause him to lose, by fighting. His own urge to destroy destroys him. Since Neo is undifferentiated consciousness, by surrendering his own will to power, to individual being, he attains total freedom. Smith on the other hand, clings to a sense of individual self, and the only means for him to continue to grow without losing this sense of self is to create more and more copies of himself. He is trapped in ego, and can never attain freedom save through annihilation. Neo is Id, Smith is ego. For Id to become conscious, it must first turn itself into ego, by which process, ego, becoming Id, is destroyed. "God" (the One) is the only personality that prevails. All the rest is illusion.

Great thematic stuff, but what we get is just one more silly, empty brawl in a great huffing, puffing HW blockbuster. Alas. This is underlined by the sloppy little codex, the meeting of Oracle and Architect, in which we see that the matrix still exists, and if it has been transformed, beyond sunrises being a little prettier, then we never learn how. The Oracle asks if those who wish to leave will be allowed to, and the Architect assures her they will. But this is meaningless. Who among 7 billon would ever wish to leave? The power of the matrix is that hardly anyone born into it ever realizes the option of leaving. And anyway, the matrix has never been able to stop warriors (those with enough will and imagination to realize the truth) from leaving. So what has changed? Nada. Morpheus told Neo in the first movie, unequivocally, "Until the matrix is destroyed, humanity will never be free."