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The Matrix 4: Revolutions | Part #2

Posted by Psychopath - January 10th, 2015


This end fight scene is kinda bland to be fully honest, I remember noting that the fight scenes in Reloaded were so good that I wish that Dragon Ball Z fights were like them, and to be fair this fight starts off engagingly enough with a ground brawl, but then the movie takes up actually mimicking Dragon Ball Z-esque fight scenes by having Neo and Smith fight midair and fly at each other coupled with invisible explosions that occur whenever Smith and Neo collide and to be fully honest, I feel like I'm watching someone's playthrough of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and no, that's not a good thing; Budokai Tenkaichi 3 is boring enough to play, far more boring to watch and with the absence of the novelty that I'm seeing Dragon Ball Z characters fight, this is lamer than lame. Though, to be fair, there is a good exchange of dialog near the end that I really like where Smith begs the question "Why Mr. Anderson? Why, why, why? Why do you do it? Why? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?" with Neo's response "Because I choose to." being probably the closest this tetralogy ever comes to being truly inspired and deep. Although I must say, considering how Smith is constantly under control of the Matrix itself and Neo is using Smith's termination as a bargaining chip for a peace treaty coupled with this speech, Neo's trials sound more like a complex machine constructed test of valor and merit to prove that humans are worth a shit rather than a war effort and you know what, I would've found that ending to be acceptable and justified; it would have tied up most of the plotholes like the major inconsistencies of Smith's loyalty and how he seems to play any side of the field he feels like at the time by explaining that he was really just guiding Neo down a specific path of enlightenment, it would have sufficed a much better explanation as to why they keep repeating the same war over and over, it would have justified using the Matrix to inject people into an artificial world instead of just sedating them to keep them unconscious all the time and it would have justified keeping the Matrix operational at all when they really don't need to when they can just resort to other methods of generating electricity despite the fact that they're fully prepared to do so. But no, that ending, albeit it would've probably felt contrived and forced, would have been remotely intelligent. Sure, it wouldn't explain how or why Neo was able to enter the Matrix without being jacked in first, it wouldn't have explained how he was able to down a small army of sentinels just by thinking it and it wouldn't have explained why he can see shit without eyes, but it would have been something.

But no, my suspicions were wrong; Neo gets killed and because my apparent brainfart wasn't right, Smith is terminated and the fact that it happens doesn't make any sense. I know that people are going to tell me that assimilating Neo returned Smith to the source and thereby gave the administrator the ability to delete his ass, which is Matrix Wiki's explanation for it by the way, and that's the reason why it worked. But then, what about other people who are directly connected to the Matrix? What about all the programs he assimilated? Surely down the line they had to have detected Smith's activity somewhere, he practically is the Matrix by this point. How do you miss that? He's fucking everywhere and all those people who's consciousness' he overwrote were connected to the machine mainframe just like Neo was. Furthermore, even if you couldn't detect and delete him but simultaneously somehow knew that he was even overstepping his boundaries to begin with, couldn't you just wipe all the information off of the server that Smith is located on and reinstall the Matrix? That's the method people who aren't computer savy use to deal with viruses when their anti-virus software fails; using an operating system installer disc to kill a virus is a very basic method and it's common knowledge. As for deleting the Matrix, I wouldn't doubt that these guys have a backup full of all the files they need to reinstall it, I mean, they are supposed to be smarter than humans, so why not? Again, I call bullshit.

