Hi-De-Ho Rene,

So, after my recent post, did you catch The Elegant Universe on Tuesday? The program left amateurs like me with the impression that we might actually understand what Brian Greene and "Einstein's successor" Ed Witten are getting at. With metaphors in the form of slices of bread, pool tables, and wormholes in Manhattan, theoretical physicists have all the fun. All in all, it was a nice popularization of a difficult concept.

In contrast, my sister and I decided to take a flyer and see the final Matrix installment last night. The Matrix series started out as a popularization of mildly difficult philosophical concepts, then was purposefully muddled in the sequels to remove any chance of comprehension. I enjoyed the original Matrix, although I saw it on tape, about a year after it had opened, so some of the images and ideas were already familiar. The second one was ridiculous, with great SFX but laugh-out-loud quasi-philosophy and plot holes galore. We had so much fun dissecting it that we felt compelled to see Revolutions last night.

It was better than expected (Reloaded having drastically lowered the bar), but still pretentious enough to provide some guffaws. Because Morpheus is reduced to a supporting character, he doesn't get the chance to utter nearly as many pearls of insipidness ("I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me," or "Some things do change"), but he gets to reprise a couple beauts. As for the plot, I don't think it gives too much away to say that, after seeing Revolutions, I'm convinced that the second film was completely unnecessary. Other than a handful of plot points and characters that could just as easily have been introduced in #1 or #3, Reloaded has been rendered pointless, introducing ideas that were dropped without explanation in Revolutions. POTENTIAL SPOILER, IF YOU'RE AN INTUITIVE TYPE: And I hope it doesn't give too much away to say that the conclusion of Revolutions has a major flaw -- it doesn't really resolve what was set up in the first picture, although I guess we're supposed to think it does. Matrix 4, anyone?

Later,
Kari