So This Matrix...It Revolves?

So the whole idea was to make a live action anime, right?

Part 1 had a pretty simple premise, lots of style.

Part 2 had more style, and an interesting twist.

This one still has style, and has taken up the anime cliche of solving all the problems with a lot of pyrotechnics and no explanation whatsoever. You know, it started off cool, with a lovely, slow scene in the train station. This was stuff not unlike Reloaded, pretty and Tron-like in that it tells the story of these sentient programs. OK. Then they all go to a club, shoot it up, and the Merovingian and Persephone have cameo appearances for no reason other than to fix up some plot points. You see Monica Bellucci's beautiful, bounteous bosom for far too short a time. Having played Enter the Matrix, I expected her to play some role in the flick, but it didn't.

Once that's all done with, there's a cool spaceship chase scene through sewers and some giant robot fights. I like giant robot fights, I wish there were more of them in live action films.

And then they go off to make peace with the robots so that they can fight a common enemy, the Agent Smith epidemic. This was the part I was quite anxious to see. How would they resolve this? They resolved it by having another stylish fight, this one looking considerably less cgi cartoony than the so called burly brawl in 2. But although they save the day, the film offers nothing in the way of explanation as to how this happens.

I was disappointed by this. The films so far didn't seem to lack internal logic, they seemed to pretty much make sense. Revolutions, like Hulk, resolved everything with unexplained special effects. Having been intrigued by 2 after being left lukewarm by 1, I felt a little let down seeing 3.

However, I don't want to harp on this point. As with many anime flicks, you really just have to judge this film by weighing the neat stuff against the irritation of not having a dramatically sound plot to enjoy. And the neat stuff in the film is very neat. It's stylish, and this one's big robot battle is very exciting. The film delivers pretty constant action, and it looks neat, so the film is good enough.

It's interesting to see how negative early online opinion is of the film. I think there's some hyperbole gone too far in much of this stuff. Is it the greatest film ever? No. Is it Phantom Menace bad? Far from it. I think there's just a bunch of disappointment in these reviews I'm reading.

I know that lots of people do it, but it's somewhat irritating to me that people use hyperbole so often. It's certainly more entertaining to read, but it's not really fair to the subject being discussed. Films shouldn't be forced to either super awesome or super shitty extremes.

Posted by mattb at November 05, 2003 11:33 PM