Writer of THE WATCH forgets to thank Sir Terry Pratchett as production wraps

The writer of The Watch, BBC America's increasingly controversial "loose adaptation" of Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, has apparently forgotten about the late author and his estate whilst extending his thanks to people involved in the making of the television series. In fact, the writer fails to mention the Discworld book series, or that his TV show is based on novels, at all. He instead names himself as the "creator" of the story in a remarkable display of hubris.

The apparent snub was picked up on by Sir Terry's daughter and literary executor Rhianna Pratchett on Twitter. Needless to say, the response from the enormous, global Discworld fandom has not been kind.

Sir Terry Pratchett wrote 41 Discworld novels between 1983 and his premature death from early-onset Alzheimer's in 2015. At the time of his death, the Discworld novels had sold almost 90 million copies, making it the joint best-selling post-Tolkien secondary world fantasy series (with near sales parity with Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire). The series is a cultural institution in the UK, where Pratchett was a perennial bestseller. Sir Terry was also lauded for his work for charities and bringing greater awareness of issues such as the endangerment of orangutan populations and Alzheimer's research. He was one of the few writers in the "national treasure" category. He also has a growing fanbase in the United States (who were late but increasingly enthusiastic attendees of the Pratchett party).

Six of the Discworld novels have been adapted for the screen: Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music were adapted to animation by Cosgrove Hall in 1997, whilst Sky adapted Hogfather, The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Going Postal between 2006 and 2010. Development of The Watch began in 2011, with the original idea being to develop a TV-focused sequel to the Discworld novels set in the city of Ankh-Morpork and revolving around the City Watch (starting with Guards! Guards!), rather than adapting the books directly. This version of the series was in development with the BBC for several years before the BBC divested it to BBC America around the time of Sir Terry's death.

BBC America hired a new writer (Simon Allen, best known for The Musketeers) threw out all the work that had been done already, apparently chose not to involve Sir Terry's family (including his daughter, Rhianna, a talented writer in her own right who had been closely involved in the prior project) and completely reconceptualised the project, including throwing out major characters, turning the setting into a "cyberpunk" city (nonsensically; I think they meant steampunk) and "sexing up" other characters by making them younger, thinner and better-looking. The Pratchett fanbase responded negatively to the early publicity images of the show and this discontent grew as it became clear that the Pratchett Estate was unhappy with how things had gone.

Snubbing the creator and writer of the original stories in this manner will likely increase the discontent and negative publicity the show has engendered so far.

The Watch is currently scheduled to air on BBC America in January 2021. A UK broadcaster has not yet been announced.

Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore

Having successfully saved Icewind Dale from the invading army of the sorcerer Akar Kessell - albeit at a high cost - Bruenor Battlehammer, Drizzt Do'Urden, Wulfgar and Regis embark on a new quest. This time their goal is Mithril Hall, the long-lost homeland of Bruenor. Unfortunately, Bruenor was only a child when the hall fell and has no memory of its location. The companions set out for the cities of Luskan and Silverymoon, hoping they will find clues to the Hall's whereabouts. But danger stalks the party, for the assassin Artemis Entreri is on their tail, seeking the halfling Regis, whilst the mages of Luskan are anxious for news of the Crystal Shard and are determined to recover it.

Streams of Silver (1989) is the middle volume of the Icewind Dale Trilogy but mercifully escapes "middle book syndrome" by virtue of Salvatore not planning a trilogy in the first place. The Crystal Shard had to stand well enough alone so that if it bombed, readers would not be left on too much of a cliffhanger for a sequel that would never come. Fortunately, the book did very well and two sequels were commissioned, which are more tightly connected together (the "standalone+duology" school of trilogies, which has an honourable precedent in the original Star Wars trilogy).

Streams of Silver is a less tightly-plotted book than The Crystal Shard and less epic in terms of having large armies clashing, but it's much more of a traditional Dungeons & Dragons adventure. We have our party, who even now get a cool name (The Companions of the Hall™) and they have a quest which takes them across the Savage North of the Forgotten Realms. Many, many later books would also focus on this region but it's interesting to see it in a nascent state here with a lot of the worldbuilding still in a fairly embryonic stage, to the point where Salvatore overlooks the existence of the later very high-profile city of Neverwinter, which is amusing, and Alustriel Silverhand, one of the infamous Seven Sisters, only has two sisters at this juncture. We get a nicely varied story as well, taking in political-magical intrigue in the city of Luskan, a semi-comic interlude in the whimsical wizard hamlet of Longsaddle, a more desperate long-running battle across the troll-infested Evermoors, an angsty stay in the city of Silverymoon (a bastion of peace and enlightenment where Drizzt hopes for respite, only to be turned away because of his dark elven heritage) and a final descent into Mithril Hall, presumably thoroughly checked by TSR's legal team to stave off the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate suing them into the next universe.

