The Matrix Revolutions

Cut Reloaded and glue it together with the best of Revolutions and behold: that would be a film! Yet, after an unbalanced and melted intermediate link, Revolutions is a brisk spectacle that benefits from the chatter of Reloaded (there's no need to think about anything deeply anymore) and the visual mastery that The Matrix is famous for. It’s nice to look at, and the ending is really riveting, as is the message of the whole story. Plus it has a great soundtrack. I love this trilogy because it is not only "one", "two", etc., but is really a conceptual work that, as a whole, creates a huge potential universe that can be further populated. In addition, it allows you to engage your brain and create your own intertextual "matrix" with classics of world philosophy and literature. It may lead to exaggerated constructs, but thank God the "mass" story places such high demands on the viewer at all... (25/01/2004)

The raindrops are still falling, the heroes are still the same, but for us that code has somehow changed. It remains green, but no longer flows smoothly. It stumbles – and instead of a quality storyline, it is teeming with unjustified monologues, unbelievable dialogue, and sadly dysfunctional action scenes. When I think back to the perfection of the first installment, the precisely defined characters, and the unforgettable two hours that can be watched endlessly without losing their magic, it feels unfair that the Lana and Lilly Wachowski have fatally let me down and forever ruined one unforgettable story for me. Morpheus has become just a motivational figure, Niobe herself has no role, regardless of who she rescues, and only the tangible bond between Neo and Trinity gives me a feeling of some vitality. And even the perfect final battle does not repair that tainted impression for me. This program has performed an invalid operation and will be terminated. (13/07/2005)

Revolutions, while retaining most of the ills of the second installment, quite adeptly reduces their intensity. The digital sequences now primarily involve clashes of dirty metal, which is easier to animate and thus doesn't take away from the intensity of the Battle of Zion with mangled CGI. Plus the exoskeletons are really cool. The dialogue here is aware that we're about to close up shop, so it's finally going somewhere. Oh, and the Zion Respect Festival scenes are thankfully pretty strictly limited to war sequences in industrial dock settings. But why five stars? In Revolutions, The Matrix has finally managed to conclude a truly ultimate cyberpunk masterpiece (or rather, esocyberpunk masterpiece) and has stopped dodging the fact that the only options are that reality is nothing or that reality is everything. Codes are reformatted into atoms, minds create matter, all as a result of electrical connections between neural systems. It's all about electricity. The Matrix is actually a bit of an anti-humanist series, telling us how humanity's only goal is to destroy the machines, while the machines' main goal is to adapt to humanity, which makes them undergo more than just one problem, including fatal ones. (09/03/2021)

As I mentioned with The Matrix Reloaded, these two films should be evaluated together because they work best as a pair. Yes, at times it's overly commercial, and on the other hand, it's sometimes overly philosophical without the philosophy saying much of anything. One ends up going in circles without anything substantial to grasp onto. But when it comes to the final scene, where Neo is supposed to reach the mainframe and either win or lose, it always grips my heart and gives me chills. Certainly, it didn't fulfill the promise of the first film, but I can't help feeling that, with some distance, I'm not actually that disappointed with it. (26/01/2014)

Matrix Revolutions has a more tangible and meaningful plot, less pseudo-philosophising and less gratuitous action for effect than in The Matrix Reloaded. I’m satisfied with that. You’ll find yourself yawning through the first hour, but the subsequent “war of the machines” is amazing. If there were more emotion in the final digital fight between Neo and Smith, Revolutions would have been a class better than Reloaded. The film’s ending has an appropriate amount of the pseudo-depth that the whole saga has been faking. Those who thought that there was something big behind everything will be disappointed. Unavoidably disappointed. Three and a half stars. (29/10/2003)