AfterEdenLogo.jpg - 16337 Bytes

OTHER DESTINATIONS
 After Eden Journal
After Eden Archives
The After Eden Forum
POP CULTURE FROM A SPIRITUAL POINT OF VIEW

Everyone welcome. More Trailers. More Photos. More Information. Spiritual. Unique. Friendly.

OVER 700,000,000 HITS

(Home) (Contents) (What's New ) (Current Movies) (Upcoming Movies)(New On Video) (On Video) (Store) (News) (Music) (Art) (Television) (Cartoons) (Spiritual Direction) (Bulletin Board) (Send Email) (Guest Book) (About Us ) (Links)


Search Hollywood Jesus
HERE


What Makes Revolutions Revolutionary
A Journal Entry for January, 2004

This page was created on January 1, 2004
This page was last updated on May 5, 2004
 
By Mike Gunn
Let the reader be warned that I am a self-professed Matrix geek -- so whatever spews from my keyboard is most likely clouded by my biased “geek” lens!

After scouring countless reviews of The Matrix Revolutions I am convinced that we have all been duped by a huge conspiratorial plot concocted by Warner Brothers -- and of course the malevolent Wachowskis. They have insidiously ripped off the public by promoting a film that promised to answer life’s greatest questions, but left us with nothing but a bunch of CGI and existential disappointment! One reviewer wrote that the movie “sucks,” and despite the hype and visuals “adds up to a supersize nothing… to all but fanatics, though, the disappointment is crushing. Clichéd, repetitive, recycled from other movies…”1 (emphasis mine). Roger Ebert, while enjoying Revolutions as a “good movie,” writes that down the road “we’ll realize that the first movie inspired its fans to imagine that astonishing philosophical revelations would be made, and the series hasn’t been able to live up to those anticipations.”2 Another critic stated, “To my mind -- as a reader of classic science fiction -- the first film promised, but this third film just lacked, the imagination needed to build a cosmology worth criticizing.”3

So what’s a geek like me to do? Instead of walking away with my tail tucked between my legs, I did what every good geek would do. I went and saw the movie. And I admit the reviews are dead on. I didn’t come away from Revolutions with my pathetic life’s dilemmas

answered in nicely wrapped philosophical dogma! And yes, it was a re-tread, re-telling that same old story about somebody messing up the world, and somebody fixing it. Insidious!

But who tells “unique” stories, after all? Aren’t all the good ones just a different angle on the same tired human epic of creation, fall and redemption?

All sarcasm aside, I will say that Revolutions -- and subsequently the Matrix trilogy -- has rendered any potential message benign because of the movie’s multi-layered and contradictory philosophies. All three movies toy with bits of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity (not to mention virtual reality, multiple universes, etc.), which either minimizes any one message, or presents messages in a cacophony of noise -- which is, not coincidentally, how we receive these various messages in the real world. Revolutions leaves us wondering if anything is real, rather like the Buddhist philosophy it sometimes utilizes. This could very well be the movie’s intent: neuter the gods; leave us all simultaneously in charge and helpless. The resulting confusion irritates many who would like the Wachowskis to give us concrete direction, and closed-ended answers.

Revolutions is no doubt deliberately open-ended, quite possibly setting up another blockbuster sequel; but did it fail in delivering its message? I guess that depends on how you see it.

Looking back on all three films, I find a truly epic

love story about self-sacrifice, commitment and a fight for survival. Of course this is a very different type of love story, one which grows as the characters in the three movies literally evolve, becoming something more than the flat straw men/women that we were introduced to in The Matrix. This movie really begins to make most of us (except for Ebert) like the characters. Even Keanu Reeves shows emotion and “humanness,” and we can begin to identify with the epic struggle in Revolutions -- whether that struggle is spiritual, physical or computer-generated.

Looking back through the movies we begin to notice that it is Neo’s and Trinity’s love for one another that saved each other’s lives in the first two movies. We also acknowledge odd placement of scenes like Persephone’s desire to be kissed by Neo in Reloaded

so she can feel what love is once again (having been reduced to being the Merovingian’s sex slave), or the weirdly-placed four-minute “orgy scene” in Reloaded -- reminiscent of some cultic, psycho-sexual experience between the gods and man. And the odd scenes aren't limited to sexual stuff, either. I mean, what up with the little girl in Revolutions? It is quite possible that, collectively, these scenes are added to emphasize passion and pure love as the writers’ dominant motifs.

