Is film a form of entertainment that shows us the world as if justice prevailed and all suffering had purpose? Or is it a spoonful of sugar to help the bitter red pill of reality go down? Your answer will determine how much satisfaction you get from the conclusion of the Matrix story, so be honest.
The Matrix began as a story about a regular guy who could save the world — Neo just had to choose to do it. That never changed so why were the sequels so dissatisfying?
- The world written around Neo, Morpheus and Trinity got bogged down in politics,
- Zion was a much more interesting place before it actually was a place,
- The lines were groanworthy,
- And, before you know it, the attacking hordes of sentinels are transformed into decorative flocks performing a victory dance for the staus quo over the heads of the last free humans.
By now you’re thinking I didn’t like The Matrix Revolutions too much. Actually, I enjoyed most of it. The effects were really good. Really, really good. They’re so well coordinated with the live action that Neo’s phony CG battle against 100 Agent Smiths in Reloaded looks like a Ray Harryhausen effect from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Still, they don’t save the film. There’s none of the freedom-fighting-rebel-cool from the first movie. The only way to follow the action is to keep the entirety of the Architect’s human/machines/matrix symbiosis mumbo-jumbo in your mind, because everything the Architect says in Reloaded comes to pass in Revolutions. Too bad for me. I chose to view the Architect’s smugness (and the Oracle’s antipathy toward him) as a hint that he was an unreliable narrator. I continued to hope that Revolutions would take up where the original left off, with the promise of bringing the machines to their knees and liberating all humans from the Matrix. Neo’s ability to destroy machines in the “real” world, I thought, indicated that the Matrix was inside another matrix. The end of the journey would prove everyone wrong (especially Morpheus with his silly faith), revealing that the true nature of the world was beyond the control of any of the three warring factions. Instead it ended with a typical conceit of poetic justice that the villain’s existence is directly tied into the hero’s and vice versa. Yes kids, there is good and evil, just like your president says!
The triumph of will over compulsion, of choice over programming, is a great message. The absence of redemption on the part of the villain, however, prevents this series from joining the pantheon of great storytelling it tried so hard to emulate. The Matrix series falls for its own hype and sells survival as a substitute for freedom. In a country built on the backs of literal slaves this trade-off rings hollow.
Its a shame that a simple parable about mental slavery developed a such a Christ-complex. Science fiction’s best best function is to drag us from within the world we are too inextricably invovled to see clearly. Once outside it we must recognize our world in the funhouse mirror reflection before us. The bisected conclusion to 1999’s The Matrix hypnotized us with the mirror’s baroque frame before we could realize the mirror was cracked.
