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.