(no subject)
Nov. 13th, 2003 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yesterday...
It felt almost like winter already when I drove out in the morning to check on the horse. Cold, sunny, but a bit hazy, distances blurred, landscape faded into bareness and shades of pastels brown. Pale full moon still in the sky.
One (and pretty much the only) thing you can say for the movie is that all the money spent on it certainly shows. They do create a nice visual apocalypse, on a quite biblical scale. Plot-wise, though.... Er. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, because apparently I've forgotten quite a few details since part 2 and am not in the mood to bother checking - so they establish some sort of peace in the end, meaning that Zion will not be destroyed at least for the time being. But the rest of humanity (if you can still call it that) will continue being bred to feed the machines and still be locked into the matrix. Only a prettier Matrix with sunrises and a general visual overhaul, upgrade, whatever. Wasn't the crucial ethical dilemma of the first part the juxtaposition between unpleasant reality and pleasant (or at least tolerable) illusion? When did it all become about saving the Matrix? And, a cynical person might ask, how long exactly will that 'peace' last, once they start trying to free people from the Matrix again?
So we just have to Believe and everything is going to be... well, what, exactly?
(Second thoughts, is it possible that the cynicism is intended? That we're to be aware that the people from Zion are going to have a rude awakening when they realise that they're to live, but the price of their survival is the continued - and presumably in the future not to be challenged by them - enslavement of humanity? Now that's a nice moral dilemma, too.)
Visually it was a good touch that they mostly stayed away from the stylish optics of 'Reloaded', because after the scene at the club (serious :: rolleyes ::, btw) and 'train station' I was thinking enough already. Not again... That most of the rest was gritty, bloody and very physical was a good change from the sanitised, choreographed fight sequences.
It's sadly obvious though, that this is yet another movie where all the thought and energy went into the technical parts and computer animations. I'm usually not a fan of extended fight and action sequences, but here the dialogue scenes were so much worse, almost without exceptions. Delivered without conviction, trite, flat, full of platitudes, either yawn- or cringe-inducing. The cookie-baking and platitudes-spouting oracle? The fetish club owing French bad guy? Trinity's dying scene for god's sake?! I'm not sure if it was so badly acted or just very badly produced, but while some of the battle scenes and especially Neo's and Trinity's flight to the machine city had me sitting there with my mouth hanging open (well, slightly), this was just plain tacky, trying to be a tear-jerker, but failing even at that (and didn't we all already know she had something fatal stuck through the parts of her body the camera kept avoiding?) leaving me entirely untouched emotionally and judging from the giggles all around I wasn't the only one.
And this with me actually having liked her character; her death like that, at that point, if nothing else, made me slightly angry. True, they had the messianic thing going on since the first part, so for the movie to end as it did was to be expected, but the first part of 'Revolutions' was so focused on the female characters - Niobe, Zee and that other woman with her, Trinity - that I actually thought that, just *maybe*, they were going to surprise me and come up with a resolution that wasn't entirely built around a (male, white - what else) saviour. Not a one man show.
But then I also thought they weren't going to kill the lesbian, just this once. Should have given me a clue.
I rather liked the dynamics between Neo and Trinity - they neither follow the usual gender stereotypes, nor exactly reverse them, even if Trinity is often the more straight forward, fierce one to Neo's air of almost-passivity, almost-fragility, but are very much equals and very similar in their emotional openness, vulnerability and protectiveness of each other. The part starting with Neo's and Trinity's departure from the other ship, Neo's fight with Smith-as-Bane, Neo's blindness (and personally I think the rest of movie might have been much more poignant without him wearing a blindfold, which, one suspects, is mostly there to protect viewer sensibilities), their trip to the city of the machines (the flight over the fields - just. oh. my. god.) until Trinity's death - those were IMO some of the best and most intense scenes of the movie.
Another thing that irritates me - what made Neo's messiah tolerable to me is that he's not the typical, single-minded leader figure, but shy, quiet, unsure, almost passive at times - touchingly human. I can't quite make the real Neo fit with the ass-kicking Neo within the Matrix.
I think at some point we were told that Smith was supposed to be Neos dark side or something like that (I rather tended to tune out the oracle) - so to me it seemed pointless from the beginning to thrash this out in a physical fight, the ultimate Matirx fight, so blown out of all proportion that is was almost funny rather than impressive, with them hurtling through the air like a couple of insane gods. It should have been something different from the beginning rather than just the xth power of something we'd already seen before too many times.. (Personally I kept thinking of 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence'. He. :: snark ::)
So the oracle lady (and god!, is that woman ever annoying) thinks they're going to see Neo again. Are we talking resurrection here? Second coming? Or sequel?
Er. The Indian girl is actually called Sati? Who the hell thought that was funny?
To sum up, while 'Reloaded' and 'Revolutions' had some very good visuals, personally I believe they should have left off after the first part, letting it stand as it was somewhere between a literal and metaphorical reading. That's not a story you can resolve in anything approaching a realistic setting.