One potential guarantee of the overall cultural worth of any project may well be the ability of the project to have cheap jokes made about it. Using this rule of thumb 24, Stephen Hopkins finest hour, certainly stands up. But jokes about Kim vs cougars, PDA’s which can do everything, and Jack Bauer’s lack of luck in love pail next to the humour potential of The Matrix. This is often to the consternation of people who love the films, thinking that if you are taking the piss then you don’t like the films. On the contrary, I take the piss because that is about all there is left to like about them. And The Matrix Revolutions (needlessly streamlined plot narrowly avoids amusing renaming Matrix Convolutions) is the funniest of the batch.
It has already been noted that nothing in The Matrix ever gets said without someone it being prefaced by “I am about to say something”. There is an entire five minute sequence which takes place pointlessly in a train station which brings up the horror of the first hour of Reloaded, obliquely gigglesome from cute child to Keanu being punched through a wall (AGAIN!) There is the scenary chewing delights of Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith, possible the first movie villain to discover how rubbish it is to rule the world. And there are those jumpers.
Please, someone tell how this future came about. Why did ‘the machines’ develop as these snakey squidlike creatures whose ‘batteries are people and spend all their time trying to, uh, kill people. Is Zion really a city predicated on being completely set in a sewer? Where does the light come from. Why don’t the build tanks. HOW COME THEY CANNOT MAKE JUMPERS THAT FIT PROPERLY!!!
Everybody dies. Hurrah! Except for the Zionists. Political subtext from the W Brothers (read that either way). I don’t think so.