And the award for....

November 6, 2003 | 0 Comments

the most disappointing movie of the year goes to *drum rolls*.......The Matrix Revolutions. Feh. Just when I thought the entire trilogy couldn't be any worse, this film managed to exceed my expectation in the crappiness scale. It's on par in terms of bad storytelling with The Matrix Reloaded. The difference is, at least Reloaded was the second entry in the series. If things weren't explained then, I still have hope that they'll be explained in the final movie. *spoilers follow*

But guess what? They still aren't. For example, what is the Oracle? Is it an equilibrium program that ensure neither the Matrix nor the human ever gains an upper hand? In that case, I don't see her being that successful. At the end of the day the humans are still on the mercy of the Matrix/the robots. The humans (well some of those who are still alive) didn't end up being a shish kebab simply because the Matrix made a promise to Neo that they'll stop attacking Zion if Neo can beat Smith. I'm not even going to make a comment as to how contrived this whole 'let's bandied together to beat our common enemy' solution. Oh wait, I just did. Too bad. :P

And that's where we come to Smith. What the hell is he? He started out as an agent of the matrix but here, the Matrix actually is overwhelmed by him that they require Neo to fight him. But why? Why Neo? And for that matter, what did Neo do in the first film that turned Smith into this 'self-mutating virus' for the lack of a better description of what he is? And how on Earth does Smith manage to take over a real human being in a real world? And how does Neo manage to destroy those sentients robot just by concentrating his thought on it? And please don't give me that crappy answer of "because he's the one". Because that just won't cut it for me.

And why does the film needs to go off-track by featuring characters like 'The Frenchman', 'The keymaker', 'Persephone', 'The Twin brothers', etc? These characters seem so....tacked on to me. They serve no purpose but to make Neo's life in trying to save Zion more difficult. But hey, why focus on the questions that needed to be answered if we can see more faux martial arts/anime-esque fights as well as some Star Wars-esque war scenes right? *sigh*. BTW, don't expect some good plot about simulation world inside simulation world. You'll have much better luck finding out about this particular plot from films such as The Thirteenth Floor.

I'm angry because I like the first film. It had so much potential and none of it ever materialised. It never answered questions that it presented, it never even gave a hint as to what may be the possible answer. Even hard to understand anime show like Neon Genesis Evangelion at least provide a template where you can guess as to why certain things happened. Here, I can't. Because there are way too many probability as to what the answers are.

And the ending was just suckatastic! So Neo died a hero dead of being pumped with enough virus by the Matrix as Agent Smith 'assimilated him'. This action infects Agent Smith with the viruses created by the Matrix, thereby destroying him (for good I hope). The Matrix keeps their word to Neo and stop the attack on Zion. Peace is achieved. But then what? The Matrix is still in full power, the humans....well, the last time I saw them they were almost demolished by the sentient robots had the Matrix didn't follow through with their promise of not attacking Zion. The Matrix promised that they'll released the rest of the humans that are imprisoned inside their cocoon (don't know why they bother since I didn't hear Neo implicitly stating that's what he's asking. He just said 'I want Peace'. Wow, the Matrix really is the bigger 'man' here). Nothing is resolved.

My final question will be: did these humans ever consider Asimov's three laws of robotic when building the robots as well as the Matrix? Because if they did, surely they'd have noticed some of these very fine points:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's then realised that there's a loophole on these laws when it comes to protecting humanity. Therefore, to close off this loophole, he added the "Zeroth law" which was:

Zeroth law: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

When I watch The Animatrix (which has the origin stories of The Matrix's existence), I get the sense that these humans certainly didn't follow the Asimov law when building the robots. As a result, the robots in The Matrix are capable of hurting humanity. So is this bad writing on the Wachowski brother's part or part of the plot?

Design-wise, the film looks nice. Although I'm really tired of those jumping up and down fight scenes (in fact, there's this one fight scene that reminds me of the fight scene in the first film when Neo and Trinity tried to save Morpheus). Some of the fight scenes look like it was ripped off some Anime film, except without the interesting plot or character development to back it up. In a lot of ways the final Neo vs Smith final fight reminds me of John Murdoch vs Mr. Hand fight scene in Dark City. Only y'know, with more expensive CGI effects.

© memento 2003