Some scenes, of course, may have been added because of their value to the multi-bazillion dollar video game; but there are just too many scenes developed as the trilogy goes on to dismiss my theory altogether. Even the grand finale -- though all too familiar to evangelical Christians -- is used as a motif to represent the pinnacle of love’s triumph: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” -- self-sacrifice. Could this be the Wachowskis’ point all along?

And if so, did they deliver it well? I believe so. But if so, why are we missing the point or finding it disdainful? Is the value of love and sacrifice really as meaningless and impotent as the reviews would have us believe? Or is it possible that we no longer hope for such an

act in history, an act of love that includes sacrifice and commitment? Apparently for many, Agent Smith’s words ring all too clearly in our experience:

“Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. The temporary abstracts of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?” (Emphasis mine.)

The S + M club scene in Revolutions juxtaposes the Merovingian’s reductionist sexual philosophy -- “It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity”
-- with the sacrificial love of Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Link, Zee, etc. Of course,

it is “insane” to care this deeply, and to give away your life for something so meaningless. Why do such a thing, when the alternative is sex: self-gratification and pleasure, and plenty of breasts? Our culture’s desire to reduce love to sex, and sex to self-centered pleasure, has warped our view of commitment and self-sacrifice for the greater whole. We no longer have the capacity to endure pain –- or the desire to -- because true love, our culture says, should produce continued personal pleasure. The Matrix trilogy, I believe, may be an attempt to explore that aspect of our culture; and it’s too bad the message was lost in the midst of too many other ideas, and too few conclusions.

But this message doesn’t fall apart; it actually grows through all three movies and is made evident in the final scene where evil (the true evil here -- not the machines, which were merely being manipulated by Agent Smith’s ability to replicate himself in the Matrix) is defeated by Neo taking on the likeness of Agent Smith for the sake of defeating evil and setting Zion free. Sound familiar? “He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf…”

The story may indeed be clouded by “Hollywood gloss,” and it certainly doesn’t impose any single meta-narrative; but its message seems clear. It is a progressive revelation that looms larger as the characters encounter Neo (“The One”), who himself progressively recognizes
the same thing: that his journey is moving him from a self-centered existence in the Matrix to a sacrificial existence in the “real” world. It is quite possibly a message that we no longer want to believe. This may be our problem with this movie after all: we have placed our hope in Hollywood, and have come away a bit disappointed.

It’s ironic that most people feel let down because the Christian story -- though clearly portrayed -- has been made irrelevant in this film, leaving those waiting for conclusions in a quandary of competing ideals and confusing questions. We are left asking: What was the sacrifice for? Did it accomplish its goal? Has this type of story been reduplicated many times? Was the sacrifice made in reality, or was it a construct of a sick architect?

It is also quite possible we’re not so “Postmodern” after all. Maybe we’re really seeking something more concrete than competing opinions to bring forth hope in a meaningless world. And maybe this is where the movie failed us the most: presenting us

with a vision of love stronger than our own flailing humanity, yet disconnected from a higher power -- all while still asking us to move beyond our propensity for self-centeredness. Maybe the lesson we need to learn is that human inventions and concoctions will always let us down, because man is flawed -- and solutions that begin in a flawed mind end up flawed. If Revolutions lacks “the imagination needed to build a cosmology worth criticizing,” it’s only because it presents us with the cosmology of our own culture. I’m afraid we need to accept this trilogy on those terms.

All in all, from one geek to another, I believe Revolutions was a good film. It may not have had all the intrigue that The Matrix gave us, but it did remind us that there is something greater than ourselves, and something older: something greater than the rush of new stuff to pacify our desire for meaning. Well, like the movie, I’m probably rambling a bit. So get out and see this one, and “May the force be with you!” Whoops, wrong movie!

All images copyright (c) Warner Brothers. Used by permission.

Would you like to comment on this article? Please stop in at the After Eden Forum on Hollywood Jesus. Click Here!
Response by Editor Greg Wright
Regina Doman is off this month, meeting deadlines on her new novel.