To further reiterate why that explanation is total horse shit, allow me to bring up something I didn't mention in my review of Reloaded; the fact that Neo is the very same operating system installer disc code that I just ranted about and that's part of the reason why Neo is supposed to return to the source where the reset would therefore be followed by Neo selecting 23 people to rebuild Zion. Now that I've brought it up, you'd think that such a detail would defeat many points I've made in these reviews. It doesn't. Here's the thing, how is it that Neo not only has the source code needed for the process, but rather that he is the Prime Program? How does that work? I know that Neo is special, but why is his existence necessitated? It's explained that his only purpose to exist is to guide everyone else down the wrong path by means of impressing them so much that they follow him as a deity by means of allowing him to manipulate the Matrix, followed by him returning to the source to have the Prime Program extracted from him which will then be followed by him rebuilding the ruins of Zion with 23 other people. Okay, the first detail makes sense, but the latter doesn't for two reasons; again, why does Neo have, or rather is the Prime Program needed to reset the Matrix? Wouldn't it be more, you know, practical to have it on a back up drive of some kind? I mean, what if Neo had a sudden nervous breakdown from the pressure of being viewed as a deistic God and killed himself? You can't control his brain chemistry outside of the Matrix, so yes that could happen and yes, you'd be indeedly screwed. Additionally, what would you do if Neo didn't decide to fight Smith and just went around Zero-One all day remotely destroying every machine he happened upon with his unexplained powers that you apparently granted him? What if he decided to just destroy the machine mainframe and the Source along with it? Hell, he's done it before and you've demonstrated that you can't control it when he did it to an entire army of sentinels that attempted at downing the Logos on his way to the epicenter of Zero-One. Otherwise, why did you allow him to destroy so many sentinels? Why did you deploy any sentinels at all? If you could control his abilities, there'd be no point in trying to destroy him by means of hitting him with everything you've got once he entered Zero-One, so why oppose him at all? Why can't you just strip him of his abilities wirelessly? Why does he have such an ability at all? Hell, if he's supposed to go to Zero-One and beat up on Smith, why attack him? It's been made clearly apparent that the Oracle, while she has her own agenda, is working with you and this course of action is preordained by you and that you knew he was gonna be here because the Oracle told him to go to Zero-One. Yeah, there just so happens to be lots of these little details, and they all contradict each other to some degree.

Oh, another thing that ruins that dialog scene is where Smith gets punched in the face in a hilarious and anti-dramatic slow motion sequence and then yells and screams "This is my world! My world!" like a little kid throwing a temper tantrum. Any kind of respect I had for Smith as being menacing has spiraled down the fucking toilet.

The movie ends with everything returning to normal and you know what doesn't make sense to me that's never touched upon? What about all the humans who's minds Smith overwrote? I mean, I understand that the assimilation of the programs could be reversed, at least in theory that is, but with regular people... that's pretty much a permanent thing you know? It can't be reversed, only overwritten again by another program, but I don't see a bunch of Smith's or other copies of the same program running around, so does that mean they rewrote everyone's brain chemistry to restart from scratch or what? Did they die? Did we just kill a whole bunch of people by deleting Smith? Oh God, Neo's a murderer! He just committed mass genocide and we're supposed to be happy about it! This is fucking twisted. I hate Neo! I wish that he would die-- oh, wait. Nevermind. Too late. Oh yeah and the machines actually bother giving him a funeral. I wish I were joking.

So the machines leave Zion as per their agreement with Neo, the Architect and the Oracle debate on how long this treaty will last for and the Architect gives the Oracle his word that he'll release the people who want out of the Matrix, see I told you this was all just a bet, and apparently the Matrix has been reset, even though despite the fact that according to Matrix Wiki, the Matrix isn't supposed to reset until one hundred years after 1999. The end.

How does this movie hold up? Not as well as Reloaded in terms of action and mythology, but better than Animatrix and the first Matrix movie. How does the tetralogy hold up? Well these uh... these are not good movies. To put it simply, try and picture yourself stumbling upon a copy of the Christian Bible, you come to understand that this religion has a massive following and you decide to give the book a read, then you come to realize all the reasons why the Bible makes no fucking sense and you're disillusioned to all the bullshit everybody else eats up and you become an atheist and although you might want to believe in God, you simply can't because you're too smart for it. As you can tell, I was able to pick all four of them apart with ease and with something that's apparently so good that it warrants four movies, I shouldn't be able to do that. If I had to compare it to something, well, it's slightly better than the Highlander pentalogy, it would be better than the Highlander pentalogy by leaps and bounds but Animatrix bogs it down so hard that it actually gives Highlander 2: The Quickening leverage over it. It's not even like Animatrix as a whole bogs it down, it's just "The Second Renaissance" that does it, the other ones range from being relatively decent to being a little bit less than mediocre. I'd say it's slightly better than the Star Wars prequel trilogy, but not the latter half of the Star Wars hexalogy. Overall the Matrix tetralogy is mediocre at best and mind blowingly stupid at worst. I find it hard to believe why people liked the first movie to begin with, but I suppose that I could guess at the idea that they overlooked the plotholes of the first because of the prospect of the sequels filling in the blanks, but when they didn't, people hated the sequels and never put the blame on the first movie. Meh.


Comments

I wasted a few days reading articles from the matrix wiki one time until I finally understood the whole mythology. But you can't expect that much quality from the mind of someone/something like lana/larry wachowski.