I watched Matrix Revolutions yesterday night, and unfortunately, the reviews were right. I expected to be disappointed (such is the nature of sequels) but still... This movie bit.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

There didn't seem to be much of a point to many scenes, or worse, some of the characters. In the beginning of Revolutions, there was this whole brouha about the Trainman, this being who exists in the land between the human world and the machine world, where Neo is after his encounter with the sentinels at the end of Reloaded. The Trainman works for the Merovingian, so there's this part where the Oracle warns Trinity and Morpheus that there'll be a lot of trouble since the Merovingian find Neo before they manage to. And yet... it's so darn easy for them to rescue Neo. All it took was for them to manage to get into a situation where they could kill the Merovingian and he caved in to their demands. What happens after that? Trinity is taken to Neo in that dreamland place, and... there's no treachery on the part of the Merovingian. Simply unbelievable if you ask me.

And that is the only scene where the Merovingian and Persephone appear in. They were so good in Reloaded and they appear for like all of five minutes in the sequel. In that case, the Wachowski brothers shouldn't even have bothered bringing them in!

Sathi? The oh-so-cute never-stops-smiling Indian girl? Pointless. Useless. Annoying. 'Nuff said.

The dialogue really suffered too. While I did slam Reloaded for being too pretentious with all the philosophical talk about free will, control and destiny, it still was far more interesting than all the crap they delivered in Revolutions. For instance, during a dialogue with a programme, Neo lets on that he's surprised that a programme can love, and the programme replies, "Love? Love is but a word. What is love? It is a connection." And then five minutes later, regarding another topic which I've already managed to forget, he says the same thing. Others may not feel the same way I do, but I generally feel whenever a movie attempts to be philosophical, it usually fails.

Anoter example of general cheesiness was the scene where Trinity lay dying after being impaled by several metal cables after managing to get Neo into the heart of the machine city. It's supposed to be a sad scene, but I ended up laughing through part of it. For someone who's dying, she's a lot more composed - and a lot less in pain - than in any other part of the show. And she lives for an awfully long time after being impaled, managing to deliver a rather long speech about how grateful she is to Neo for showing her so much, and that she believes in him and that the last time she died, she felt regretful that she wouldn't be able to tell Neo how much she loved him but that he brought her back and gave her a second chance yada yada yada. What I want to know is, if she felt that way, then why didn't she tell him sooner? Why only tell him just as she's going to die, given that one never knows how much time they're going to have left to deliver a little speech right after being impaled in three different places? She conveniently manages to die right after he kisses her for the last time.

The ending just plain sucked. It was boring, bland and on the whole, too straightforward. This one was just a bad attempt at tying up all the loose ends. No new questions were raised, unlike the previous two movies, and no new standards were set. The colossal fight scene between Neo and Smith was boring, and over-the-top. How many tidal waves and mushroom clouds does one need to see? And the scene where Smith was frustrated with Neo's refusal to just lie down and die... Hugo Weaving seemed to be overacting, with his lips just protruding so far from his face in an attempt to sneer and appear frustrated at the same time. I couldn't quite figure out whether it was because being a programme, Smith is unable to feel emotion and was jealous of Neo for his ability to feel, or whether he was just frustrated and trying to be overly bombastic as he usually is. Like the previous movie, Revolutions suffered from too many focus on special effects and not enough on the storyline and character development.

One last point. When Bane (Smith in the human world) is taunting Neo, it sure does take Neo a hell of a long time in figuring out who Bane really is. Given thaT Bane calls him "Mr. Anderson" at least four times from the beginning of the scene, Neo sure is slow on the uptake.