Matrix Popcorn


There’s been a lot of commentary on on the latest Matrix offering: Revolution. My favorite summary statement so far is Eric Sigmund’s at The Fire Ant Gazette which closes:

The movie could have been 20 minutes shorter without losing any of its impact. That may not sound like much, but 20 minutes of boring dialog is a lot, even when it’s spread out over 2+ hours.
OTOH, when the movie was good, it wasn’t just good, it was wonderful. I’m referring to the sci-fi action scenes, of course, and they surpassed anything I’ve seen. Man does not live by action scenes alone, but for every “Bruce Almighty” there must be a “Rundown.”
In the end — and I truly hope this was the end — the overriding perception of this episode, like the previous two, is its utter humorlessness. Would it have killed them to insert a joke…even gallows humor…into the script? (The several scenes where I had to stifle laughter at the dialog don’t count.)
Nevertheless, I recommend the movie for anyone looking for an entertaining popcorn-delivery system.

Several other reviews have hoped that this is the last in the series which is not a high recommendation in my mind. On the other hand I plan to buy the largest possible popcorn and expect the noise of the movie to drown out the crunching as opposed to what happened here:

He was a small guy with an armful of snacks — cans of soda, boxes of candy, a huge container of popcorn. I checked him out with concern before the lights went down, but he turned out to be OK — a discrete and lowkey spectator. Or he was until Meg Ryan’s first sex scene, that is, when he began eating his popcorn faster and faster and faster. And louder and louder. The chomping got so frenzied that I looked over at him in alarm; he was moving popcorn from the tub to his mouth about as fast as a human being could. He clearly wasn’t doing this to be funny; it was his way of handling the intensity of the scene.

Maybe I’ll pass on the popcorn if I go see In the Cut.