| It’s all in the eyes.
(Or what I didn’t like about Revolutions)
With out going into detail, neo looses his sight; you will probably have seen the trailers with neo having a bandage around his face. Some of you may know this, most will know it subconsciously: 90% of emotion is in the eyes. With out the eyes its nigh on impossible for humans to accurately express their feeling with any clarity or conviction. So what did the Wichowski brothers decided to do to a man who hasn’t got a whole lot of acting ability anyway? Cripple him, that’s what. There was some powerful emotional acting needed from Reeves at certain points, and thanks to the barmy script and plotting any emotional impact there was, was all thrown out the window. Sadly, this kind of “story stomping” is very common in the 2 matrix sequels.
You may also have heard that the actress playing the oracle from the first 2 films sadly died during filming, so she had to be replaced. Instead of just making a side reference to the “changing nature of the matrix” or something understandable, they devote 2 whole FUCKING PAGES OF DIALOG TO IT. And you can damn well be sure the 2 pages made no sense what so ever. I really hate Andy and Larry for the pain they have inflicted on their supposed “geek” brethren. I have no idea what happened, but I can only assume the studio got to greedy and gave the brothers too much power. They clearly have no concept of the fact sometimes it is better to leave things unsaid.
And the Oscar goes to…
(Or what I did like about Revolutions)
They’ll win an Oscar, of course. The computer graphics and other special effect are absolutely unrivalled. The actions scenes in this film, thankfully mostly devoid of fake philosophical dialog, really shine. After the first 25 to 30 minutes, and the before last 3 or so minutes, it’s actually a pretty good film in my opinion. The hand to hand combat looked more real and the computer generated action (I.E. the attack on Zion) was unrelenting adrenalin pumping fun.
Everything that has a beginning, has an end.
(Bulk, on what the hell went wrong)
Everything that has a beginning has an end, so the tag line for Revolutions goes. Did the brothers have any idea the first film would be so popular? No. Did they ever plan the story of the Matrix to be a trilogy of films? Possibly. Does the story or the theme of the 2 sequels have absolutely nothing to do with the first? Definitely. Therein lies the problem. The first film was about one man and his journey to discover the nature of the world around him, and his place in it. At the end of course, we find out he is essentially God, which is all fine and dandy. Where the hell do you go from there? There was little choice in the matter I’m sure. Warner would have demanded a sequel or two, and they would have been made with or without the brothers. However that doesn’t seem to have been a problem as the pair appear to have dived into this project and written these two films with the assumption that a massive universe and ensemble of characters had already been set up and explained. It hadn’t. Even with the damage control of the Animatrix, there was far to much we just didn’t know before we started out on this “epic” journey. There just wasn’t enough transition from the first film with a relatively small scope to a massive saga about the war between humans and the machines that was only vaguely hinted at in the first movie. Of course, the insane pseudo philosophical ramblings didn’t help anyone. It’s very clear that if the studio does decided to go ahead with a fourth movie, and lets face it, $3 billion profit predicted for the first three, I don’t see how they’ll say no, they better get a better leash on these insane directors before they kill my faith in movies for good.
Edit: Apprently Ben cannot extract opinions from text, so my final verdict is: If you ignore the first 30 mins, remove all the story and the acting, and pretend the last 5 minutes didn’t happen, its a pretty good movie.
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