Guilty as charged.

I'm one of those people Pastor Mike was talking about I guess -- those who were disappointed by Revolutions because it didn't seem to offer anything new.

And I have to admit that Mike's theory is intriguing. If the Wachowskis really did set out to teach us all that we need to value things traditional, and that our penchant for things "new" is itself somewhat tired and hackneyed -- well, that's a daring tack to take when you're at the helm of a multi-million dollar enterprise: boldly going where only iconoclasts have gone before.

It is possible that we have come full circle, that the Post-modern influence is leading us back, somewhat, to our roots. If that's the case, though, there should be some evidence for it. So let's take a quick look...

Released Movie 1st weekend US Gross World Gross
3/31/1999 The Matrix $27,788,331 $171,479,930 $456,500,000
5/15/2003 Reloaded $91,774,413 $281,553,689 $727,400,000
11/5/2003 Revolutions $48,475,154 $138,462,698 $415,000,000

(Statistics courtesy the-numbers.com)


Now, if Revolutions had really sucked, like the critics said it did, we would expect the box office numbers to tank. Bad movies may open strong, but they tail off quickly. What actually happened with Revolutions? Well, considering that The Matrix has a three-year lead on Revolutions for final box-office tally, we find that box-office did not drop off precipitously -- that, in fact, audiences liked Revolutions just about as well as they liked The Matrix, and in spite of the critics! If Revolutions sucked, as the critics claimed, then The Matrix must have sucked too. We know it didn't. People liked what The Matrix had to say, and wanted to hear more.

Did Revolutions perform as well as Reloaded? Obviously not. But here's the difference: The Matrix and Revolutions offered conclusions -- and the same conclusions. Reloaded offered questions.

As long as our entertainment offers questions, we're very intrigued. When it offers answers -- particularly answers we don't like, and partiularly if we're one of our culture's power brokers, like critics -- we're less enchanted, as a whole.

Revolutions definitively supported the conclusion of The Matrix; and it was a conclusion that a lot of people wanted to hear, and responded to hear. Now, it was a conclusion that a greater number of people wanted to see questioned. And the answer that Reloaded questioned is this: Neo is the One.

Well, that's pretty similar to another answer that our culture responds to, but still prefers to debate: Jesus is the One.

But the real question to answer is this: not, "Who is the One?" but "What the hell difference does it make?" So Neo is the One. So Neo gives his life to save Zion. So what? How different is the life of the average pod-dwelling machine-slave, the poor sucker who is still trapped in the "life" that Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and others escaped? Where's that sucker's choice between the red pill and the blue pill? Zion's free, sure -- but free to do what? Gloat over the fact they they are free, while all their brothers remain enslaved?

So also in our own world we have tough questions: So Christ is the One. So Christ gave his life to save us from our sin. What difference does that make in the life of the average hell-dwelling sin-slave, the poor sucker who is still trapped in the "life" from which Christians so gladly escape? Who's going to let that person know that there is a choice, that the world around them is but an illusion?

Well, that's where the rubber hits the road, isn't it?

And if Mike is right about the Wachowskis, they are offering an answer: the value of, and need for, self-sacrifice. It's an old story, sure, and one we may tire of easily -- but is it our story? Is it my story?

Thanks, Mike, for reminding me that there's a lot more important things to be doing than criticizing Revolutions. Got any spare red pills?

Would you like to comment on this article? Please stop in at the After Eden Forum on Hollywood Jesus. Click Here!
 
The Devil's Advocate Speaks

Let me first say that Mike’s arguments regarding the open-endedness and deliberate philosophical ambiguity in the Matrix trilogy stand up well -– I think we (humanity) are, perhaps, looking for something better than what we have to offer ourselves, and the movies don’t offer any hard and fast solutions. However, I think the disappointment both Mike and Greg refer to is a simpler matter -– one of expectations.

In general, I am skeptical of all things hyped. So when a movie (or trilogy, or album, or video console, or lawn fertilizer) is touted to be the next “greatest thing,” I wait until the “thing” has been out for a while before trying it out myself. The Matrix mania was no exception. I saw the first movie on a borrowed video; saw the second in the theater; and if I hadn’t agreed to write this column, I would have been perfectly happy to wait until Revolutions came out on video to watch it. Not because I think the movies are bad or uninteresting -– I just don’t find them as compelling or earth-shattering as the media intends me to.

