f you haven't already seen The Matrix Revolutions, you're going to, you know it—and it doesn't
matter what the reviewers have been saying. It won't matter to you that The New York Times wrote that "Reloaded was certainly a lumpy, gaseous treatise of a movie, but viewers of Revolutions may find themselves looking back on it fondly" or that The Washington Post wrote that "the film is a soggy mess, essentially a loud, wild 100-minute battle movie bookended by an incomprehensible beginning and a laughable ending"
or even that our own reviewer wrote in Science Fiction Weekly that "the climax and denouement are surprisingly anticlimactic."
You know that you're going to plunk down your dollars, just like I did. (Hey, not all of us get free invites to those advance screenings.) When a high-profile science-fiction film premieres, whether it's loved or hated, we're there. We have to be. We're a captive audience. It isn't enough for us to just put together a picture in our minds based on the judgments of others. We want to form our own opinions. We know we'll need them when it's time to to talk about the flick with our friends at the
office, at school, in Internet chat rooms—wherever sci-fi fans congregate.
And this isn't an issue that comes up only where movies are concerned. If someone tells me that the latest installment of a famous TV franchise has fallen short of its golden history, I'm not scared away—I have to see it for myself. If the top book reviewers in the field warn me that the newest novel by an elder statesman is barely comprehensible, I don't care—I still dive right in.
Eternal flames for eternal optimists
We science-fiction fans are so in love with the field that we remain eternal optimists—we won't submit to being haters until we take a bite out of that rotten apple for ourselves.
And so it goes, through the entire panoply of sci-fi pop culture. Books, movies, television, games, whatever the medium, we show up in hope, sometimes against our better judgment, and we often leave in despair. Even when the reviews are dreadful, we still rush to consume, thinking, "It couldn't possibly be as bad as everybody's been saying," and time after time we leave moaning, "I can't believe it's just as bad as everybody's been saying."
But do we remember that in the future? Does that bad experience stop us the next time we get a whiff of poor press? Of course not. We've been taught not to believe the hype, but it turns out that we happen to be cynical optimists (if such am oxymoron is even possible), and so we don't believe the anti-hype either. We dare to forge ahead, cutting through the hyperbole to find our own truths. Which means that there are larger issues than how I felt at the end of the Matrix trilogy.
I'm a science-fiction fan. Like so many of us, as far as the genre is concerned, I'm drawn like a moth to a cosmic flame. I'm so powerless over my attraction to science fiction that I should probably seek out a 12-step program.
It's not that I don't discriminate between good and bad SF, because I do. But unfortunately, I seem to insist on doing it after the fact. In my search for the good that's out there—and just because I'm dealing with the less-than-good in this particular editorial doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of it out there—I try to devour it all. I tend to ignore the warnings of others. Which means that I can't help but suffer for my art.
What this boils down to is that as a consumer, I'm lousy at sending messages to Hollywood. By the time I form opinions for myself and know for sure whether a movie is good or not, the suits that run the studios already have my money in their pockets. I sometimes worry that, since I'm such a sucker for science fiction, and can't stop watching, playing and reading, there's no way they'll ever be able to hear those opinions over the sound of the cash register.
But you know what? Those worries won't stop me from paying cold, hard cash to see a fourth Matrix movie should the Wachowski brothers be so inclined—and that's what real love is all about.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Men Writing Science Fiction as Women, edited by Mike Resnick.
