> Tonight I rode back home from the movie, tired and not paying much attention to things outside the car. After a while I raised my head - to the sight of mile marker 101. 101, the first sign to greet my eyes after the stunning conclusion to an enjoyable trilogy.
>
> Gahalyn

Okay, I also just got back from seeing it. And... uh. We saw different movies.

"Revolutions" is one of the worst movies I've seen in theaters this year. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I hated it. It answered not a SINGLE question from the multitude "Reloaded" brought up, and it managed to raise a ton more. It also did this while being boring, wordy and full of cliches at every turn.

I put a spoiler warning in the subject line, and here goes. I was *laughing* at Trinity's death scene. Here's the death scene of one of the protagonists and I'm laughing at how stupid it is. It's drawn out and wordy, and just overly pretentious. Given that this is the SECOND time she's died, it's lost a ton of impact (especially because, well, Neo died in the first one, and it was basically the same damn scene).

Speaking of death, so... Neo. Dear Wachowskis: thanks for spending three movies building up a character only to maybe kill him at the end. Only we don't actually know if he dies or not. Wow, just great. Hey, at least now I see why you didn't bother to give him any real character development.

Speaking of character development, I'm glad the Wachowskis decided to pretty much halt all of that here. Remember in "Reloaded" when they played up all that tension between Niobe, Morpheus and Locke? Glad to see that it's all basically ignored in this one. Would hate to have any resolution or anything.

Speaking of resolution, I'm REALLY glad this movie resolved nothing. Questions that linger from the second movie:

* Who and what, exactly, is the Merovingian?
* What's the deal with Persephone (the Merovingian's wife)?
* Why did the machines let Bane survive in the slaughter of the human fleet?
* Is the Real World really a Matrix? If not, how exactly is Neo able to control sentinels?
* What is the Oracle working for?
* Is the Architect telling the truth about previous Ones and Zions and stuff?
* What the hell is Smith doing and why?
* Are you guys preaching free will or determinism?

No, instead of answering those, we get a brief scene with the Oracle (3 for 3 now in terms of Oracle scenes that don't really make a lot of sense) where she pretends to explain things. And we get ALL NEW questions!

* Who is that little girl?
* What deal did the Oracle cut with the Merovingian and why?
* What the hell is Gary Busey (or at least a guy who would've been better played by Busey) doing running a train program?
* What the hell is going on at the end?

And I'm ignoring all the "Do they think I'm retarded?" questions like, "Why don't the humans split up and get multiple EMPs?" or, "Why the hell did Locke let the ship back in if he didn't want them to use the EMP?"

There is a total of one action scene in the movie that is original, and that's the extended battle for Zion, but it's way less interesting because it's obvious that the humans are going to lose. Parts of it are pretty rad, but everytime I'd get into it they'd put in a retarded moment. Captain Mifune dies a hero's death and they muck it up by having the Kid make a lame joke about never having passed the training program. Dude, there are like a billion killer robots trying to wipe out humanity here. Maybe you could move your ass a little bit.

The other action scenes in the flick had a massive sense of "been there, done that." The first one, against the people in the Merovingian's club, was completely uninteresting. It was kind of cool from a technical standpoint, but we'd basically seen it before in the first flick (it's the lobby scene versus people who also have Matrix powers). The final fight between Smith and Neo was deliberately referential to the final fight at the end of the first movie, but it has none of the impact of that. We're just watching two insanely powerful people fly around and hit each other, but it doesn't seem to matter. And then Neo just makes Smith explode in almost the same way he did in the first movie. Wow.

"Reloaded" excelled when it scaled the first flick up a lot. The freeway chase is brilliant, and the Burly Brawl with Neo against all the Smiths was a ton of fun to watch even if it didn't have a ton of dramatic impact. "Reloaded" (like the original "Matrix") was slow and talky when there wasn't fighting, but there was enough style and quirkiness (the Keymaker, the Merovingian and his hangers-on, etc.) that I enjoyed many of those moments. Anytime they were just talking in "Revolutions" and I was bored as hell.

I'm not even going to bother with the film's ending.

Afterward, I watched "Kill Bill" again. That is an action movie where even the slow parts are beautiful in their own way, and where the action sequences are breath-taking. I wish the Wachowskis had watched it before writing the conclusion to their trilogy.

Stephen