…but they are being shown at the cinema.

We just got back from watching Matrix: Revolutions and, well, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Going in, most of the reviews I’d read were pretty damning. They varied from ‘Can’t live up to the original‘, to ‘Marginally better than the second one‘ to ‘Worst of the three’. Anyway, I went in prepared for the worst and was, kind of, pleasantly surprised.

First of all – it’s not that bad. There’s a few corny scenes, but not too much.

There’s still the philosophy, although much less of it than in the first two. This time, the philosophy has a lot to do with semiotics, so more in common with the first than the second in this way. The second film focused on the free choice vs predestination/inevitability theme, but Revolutions doesn’t really touch on this area of philosphy very much, only paying it cursory attention. In fact, now that I think about it, apart from a few isolated conversations, there’s almost no philosophy in this new film at all.

Likewise, there’s much less action this time around, and when it’s there, it pays homage to the first Matrix. In fact, there’s a lot about this film that draws on and returns to the first. They’ve certainly made a real point about returning to the start, coming full circle, all that jazz – and when I say point, I mean that they take a whopping great pointed stake and stab you in the head with it, it’s that obvious.

The religious imagery plays out quite nicely in this one – well, the religious imagery fits, particularly considering the way it has been set up in the previous two. I’ll write more on this when more people have seen the film as I don’t want to give anything away.

This, I think, brings up the point of what I really liked about this film and it’s place in the trilogy – it’s neat. I like neat. I like it when everything falls into place. I surprised myself by not caring that there wasn’t much cool action, or interesting philosophy, or even a good script, I didn’t even care about some of the loose-ish threads or things left unexplained – I liked that it finished in a neat package. I think this is what really made it better than Reloaded for me – after Reloaded I was a bit unsatisfied because so much was left hanging and nothing was explained, whereas I didn’t feel that this time.

That said, it still wasn’t that great overall, but maybe that’s because it was so hard to live up to the first Matrix. It’s funny, I was saying to Tegan that after watching the sequels I wish that the first film had been just left as it was and that was it. But if they’d done that, I’d be eternally frustrated that I never found out what happened. So it’s a kind of Catch 22. Although, it’s not, since it could have been avoided by making better sequels.

Overall, let’s just say that it’s a far inferior trilogy to the original Star Wars trilogy, but Revolutions is a lot, lot better than Attack of the Clones.

And the best thing: it didn’t end with Neo waking up and finding out that it was all a dream.