An interesting parallel storyline emerges where the assassin Artemis Entreri is hot on our heroes' trail and assembles an "evil party" to bring parity to their encounter, complete with its own wizard, tracker, magical construct and a reluctant guide in the form of Catti-brie, Bruenor's adopted daughter now turned hostage. Given that Catti-brie was barely even in the first book, it's good to see her have some character development in this volume.

There's a lot more female characters in general, including several among the villains, which remedies one of the oddities of the first book. There's a fair bit of action, although not quite as breathlessly over-the-top as in the first book (sadly Drizzt and Wulfgar don't get to take out two dozen giants single-handed, which was stretching credibility just a bit), and Salvatore's writing calms down. No more excited exclamation marks after every other sentence! His prose can still veer towards the cheesy (especially whenever he decides Drizzt needs to be introspective and ponder on the unfairness of the world), but it's easily accessible and straightforward. There's still more enthusiasm than skill here, but it's surprising how much fun that can be.

The novel is very much still in the "Big Mac with extra fries" mode of fantasy literature, but it does make some clumsy nods towards engaging with a big theme when it comes to racism. Drizzt is a dark elf or drow, whose people were cursed and outcast from the rest of elven civilisation ten thousand years ago after betraying the other elven peoples during the Crown Wars. As a result, Drizzt encounters extreme hostility from pretty much everyone he meets. Later Forgotten Realms fiction would cast this event as a grand tragedy, with many tens of thousands of innocent and "good" dark elves punished for the crimes of their evil brethren, with many drow fighting for redemption under the banner of the goddess Eilistraee. At this early stage in the setting's history, though, the worldbuilding is more that all the drow are evil all the time (apart from a small number who are merely totally amoral instead), and Drizzt is the only exception in the whole world. On that basis it's hard to make Drizzt's story about racism work when virtually all the other drow we meet are inherently evil (shades of Dragon Age trying to make a story about bigotry against its mages because the run the risk of being overwhelmed by evil forces, despite the fact that almost every single mage we meet does go insane and get possessed by a demon at one point or another). Later books, which introduce more nuance to the setting, do deal with the issue more successfully.

Streams of Silver (***½) is a reasonable follow-up to The Crystal Shard. Salvatore has improved as a writer, although this is still very much at the enjoyable pulp end of the literary spectrum, and makes a couple of nods at larger themes around racism, homelands and belonging in this book, which are not altogether successful. He does deliver a readable, action-packed story which moves with verve through an interesting setting. With the success of this novel a bit more assured, there's a cliffhanger ending leading into the concluding book in the trilogy, The Halfling's Gem. Streams of Silver is available now in the UK and USA.

Hasbro resurrects the classic HERO QUEST board game

Hasbro has resurrected the long-defunct Hero Quest board game IP and is set to make a big announcement on the game on 22 September.

Hero Quest is a board game franchise that was created in 1989 by Milton Bradley Games in collaboration with Games Workshop, who provided the game's excellent miniatures. The game was set in a traditional fantasy world and saw up to four players create an adventuring party and enter a dungeon, which was laid out and prepared by another player serving as the Games Master. The game used a clever modular board design to provide for hundreds of possible dungeon layouts without spilling over an entire desk (something modern board games sometimes struggle with), and it was possible to play the dungeon adventures as stand-alone quests or sequentially to form a long-running campaign.

The original Hero Quest game was supported by a substantial number of expansions: Kellar's Keep, Return of the Witch Lord, Against the Ogre Horde, Wizards of Morcar, The Frozen Horror, The Mage of the Mirror and the Adventure Design Kit. The board game and expansions sold extremely well for three years, but the line ran out of steam in 1992 and was cancelled. Games Workshop published their own version of the game, Advanced Hero Quest, along with an expansion called Terror in the Dark, in 1991 but these were not as successful as the main line.

There were also two successful video games based on the board game, and MB and Games Workshop collaborated again on a science fiction iteration, Space Crusade (1990).

The Hero Quest design paradigm inspired many later games, including Warhammer Quest, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, Zombiecide and Gloomhaven.

