Movie Comment: The Matrix Revolutions — Spoiler-free.

As any crowd of self-respecting geeks would do, me and my teammates booked our Matrix Revolutions tickets a few days ago. The skinny: I really liked it. It’s visually stunning. The plot moves sluggishly at times but makes many interesting points. Keanu still has the acting skills of a wooden board but that’s ok: he’s just a conduit for the story. The Neo-Trinity dialogs are throwaway romantic crap, but that has been true since the first movie and its infamous “Sleeping Beauty Kiss”. Hardly a show stopper.

Since most people want to see Revolutions after all the questions Reloaded left up in the air, I won’t post any spoilers. Suffice it to say that not all questions are answered, and the explanations aren’t likely to be what you expected. The movie was a lot of fun, though. It kept me on the edge of my seat. Particularly the parts about Zion’s resistance against the machines. Much better than Reloaded, not as good as the first Matrix.

Now, over the course of the next few days you’ll be hearing a lot of crap about this movie spouted by so-called “movie critics”. Bear in mind that this is a group composed mainly of guys who manage to quote Kant before saying “Good Morning”. These are the same people who lambasted Boondock Saints and Equilibrium, two amazingly fun movies. It would seem that having enough cultural baggage to spot the previous explorations of a subject and snobbishly point them out is what makes a person a movie critic these days. They’re like the overly eager nerd who sits in the front row and keeps answering all the questions just to remind the rest of us how smart he is (of course, many of us were that kid at some point or another, but if we’re lucky, we’ve outgrown that).

Movies should be fun. They should be judged based on themselves and the experience they provide. If a movie fails to entertain then it’s crap. Rehashing ideas previously presented by Kurt Vonnegut, Orson Welles or Aldous Huxley is not grounds for dismissal. Neither is using visual styles similar to other director’s. The day reading books and watching movies makes me bitter and sour and keeps me from enjoying other movies will be the day I stop reading or watching movies.

Sometimes a potato is just a potato. Some other times, there is no potato.

— sergio on November 05, 2003