I think the title says it all.
Middle Guy, TG and I saw it.
People laughed – at parts that weren’t supposed to be funny.
Lawrence Fishburne, who I respect beyond all belief, had that anxious Michael Caine “I’m just here getting a paycheck” look in his eyes for the whole film.
Believe me, any movie you imagined this to be is much, much better than this.
It’s almost as bad as ‘Signs.’
Oh, you didn’t like Signs either? I thought I was the only one. I thought it was extremely boring.
I did love the first Matrix though.
No, Michael, you are not alone. Signs was most definitely awful, and a lot of people believe so.
I’m not sure I’m going to see Revolutions. I saw Reloaded only a week ago and just couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. Now I know they simply weren’t thinking. Damn you, Wachowski Siblings.
linden –
Let me call in an intevention here; if you’re (or anyone else reading here is) thinking of seeing ‘Revolutions’, DON’T.
I walked out thinking less of myself for having liked the first movie so much.
A.L.
Thanks for the warning AL. I was planning on seeing it this weekend, but now I will avoid it, and cherish memories of the first Matrix instead.
As for Signs, I must admit that while watching it, I was rather disgusted. The whole idea of some farmer out in the middle of nowhere, without any kind of firearm, is rather silly. Even if he was former priest. But the worst part is where they decide to stay at their house and “fight it out”, without any guns or any kind of weapon. I mean, there must have been a gun store somewhere nearby. Given the circumstances, I would think that any owner would be willing to bend the rules a little about wait times. So that was simply ludicrous. And aliens who can travel light years, cloak ships, and leave crop circles without explanation would likely have a phaser or two up their sleaves. So yeah, I hated it.
Thanks, AL. Now I’m convinced I have to see it. Probably once it comes out on dvd.
Loved Matrix. Reloaded was a disappointment. I will still go to see Revolutions. What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment.
As far as Signs is concerned, I haven’t liked anything M. Night Shyamalan has put out.
Everyone thinks I am crazy for not liking The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. While I will admit that all of them have alluring concepts, the director’s style is too slow for my tastes. He seems to try and set an eerie, tense tone throughout all of those movies, but only manages to put me to sleep.
Back off! Stevie Wonder is a musical genius! I got all them albums! I got ‘Music on My Mind,’ I got ‘Talking Book,’ I got–oh. Sorry, wrong rant.
Matrix II & III failed for one reason: overwhelming ego.
The Brothers thought they had an original idea. They thought they were deep.
When, in actuality, what made Matrix I work was its style, not its substance.
Instead of focusing on that visual strength they focused on their supposed intellectual prowess…and ended up making two dumbass, pretentious, ponderous movies.
See, after Matrix I I thought: what a great, classic superhero origin story. Now they’ve got their Superman, they’ve got a little twist to it with the real world/dream world thing, and we can have a smart, stylish superhero trilogy that didn’t get its start in the comics.
But no.
They just had to tell us all about their college-sophomore whoa, man pothead pseudo-philosophy instead.
Idiots.
Rich idiots.
But still idiots.
I saw Revolutions and loved it. The story made perfect sense and the apokatastasis ending fit in great with the rest of the trilogy. But then I thought Reloaded and Signs were masterpieces as well.
I expect I’m going to be in the minority camp on this one too as well.
Revolutions should have had a 15-minute prelude to replace Reloaded.
That said, I thought it was all right. You have a nice split between I (What is the Matrix?) and the rest (This is the Matrix, and Bad Things are happening in there and out here). However, they do seem to have spent much more time on blowing things up in shiny ways in Revolutions than in Reloaded.
They need editors, but they aren’t really that guilty of any capital crimes against taste in Revolutions, I think.
Dan, you can take that as supporting you, or not, as you wish.
(I also despised Signs, for reasons that seem unrelated to everyone else’s.)
Reloaded is the most brilliant pop culture creation of my lifetime, not least for how it parodies the mechanics of pop culture itself (inter alia puncturing the rebellion-glorifying notions of the original money-minting machine, er, movie).
Revolutions was a cheap sell-out. It looks like they mutilated the ending to leave room for more sequels. I suppose there’s some ironic appropriateness to this, but I’m not amused.
Lay off of Signs.
The problem lays not in the movie but in the INTERPRETATION of the movie.
If they called the movie “Job”, no one would have seen it. But if you knew that you’d be seeing a reinterpretation of Job, you’d have enjoyed it much more than if you thought you were sitting down for War of the Worlds as told from a basement in the country.
This was what I did: I convinced myself that it was going to be an utter waste of my money, and in the end, I found it worth the price of admission!
All in all, it sucked. What made it worse was Lileks paid $5 to watch it while I forked over $13 to see the IMAX version at Howard Hughes!
Jaybird – well, actually, that was the main part of my problem. If you want to have a theme of “There’s a mysterious supernatural force that’s putting things in order according to its own design,” and you write a piece of fiction around that theme, that piece of fiction will invite the interpretation “Yep, there sure is. It’s called the author/screenwriter/etc. What a cop-out.”
I thought that the theme of Signs was something much more akin to “Don’t jump to conclusions about how God works.” In the same way that that was a major theme of Job (Job, of course, had a much stronger main character with a better backbone and much more horrible afflictions). A cop-out? Only insofar as Job had a cop-out ending (and I’m not talking about the part where he got his cattle, sheep, camels, and kids back).
Jaybird – Hmm. I would have considered the final resolution of the situation in Signs to be equivalent to “getting his cattle, sheep, camels, and kids back,” but I also wasn’t raised in a religious tradition. I may have felt differently about it if I had been.
I vaguely suspect that if a tale like Job is presented *explicitly* as something semihistorical – something that is evidence that you shouldn’t second-guess God (or claim you know how the Universe really works, or whatever; the theme you gave is one that’s not necessarily religious, and one that I accept as a wise precept) – then it will have the desired effect. If it’s approached as a work of fiction, created by an author, then it falls flat, because the author can control the setting and the characters. By that standard, the ending of Job *is* a “cop-out,” and it only works because it’s in a context that’s explicitly not fictional. (Or, if it *is* in a fictional context, it’s expected that you’re reading it allegorically.)
If I’m wrong about that, then the defining characteristic for whether it works or not is how contrived the situation appears to be. And in that case, Signs’ “proofs of design” were too contrived for me to suspend disbelief, and served instead as jarring reminders of the presence of an Author (of Signs, not the universe in general).