Unsurprisingly, the game's popularity (it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its original run) has made it a prime target for restoration in the modern board games market. Gamezone Miniatures, a Spanish company with the licence to make the game in Spanish, tried to mount a reprint campaign in 2013 but fell afoul of legal concerns. A second attempt was made a few months later, but this was shot down by Moon Design Publications, publishers the HeroQuest pen-and-paper RPG. Chaosium took over the RPG and renamed it QuestWorlds at the start of 2020, which may have allowed others to stake a claim to the Hero Quest name (although this is unclear).

In July Restoration Games stepped in to trademark a project called Hero Quest: Legacies, although they noted at the time they did not plan to immediately develop a project.

Given that Hasbro have now set up a Twitter account and website, it appears that they have fully secured the Hero Quest name. They also have the design work IP from their prior acquisition of MB Games. They don't have the rights to use any of the Games Workshop-specific creatures or factions, so don't expect to see Fimirs or Chaos Warriors in the new game, but beyond that it looks like all systems go for a resurrection of a beloved, classic game. It'll be interesting to see what form it takes.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A war is raging through all of time and space, spanning an infinite number of universes. Two great powers - the Commandant and the Garden - are clashing, their agents fighting one another in the stone age and a distant future of galaxy-spanning empires. Two agents, Red and Blue, clash again and again without ever exchanging a single word...until the day they decide to start writing letters.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a novella depicting a war fought through time between two implacable forces, each represented by one of their agents. It's a short book, at under 200 pages, and also an interesting one structurally, mixing traditional third-person narratives with the letters the two rival agents exchange on a regular basis. It's not quite an epistolary novella, more of a mix between it and more traditional narration, but the letters form an integral part of the story.

Although short, the novella covers a lot of ground. Multiple settings, from deep space in the far future to a sinking Atlantis to contemporary cities, are used as battlegrounds by the warring sides, and we see both the hard end of their fighting and meet the vast and almost staggering forces leading the wars. That said, there isn't a lot of exposition in the book. The reasons for the war - given that billions, if not trillions, of branching timelines exist for the two factions to coexist in - are never really given and it's unclear who is winning and losing (although both Red and Blue are prone to boasting of their side's achievements, at least early in their relationship). To be honest, it's not really important. More important is how alone and isolated both agents feel, and the only person they can relate to is their opposite number, doing the same thing and feeling the same feelings, just in a different cause.

The writing is poetic, with both agents keen to use creative language in their letters, which start off as verbal fencing matches but later become more flirtatious and intellectually challenging. There is humour in the book but also an air of bitter-sweetness. There's also tension: agents from the two forces are forbidden from communicating with one another out of fear of corruption, and it's not always clear it the agents are genuinely becoming enamoured of one another or each is trying to trap the other in an unexpected reversal. It feels a bit like Spy vs. Spy with added romantic tension, all set in the middle of Doctor Who's Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War (****½) is short, focused and energetic, playful in tone and compelling in execution. Those who like books packed with exposition with every I dotted and every T crossed will probably be unhappy with the book's unapologetic lack of context; those who enjoy stories for their emotion and wordplay will be very satisfied. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

RIP Dame Diana Rigg

Famed British actress Dame Diana Rigg has sadly passed away at the age of 82.

Born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire in 1938, Rigg was raised by her parents in Bikaner, India. Returning to the UK, she trained as an actress and made her stage debut in 1957 and her TV debut two years later. In 1965 she was cast in the first of her three major screen roles on the fourth season of British spy series The Avengers, playing Emma Peel. Peel was an action heroine with a line in witticisms, engaged in a constant battle of comebacks and ambiguous tension with her co-star Patrick Macnee (playing John Steed). The Avengers was a huge success, one of the few UK shows which also aired in prime-time in the United States, but Rigg was unhappy with being paid only a quarter or so the amount of her co-star. For her second season she argued and won a big pay increase, but news of the dispute leaked to the press and Rigg was castigated in the tabloids for being greedy, despite still being paid less than Macnee. She quit the show after the fifth season ended in 1968.

Although the move was not seen as helpful for her career, it surprisingly paid off when she was cast in the next James Bond film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), as Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo. She was the love interest for James Bond (George Lazenby in his sole outing in the role) but rather than a typical "Bond girl" she was presented as Bond's intellectual equal, winning his genuine respect. She and Bond marry, but in a memorable twist she is killed at the end of the film (this was actually material shot for the start of the next film, Diamonds Are Forever, but Lazenby quitting the role caused them them to be moved back into Majesty). Arguably Teresa has a greater impact on Bond's life than any of his other partners, and is the only one to be referred to (if often obliquely) in multiple other films.

