The Revolutions Will Be Screened

Every beginning must have an ending’ crows the poster. This dunce-tastic tautology may sound like a classic Bushism designed to appease anti-Gulf occupation n’er-do-wells, but it’s actually the (shockingly unimaginative) tagline for The Matrix Revolutions. This final instalment in the Wachowski brothers’ Alice In Cyberland trilogy is an event certain to lure legions of fans, including many internet addicted shut-ins who haven’t ventured forth from the radiance of their consoles since Reloaded hit the ‘plexes last May.

Most will come with unanswered questions. Does Neo possess Real World superpowers? Will Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) destroy from within using Bane, a member of the hovercraft fleet? Is the Oracle just another layer of falsehood? Will the last human city of Zion be breached by a 250,000 strong cyber-squid army? Will Keanu be breached by Monica Bellucci? And why do all films set in the future feature thrash metal-soundtracked poser clubs? Revolutions will provide the hotly-anticipated answers to these queries and others, with a visceral low-altitude helicopter chase and a 17-minute creature-feature set-piece thrown in for good measure.
“The best way to explain Revolutions,” claims actor Laurence Fishburne, “is by thinking that the first movie was about birth, the second about life, and the third is about death.”
The actor, reprising his role as mentor Morpheus, is yet again required to keep the faith for Neo, all the while uttering lines of new-age psycho-babble that only he could pull off. And to think it was nearly Val Kilmer spouting stuff like ‘I am the one heralding the one who is the One’. It’s hard to picture The Matrix doing the same astronomical box-office figures, had anyone else assumed what’s essentially a spacey cheerleader role. Which begs the question: did the actor find it difficult making Morpheus credible when he has so much loopy information to impart?
“Sure, but I relate to him as a man of faith’, professes the likeable Fishburne. “He just has tremendous faith and that’s the place where we connect. I think in Revolutions, he becomes more human than he might have seemed before.”
Despite the comparatively late recognition – he’s now 42 (the same age as co-star Keanu Reeves, making The Matrix positively geriatric by action-sci-fi standards) – Fishburne has always been an amazing, if underused actor.
Following the divorce of his corrections officer father and teacher mother in childhood, Fishburne was transplanted from Augusta, Georgia to Brooklyn, and immediately displayed a precocious acting talent, landing his first professional role at the age of ten. Having chalked up well-reviewed performances in low-key features, he famously lied about his birthdate and landed the role of navy gunner in Apocalypse Now aged fourteen.
He’s worked steadily since, and has proved a favourite with name directors such as Coppola (Rumblefish, The Cotton Club), Spielberg (The Colour Purple) and Spike Lee (School Daze), as well as turning in much-admired work in the underrated Deep Cover, Kenneth Branagh’s Othello and the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It? for which he recieved an Oscar nomination.
Household name status arrived when The Matrix exceeded all expectations and rode the fin de siecle wave to glory back in 1998. Having spent years on the recieving end of mistaken compliments for his (actually Samuel L. Jackson’s) work in Pulp Fiction, it came as something of a culture shock.
“We knew that the Wachowski brothers had relied heavily on Greek mythology and old myths and the hero’s journey,” he reflects. “They had worked in a reluctant messiah motif which is in every culture, but we were still very surprised at how people really got it and The Matrix became the pop culture phenomena that it did.”
Did he find the jump in scale between the original film and the sequels Reloaded and Revolutions difficult to deal with?
“Well, we had a lot of downtime because there was so much going on,” explains Fishburne, “with Reloaded and Revolutions being shot together out of sequence – it was like being part of a giant hive. Certain aspects were more fun, but there’s nothing like the first time. It’s never as much fun as the first time.”
And now that he’s been morphing into Morpheus since 1997, will he miss him, now The Matrix reaches its conclusion?
“Not at all. Once I’m done, then I watch the movie like everyone else. I’ll miss Australia where we shot the film. When you’re in a strange country, you fall in love with the simple things that are there – like the toothpaste and the soft-drinks. So right now, the thing I lament about America is that I can’t get a fucking meat pie there.”

The Matrix Revolutions is on general release