What Is The Matrix Revolutions? Revisiting the Wachowskis’ trilogy-topper
Review Overview
Action
8Sci-fi
6Philosophy
7Mark Harrison | On 20, Dec 2021
Director: Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Jada Pinkett Smith
Certificate: 15
“Everything that has a beginning has an end.” The Matrix sequels weigh the trilogy more towards the spiritual and emotional than the philosophical. With their jumbled storytelling, neither holds a candle to the impeccably structured original, but The Matrix Revolutions is at least more thematically sound as a finale than Reloaded is as a middle chapter.
Although the second movie’s hints that the resistance might be another level of the simulation stay as subtext, Revolutions finds both Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Smith (Hugo Weaving) growing in power in the real world – the former through greater understanding and enlightenment, and the latter by continuing to overwrite people and programs like a virus.
As Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and The One journey to the Machine City, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) gather the remaining forces to try and mount a last-ditch defence of Zion, as the Sentinels breach its walls. Meanwhile, inside the Matrix, the stage is set for a final confrontation between Neo and Smith.
The first half-hour of the threequel is mostly dedicated to the hangover from Reloaded’s fumbled revelations, with a laborious diversion to visit the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and Persephone (Monica Bellucci) again, like a less-fun Jabba’s palace. A subsequent conversation between Neo and the Oracle (Mary Alice, replacing Gloria Foster who died after filming Reloaded) is the nadir of the series’ writing, consisting of five minutes of Reeves asking “what”, only to be told “you know what”, or “why” and being told “you know why”, and so on and so forth.
Baggy as this section is, it serves as a lay-up for a film that’s less interested in its heroes fighting than it is in what they’re fighting for. More effectively than the last film, it torpedoes the cult of The One, and also counters it with Smith, an individual who’s taking that same sense of exceptionalism to world-ending extremes to balance out Neo. When the stretch goal was Neo taking down the machines and the Matrix with it, our heroes go back to the drawing board to find peace by other methods.
That leaves the middle section free to focus more on the efforts of the collective, be it Morpheus and Niobe blazing back to Zion with Sentinels on their tails or the amassed volunteers and military of the human stronghold defending it from the robot nasties. For a film that finally lands on the side of war being futile and cyclical, it sure eats its cake too with those all-out battle scenes.
As a result of the more holistic approach, some of the central characters do wind up being slightly underserved, but they all get their send-offs. While everyone else is a bit more low key, Weaving amps up his performance to fill the movie with his over-powered pomp and cements Smith’s status as an iconic movie villain in the process.
Meanwhile, the anime and manga influences on the trilogy have never been more obvious than they are in the film’s big set piece: an epic brawl between Neo and Smith through the rainy streets and skies of the Matrix. Prefiguring a lot of the superhero movie battles we started seeing in the years after, the battle royale brings these influences to live-action blockbusters.
It’s also backed by composer Don Davis’ immense Neodämmerung. With its apocalyptic fanfare and Sanskrit chanting, this aggressive track adds to a suitably bombastic end – even though the ultimate scrap finishes with the same kind of subversion that characterises both sequels. Often decried as anti-climactic, the finale swerves the “good vs evil” clarity of other fantasy and sci-fi trilogies to suggest such binary thinking makes humans no better than machines, whether it’s about good or bad, Neo or Smith, or red pill or blue pill.
Aside from that unfortunate preamble, The Matrix Revolutions is adamantly climactic, reaping all of the portended death and destruction in a cycle-smashing sci-fi odyssey. It’s grandiose, poignant and unabashedly written to theme.
It’s designed as the last word but does throw up other intriguing possibilities that will probably be explored in Lana Wachowski’s legacyquel, Resurrections. This trilogy-topper may be messy, but this much-maligned sequel holds up pretty well as a finale.