No more must we Fight The Future. We have Finally Freed Our Minds. We can rest blissfully content in our knowledge that Everything That Has A Beginning Has An End.
Those sci-fi carpetbaggers have finally been run out of town, holding their hats and trailing broken pieces of plot and wind-up surfer boy (and guns. Lots of guns) as they run for the river ahead of the posse that deserves to string them up. And good riddance.
The third Matrix movie — and we’ve been promised there will be no more — is over. Of the countless ways it could have answered the growing murmurs over its scattered plot, it chose none of the above, instead throwing out every one of the issues suggested up to this point (along with, sadly, the martial arts choreography that made the second one worth seeing) and blossoming into a sci-fi shoot-em-up thriller with a touching, tragic death scene and some kissing. Not in that order.
It goes to show–I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. The thought that the Matrix Reloaded sketched the outlines of a couple of interesting questions beyond the sophomoric ‘philosophy’ fingerpainted by the first–questions that could, just barely, justify 390 minutes of time–was hopeful thinking. Everything interesting in the second movie was an accidental side effect, necessary only to allow some other scene with more guns.
I’m glad, really. After a lesson like that, I won’t need to learn it again for a while: They don’t make movies for people like us. We read.