So I, personally, wasn’t particularly disappointed with Revolutions, because I wasn’t expecting any ground-breaking answers to life, or any definitive conclusions for the myriad questions raised in Reloaded. From my perspective, I could only have been disappointed if I had expected an epic story of love and self-sacrifice -– which, by the way, I would very much like to see.

From Revolutions, though, I just expected a decent movie. And I, for one, was satisfied.

 
About After Eden

In 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul speaks of Christianity as "the ministry of reconciliation."8 By this, he means that the central story of the faith is the reconciliation of Man to God through the blood of His Son, Jesus. Christianity, then, is the ministry of reconciliation because all who claim the name of Christ are ministers -- literally, servants in the Greek -- of God's specific conciliatory purpose.

But Christianity is not only the ministry of reconciliation -- it is the ministry of all things godly. One of the other theological terms applied to the act of Jesus' death on the cross is redemption. In conceiving Hollywood Jesus, David Bruce understood that Christianity is also the ministry of redemption -- and in particular, it is the redemptive hope for our culture: not through legislation, stone-throwing or critical negativity, but through showing us the godly things already embedded in our culture. For God reveals Himself through all that He has created, even the things that we may not particularly like.

After Eden is dedicated to this redemptive vision. We believe, as G.K. Chesteron put it, that "humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea."9 That's not a reality we endorse. We'd like to help salvage the gold from the gutter, and rescue the diamonds from the sea.

Mike Gunn is a pastor at Harambee Church in Tukwila, Washington, and was cofounder of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Regina Doman is a writer, the author of the young adult novel The Shadow of the Bear and other modern stories based on fairy tales; she was also an editor for the late journal Caelum et Terra.

Editor Greg Wright is a writer and ordained minister of the dramatic arts. He is a contributing editor for Hollywood Jesus, and is author of Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter.

Editor Jenn Wright is a writer with degrees in literature and theology. She will be co-writing the Narnia coverage for Hollywood Jesus, which will be debuting the summer of 2004 in anticipation of the first movie's 2005 release.

The Devil's Advocate is a composite personality of our consultants and editorial staff. He may look like someone you know -- and probably thinks like a lot of them.

Do you have comments or suggestions regarding the After Eden journal on Hollywood Jesus? Would you like to receive notification of new articles and updates?
Please email Editor Greg Wright
 
 


Hollywood Jesus News Letter
Receive the Hollywood Jesus Newsletter FREE.

JUST CLICK  and Send a Blank E-Mail



Copyright © 1998-2003 David Bruce. All rights reserved. "Hollywood Jesus" is a trademark owned by David Bruce. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in any form. See copyright information. Review our Privacy Policy and the Bulletin Board Forum rules. Please notify us of any errors so corrections can be made. All film stills, trailers, video clips and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and may not be reproduced for any reason whatsoever. If proper notation of owned material is not given please notify us so we can make adjustments.
 
 
 

Tolkien
On Storytelling

There cannot be any ‘story ‘without a fall -- all stories are ultimately about the fall... 4

 
 

Nietzsche
On Sacrifice

Sacrificial animals think quite differently from those who look on: but they have never been allowed to have their say.5

 
 

Shaw
On Sacrifice

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.6

 
 
 

Huxley
On Sacrifice

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.7

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Chesterton
On Perception

It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men... have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.10

 
Notes

  1. Peter Travers, www.Rollingstone.com 11/7/03.
  2. Roger Ebert, www.suntimes.com 11/5/03.
  3. Ted G., www.imdb.com 11/6/03
  4. J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, no. 131.
  5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Third Book,” aphorism 220, “Sacrifice.”
  6. G.B. Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists: Self-Sacrifice,” Man and Superman.
  7. Aldous Huxley, 'Bruno Rontini' in Time Must Have a Stop, ch. 30.
  8. 2 Corinthians 5:18, New International Version.
  9. G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant, J. M. Dent, 1901, p. 16.
  10. G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant, J. M. Dent, 1901, p. 13.