November 6-12, 2003
movies
Spun Out
 In with the neo: Keanu Reeves re-enters The Matrix.  |
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Once more around The Matrix.
"Why, Mr. Anderson?" asks Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), for what seems the umpteenth time. "Why get up?" Why, indeed? Battered and penetrated and tossed about, Neo (Keanu Reeves) always gets up. His tenacity, so coolly trench-coated, surely frustrates the self-multiplying program Smith. In The Matrix Revolutions, which the Wachowski brothers promise is the last movie (if not the last video game or extra-filled DVD), you’re reminded just why he does get up, time after time. He does it, says the messiah, because he chooses to.
Ah yes. Choice -- whether a function of illusion, faith or actual free will -- is the philosophical MacGuffin that runs through the franchise. You choose to purchase the continuing spew of merchandise, just as you choose to appreciate Revolutions' effects in lieu of character development or novelty. And you choose to recall, no doubt, that the previous half-film, Reloaded, left loose ends that the current film is supposed to tie up.
That irresolution took a particular form: Neo's human body on a gurney, his other self shot out into a limbo space somewhere between the slickster haven Matrix and the sweaty-body-filled Zion. This installment begins by visualizing that limbo as a white-on-white subway station, the "Mobil Ave." stop. The way out involves a train, run by the Trainman (sprightly and bad-toothed Bruce Spence, looking much as he did in the Road Warrior films, and as good a reason as any to sit through Revolutions, even if he's only onscreen for about five minutes).
All this is to say that Revolutions is clunky and convoluted like Reloaded, rather than efficient and weirdly graceful like the original. The uncleverly circular plot -- reportedly informed by the Enter the Matrix video game -- takes Neo, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) through the same motions as before. They visit the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) at his writhing-punks-in-Hel Club, providing one more glimpse of Persephone (Monica Bellucci) and her stunning breasts; Zion's Council (again featuring Anthony Zerbe, Cornel West and Harry Lennix's clench-jawed Commander Lock); and, with the help of Seraph (Collin Chou), the Oracle's kitchen (where she's baking cookies as well as smoking a few more cigarettes). Only now the Oracle is transformed from Gloria Foster, who died during production, to Mary Alice, whose gracious performance is most welcome, especially alongside her co-stars' general woodenness.
Their dispassion might seem apt, given Revolutions' incessant repetition of ideas and dialogue: "I see you're filled with doubt," she observes of Morpheus, "clouded with uncertainty," just before she tells him that he needs to make up his own damn mind; that is, he needs to make a choice. The question, as always, is whether that choice is his, or whether all he thinks or does is the effect of a greater system.
While Morpheus' earnestness invites jokes (the Merovingian remains the most entertaining program, delighting in his adversary's impulse to "get straight to business"), he's almost balanced by sinewy Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), who finally shows up some 45 minutes into the action. Angry and skeptical, she trusts in her own skills above all, and, as everyone tells her, she's a "hell of a pilot." She steers her ship back to Zion through the impossible-to-navigate "mechanical line" just in time to restart yet another battle of the titan machines. (The film includes frequent video-gamey battles, all loud and fiery, mostly boring.) "Come on, keep up!" she yells at Morpheus. "I'm trying," he wails.
Her Skywalker-y performance only underlines how much Revolutions borrows from previous like-minded sagas, where the right choice is the only choice and vice versa. The fact that she is Pinkett Smith and not feather-haired Mark Hamill rehearses the Matrix industry's most progressive sociopolitical agenda, namely, Zion's primary cast are actors of color, save for Trinity and sometimes Neo, when viewers forget Reeves' mixed race. The third film grants sober Captain Mifune (Nathaniel Lees), buzzcut Charra (Rachel Blackman) and relentless Zee (Nona Gaye) some brief superhuman moments during the assault on Zion, then gives next-generation status to "The Kid" (Clayton Watson), as white-boyish as can be.
Surely, the Matrix series has worked hard to rethink racism and race relations, within and without the framework of slavery. Here, the most remarkable moment comes when Smith visits the Oracle, accompanied by several of his multiple other/same selves. He runs on about what she knows and doesn't know, whether his violence is preordained or his own choice, while she smokes, quietly. "You are a bastard," she says. Comes the retort: "You would know, Mom." It's the nastiest, most unresolved bit of dialogue in the film. And that's it. From there, he's off to fight with his "opposite," Neo, and she's left to think up more ways to upset the "balance" that her "opposite," the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis), endeavors to maintain. Whether this is a choice is hard to say.
The Matrix Revolutions
Written and directed by Andrew and Larry Wachowski A Warner Bros. release Now playing at area theaters
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