The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: After The Matrix Reloaded (2003), I wondered if I even needed to see another Matrix movie, but sometimes you’re a college freshman and people are going to the theater, and it’s not like you have anything better to do.

Did I Like It: And at that time, I kind of liked, or at least I liked it better than I did the second film. It had a rousing finale. The duality between Neo (Reeves) and Agent Smith (Weaving) fills a few intriguing minutes. The realization that the only way the war between the human resistance and the machines will end is by them being forced to work together is worth chewing on for a few moments. I’ve seen far worse trilogy cappers, based on that list.

It’s almost enough to ignore the fact that I don’t think anyone can adequately explain just what happened at the end of the movie. Did Neo die? Did he become a machine? Did he become Smith? Does the end even matter? I suppose I can live with ambiguity in my movie*, or at any rate I’ll have to accept it because that’s all that we have on the menu. But did we have to put up with extended mech battles that seem like they were taken from a rejected version of Alien 3 (1992)? Or, more importantly, a scene that runs through what feels like its own feature length runtime and takes place entirely in a hermetically sealed subway station?

Maybe I don’t like the film at all, as it turns out? Should I even watch the fourth film?

I probably will… Probably. 

*Does the fourth movie resolve any of that? Still remains to be seen here on these reviews, but if I know my Wachowskis (or even half of them), I’m betting the answer is no.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. After The Matrix (1999) I was pretty excited about it. When I heard the Wachowskis were producing their sequels back-to-back, a la the same process used for Back to the Future - Part II (1989) and Back to the Future - Part III (1990), I got even more excited. It felt like they were doing things right.

Did I Like It: And that excitement sort of evaporated. Instantly. The balance between mythologyesque/adventurey and the more religiousy/allegoryish elements of the original film moved all the way to the religiousy end of the spectrum. That may not be the right criticism for this movie in particular, but the Matrix sequels as a whole certainly landed there. This one seems more like a relentless chase sequence that expands on the original film’s main feature… And that is making a bunch of story promises that the additional movies can’t or wont’ payoff.

Sure, the freeway segment probably doesn’t get enough credit for being a pretty spectacular action sequence, but the extended rave sequence in the city of Zion is such a protracted exercise in self-indulgence that I honestly wonder if Kevin Smith didn’t direct it. It exists merely to be cool and has so little to do with the scraps of a story filling the remaining two and a half hours, that I’m sort of surprised that J.J. Abrams didn’t take over the production at some point.

I suppose that’s probably enough snark to spread around for one movie, but ultimately this feels like a list of cool things (raves, flying sequences, techno vampires) desperately searching for a story. They didn’t have a story to continue, but they jammed just enough philosophy and pyrotechnics into a package to convince some people.

The Matrix (1999)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: I mean, how would somebody get through the 2000s, own a DVD player the entire damn time, and not see this movie? I’m legitimately curious.

Did I Like It: As is usually the case, it’s difficult to write about a movie that changed the face of cinema ever since, and sometimes in good ways. One could write about how the mythology in the film influenced genre filmmaking, but then you’d also have to note how the series never quite capitalized on its singularly Campbellian display of the monomyth here, but that almost seems like a better discussion to have during the reviews of those movies, especially the persistently discouraging sequels*.

I could talk about how the narrative has changed slightly in the twenty-plus years since its initial release. It’s become something of a parable for the trans/non-binary experience, especially after the Wachowskis transitioned. But they deny that such a parable was at least consciously the case, and there are any number of other writers who could pontificate on that point far more eloquently than I could. 

I might go back to the critique I had of the movie back in the day, that Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) might have had a point. The real world of the story is so drab and awful and filled with frequent death, and the Matrix seems… okay enough? Who wouldn’t want to go back into The Matrix? Between the gender parable and just growing up a little bit, that criticism rings hollow.

So, where am I left in this review? It’s a very fine film and if you have, indeed, somehow made it to this point in life without seeing the film, you certainly should. The thing that I was struck by in this viewing was that I had always taken the film as a piece filmed in Chicago, with all of the character of that town. The Wachowskis come from there. And yet, the film wasn’t shot there at all, and instead is a product of Australia, utilizing studio facilities whose biggest contributions to the form up until that point was Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie (1995). I thought I had gotten so sophisticated in my viewing that I could always pick out when a film was shot in a real city or not. This film continues to surprise me. That’s more than a little something.

*At press time, I haven’t yet watched The Matrix Resurrections (2021), but I do get the impression that it isn’t exactly going to bring the whole together all of a sudden.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Director: Joe Johnston

Cast: Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell

Have I Seen it Before: With Johnston directing and his pedigree from the The Rocketeer (1991), this might have been the Marvel movie I was anticipating the most.

Did I Like It: For a long time, it remained one of the more mundane pictures. It didn’t live up to the jaunty humor of the Iron Man movies, nor did it have the breakneck pacing of the aforementioned Rocketeer, but upon this rewatch I’m realizing those comparisons are unfair. Cap isn’t supposed to have the same milieu as Iron Man. It’s why when they meet in Avengers movies of various sizes and shapes, their chemistry pops. Comparisons to previous Johnston pictures also doesn’t work, as this first outing with Steve Rogers (Evans) is more of a straight war picture, while Rocketeer is a pulp adventure that happens to involve nazis.

Also—not for nothing—I originally saw the The Rocketeer when I was seven, and the movies we see during our first decade may eschew any attempt at even honest comparative criticism.

This particular movie is kind of like the casting of Evans in the title role. On first blush, he’s sort of bland and too earnest for his own good, but there’s something impressive in that as well. If he can be entertaining without the jokes that a Downey, Pratt, Hemsworth, or others might bring to the proceedings, then that takes a lot more restraint than I might have originally granted him.

The rest of the casting works out pretty well for this movie. Tommy Lee Jones may be so perfectly cast that I’m not entirely sure he’s even acting anymore. This is a far cry from his turn in Batman Forever (1995), when he made a very competitive play for most miscast performance in a superhero movie. Dominic Cooper’s attempts to play a young Howard Stark effectively echoes 

And still, there are things that work far less than they did in the early days of its existence. There are far too many shots artlessly designed to take a advantage of 3D projection. As I write that sentence, I can’t honestly remember the last time I went to go see a film in 3D. I’m only vaguely certain that they still release films in this fashion, but they certainly stopped having Cap fling his shield straight into the camera. For that matter, the scenes before Steve Rogers great becoming just look like Chris Evans’ head photoshopped onto a shrimpy dude’s body. The teaser trailer for The Avengers (2012) is a weirdly dated poor substitute for the fun that Marvel is known for bringing in its tag scenes.

So, while parts of the film remain planted in the year in which it is made, I’m a convert with this film. It’s one of the greats, especially because it doesn’t feel the need to be the movie I think I want it to be.