Rigg continued to act on stage and on screen in both the UK and USA, and maintained a steady stream of appearances, including an acclaimed performances in Evil Under the Sun (1982). Between 1989 and 2003 she hosted the PBS television series Mystery! Always happy to play for laughs as well as in more serious roles, she appeared in The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and sent up both herself and co-star Daniel Radcliffe in Extras (2006).

In 2013 Rigg starred in Doctor Who, in the episode The Crimson Horror, alongside her daughter Rachael Stirling. Rigg then chalked up her final iconic role when she was cast as Lady Olenna Tyrell, the "Queen of Thorns," in the third season of Game of Thrones. She reprised the role across five seasons, becoming the nemesis of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). Her character was killed off in the seventh season.

During her career she was nominated for three Tony Awards and seven Emmy Awards, winning one (in 1997 for her role in Rebecca). She also won two BAFTAs during her career.

AMC confirms the end of THE WALKING DEAD

 AMC have announced that The Walking Dead will end in 2022 after airing its 11th season, which will be super-sized as a result, with 24 episodes as opposed to the usual run of 16 episodes.

The Walking Dead began airing in 2010 under the stewardship of Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). Based on Robert Kirkman's successful comic book series - which ran for 193 issues between 2003 and 2019 - the series follows a band of survivors in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, which mostly takes place off-screen. The focal character is Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a sheriff who is caught up in the apocalypse along with his family, best friend and some random other survivors. Over the course of the show, the initial band of survivors changes composition many times (until only two actors from Season 1 are still in the regular cast in Season 11) and it evolves from a desperate, isolated band to a group of community-leaders and nation-builders. The zombies, although everpresent, decline as the main threat in favour of other human communities of varying degrees of morality and corruption.

The show quickly became the biggest thing on television for several years, until being displaced by HBO's Game of Thrones. Recent seasons have seen sharp declines in viewing figures and critical appreciation, but with an ending in sight and a climax to build towards (which for various reasons will have to be very different to the ending in the comic book), it'll be interesting to see if the show can win back some sceptical, long-departed fans.

The show's first spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, is continuing to air on AMC and a second spin-off, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, set ten years after the apocalypse, is due to launch in the next couple of months. World Beyond is a limited series planned to run for just two seasons. AMC have also confirmed they will be launching a third spin-off, which will follow the adventures of Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), the most popular characters from The Walking Dead and the last two Season 1 characters standing. A series of TV movies focusing on Rick Grimes is also in the planning stages.

AMC is also developing Tales of the Walking Dead, an anthology series set in the same universe involving both new and old characters from different points in the series timeline.

First full-length DUNE trailer released

After a great deal of build-up, the first full-length trailer for Denis Villeneuve's take on Frank Herbert's Dune is here.

The trailer was preceded by a presentation led by Stephen Cobert in which he talked to the main cast and director Denis Villeneuve.

The trailer itself, set to a version of Pink Floyd's "Eclipse", opens with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) discussing his prescient visions of Chani (Zendaya) and a great crusade that will burn across the galaxy. Paul discusses his fears with the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Chalotte Rampling), who forces him to endure a test of pain. We see Paul sparring with knives and personal shields with Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), whilst the Reverend Mother chides him that he will inherit too much power and he must learn how to rule others as well as himself, something his ancestors never learned. Paul notes that his father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) rules an entire planet (Caladan), but he is losing it in favour of a richer one (Arrakis, known as Dune). The Reverend Mother warns that he will lose that world as well, as Arrakis is a deathtrap. We see the confrontation between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, involving characters such as the Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), Stilgar (Javier Bardem), the Beast Rabban (David Bautista) and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). The trailer ends with Paul and his mother, Jessica, confronting one of the great sandworms of Arrakis.

Dune is currently scheduled - pandemic permitting - to hit cinemas globally on 18 December this year.

New DUNE film gets yet another teaser for its trailer

The first full-length trailer for Denis Villeneuve's new film version of Dune drops tomorrow. Having already given us a taste of the trailer (via a cinema-only teaser airing alongside Tenet), they've now given us a second teaser for the trailer in the form of Paul Atreidets (Timothee Chalamet) voicing the infamous Litany Against Fear.

All very impressive, with what appears to be Hans Zimmer's score crashing over the title card. But I think we're ready for the main trailer tomorrow, and the film itself which (pandemic permitting) will drop on 18 December.

