Taken as a whole, and watched on a single flight back from India.
The Matrix, The Matrix Releaded, The Matrix Revolutions (1999, 2003, 2003)
| Overall |  | Story | |
| Production |  | Acting | |
I’ve watched the first film multiple times, but never caught (due to bad press) the second two. Matrix I was great and self-contained. Matrix II-III (really a single movie) suffers most from an indecision of vision. Is this movie:
- A big-concept SF action-adventure?
- A showing-place for new and spiffy CG fx?
- An examination of the last human refuge, Sion, how an endless war has shaped it, and the final battle between humanity and its mechanized creations?
- A scientific high-fantasy full of strange conceptual creatures and Neo’s Alice-like encounters with same?
- Neo’s continued voyage of self-discovery for the meaning of life?
- The deadly ongoing man-vs-machine duel between Smith and Neo?
- A religous-philosophical tract on the nature of reality, and the dependence of its parts? Or about what is life and what’s the difference between humans and machines?
There’s multiple movies in there; by trying to make them all into one (well, two), the Wachowski Bros. end up with something that’s too diffuse to make much sense, and dilute most of the characters they bring in to fill in the multitude of roles. We get bits of Terminator movies, Alien movies, Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner, Tron, and Star Wars, and end up with something that doesn’t match any of them (even Tron).
Actingwise, the mysteriously wooden actors of the first installment are replaced by clearly wooden actors in the second two (and, yet, actors that manage to change the direction of their woodenness at various and random intervals). The production values, at least, are up to par through the whole thing — but, honestly, they super-duper-matrixy kung-fu melees of the first movie aren’t improved upon later on, only repeated to increasing tedium.
The second two-thirds of the Matrix Trilogy aren’t awful. They just aren’t very good, esp. compared to the promise and freshness of the first. Watch just The Matrix, and save yourself some time.
Bottom line: A great way to kill about half of a flight from India to the US.
Couldn’t agree more. With that said, I liked the movies, but for different reasons. The epic SF struggle between good and evil really was what kept me for the last two movies. We own all three and wouldn’t part with them for the world, but still…
I remember how fresh the soundtrack for the first movie was too and Reloaded and Revolutions both had such mediocre selections for their soundtrack. Listening to them individually, they all seemed ‘good’, but collectively it was the same feel as the movies–that they could be better.
Part of the problem from the get-go was the script may have been canned and re-written. I remember hearing an interview with POD, who wrote one of the songs on the soundtrack, that they heard an initial script that involved a separate ‘force’ with a hand writing on a wall within the matrix world signaling the end of the the matrix. Sound familiar? Apparently it got canned for an idea because that didn’t exist at all in the final film.
I don’t know. The directors really haven’t ‘hit’ anything since. But, man, I were to be known for only one film I would think ‘The Matrix’ is one for the books.
The first film is a classic. I think the second and third suffer at the very least in comparison, but also due to (a) shifting too far from the original in tone and vision, and (b) trying to fit about five different movies into two. “The classic SF struggle between good and evil” is fine, but we got about three or four different struggles in there, whereas a single one would have been sufficient.
The only saving grace to parts 2 and 3 were seeing them on IMAX with Randy.
But yeah, there were moments of 2 that were good, and even fewer moments of 3 that were good. A good editor could get *one* good movie out of them.
Matrix and PotC suffer from the same problem: One fantastic movie that they decide to turn in to two sequals….that completely edit out or dilute the all the stuff that made the first movie so Awesome in the first place.
We won’t even get in to Star Wars or Indiana Jones…
The rumor I heard is that the Wachowski brothers wanted to do a prequel to the Matrix and a sequel. The rumor went on to say that the studio nixed that idea but wanted two sequels.
My impression is that the Wachowski brothers had a lifetime of good ideas to put into the Matrix, then they only had a couple of years to get good ideas for the two sequels. It felt like they had enough good ideas for one movie to me, not for two. As a result, I think they filled the remainder of the second and third movies with a bunch of visually interesting stuff that didn’t have as much substance and didn’t hang together as well. I’d like to see if a good editor could create one good movie with the footage from the second and third movies.
Although they weren’t the directors, just producers (I think), I really liked V for Vendetta. There, they had someone else’s good ideas to rely on, so they didn’t have to come up with all the good stuff themselves.
I agree that V for Vendetta is a far better film than the Matrix Trilogy as a whole, though not without its flaws (review).
My trivia moment. I thought the Oracle’s agent was named “Serif” (as in a type descriptor), as opposed to (as I now see on IMDB) “Seraph.”
Did you get the biblical reference to Zion (rather than Sion)?
But of course, duh. I also figured out that “NEO” is an anagram for “ONE.”
Now what I want to know is why the folks in Sion all dress like space hippies when they go to temple. It was a real taking-out-of-the-moment thing for me.
Sorry, didn’t mean to offend, I should have phrased that differently. Until just this moment, I didn’t know that “Sion” was an alternate transliteration of “Zion”.
I wonder if the rave scene costumes weren’t motivated by the costume designer and production designer having some fun. I think that scene and the love scene that goes with it were too long and kind of out of place by comparison to the rest of the movie.
There were any number of scenes that were too long, I fear. But, yeah, that ranks right up there.
(And, no, no offense taken.)