Black Sails: Season 3

Following their betrayal in Charles Town, Flint and the crew of the Walrus have embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution against pirate-chasers and magistrates along the coast of the New World and in the islands, sparking widespread anger in England. An enterprising and ambitious British expedition to retake Nassau is launched, whilst the formidable Edward Teach - the infamous Blackbeard - returns to the island to resume his friendship with Charles Vane.

Following the bloody carnage which ended Season 2 of Black Sails, the third season opens with a much more wide-ranging and ambitious storyline, one that ranges from London to the coast of North America and back to the Bahamas, taking in events from before the show began (revolving around Teach and Hornigold) as well as pushing the story forwards more definitively.

The result is yet another extremely strong season for the show, being one that is rooted in superb character development, some remarkable action setpieces (the writers gaining confidence that the CG can deliver the epic naval battles they're asking for) and some great storytelling. In the storm sequences in the second episode, the show breaks new ground in the level of production value that can be expected from TV shows.

There are a few issues. It takes a long time for the crew of the Walrus to get involved in the action back in Nassau, part of the problem of having established Flint and Silver as such formidable protagonists that the audience would have a hard time believing they couldn't deal with any problem that emerged, but also needing them to get back in the fight quickly and having a realistic shot at dealing with overwhelming ods. The result is some wheel-spinning and convenience (the arrival of an experience pirate warship and a ready-made army of ex-slaves feels a bit too easy), which the show quickly bounces back from.

Black Sails steps up a notch in its final episodes, not being afraid to axe major, long-running characters and ramping up the stakes and tension to a new degree. The new castmembers, particularly the mighty Ray Stevenson (Rome) as Blackbeard and Luke Roberts (a brief but memorable turn as Ser Arthur Dayne in Game of Thrones) as the British commander Woodes Rogers, are excellent and help broaden the scope of the show to its benefit.

Season 3 of Black Sails (****½) might be, by a hair, the strongest season of the show. It balances fine character work with exceptional action and politics with practicalities. The show is available to watch via Amazon Prime in the UK and in the USA via Starz.

The Matrix Revolutions

The AIs and machines are preparing for a final assault on Zion, the last surviving stronghold of the human race. Neo has been offered the chance to spare humanity from annihilation by rebooting the Matrix, an act which will start everything - the war, Zion, the prophecy - again from scratch, but has refused. With humanity's lifespan now measured in hours, Neo in a coma and the Matrix itself being overrun by the rogue Agent Smith program, it appears that all hope has been lost.

The Matrix Revolutions is a curious movie. If The Matrix was the paradigm-shifting, classic original which blended cyberpunk and Hong Kong cinema, then The Matrix Reloaded was the bigger, faster, "more!" sequel with more fights, more explosions, more CGI and more scope and scale. Also a lot more exposition, and hundreds of times more Hugo Weaving (the film asked us, "How much Hugo Weaving is too much Hugo Weaving?" and still never found a satisfactory answer). The Matrix Revolutions then has to be the weird one, starting off with a strange sequence with Neo lost in the Matrix before he is rescued (in a surprisingly non-drawn out manner) by his friends. From there the crew splits in two, with one team racing back to Zion before it comes under attack by the Sentinel army and the other making its way to the machine city, Zero One, to try to broker a peace. Much of the rest of the film is split between the adventures of the two hovercraft and the defenders in Zion.

This structure is fine as far as it goes, but it does rather obviously have a flaw: not a lot of the film (apart from the very start and the very ending) takes place in the Matrix itself, which given that's what the whole trilogy is about feels weird. Instead we're spending a lot of time with characters we've barely met or seen, apart from Morpheus who really doesn't have a lot to do in the movie (you start to realise why so many stories kill the "wise old mentor" character once the protagonist and thus the story outgrows them).

We do get some great action set pieces, such as the Mjolnir's running battle with a Sentinel fleet through miles of underground tunnels, and the assault on Zion is impressively apocalyptic, even if the script is writing cheques that 2003 CGI can't quite cash. The scenes in which thousands of Sentinels sweep through the Zion Dock and there's so many of them they look like a liquid is impressive, albeit somewhat nonsensical (and it's unclear why, if the Sentinels can do that, they don't just scour the Dock clean in a matter of seconds). The film succeeds in ramping up the stakes, although the fact that none of our regular characters are involved in this battle does remove some of the dramatic tension.

Neo and Trinity get a rough ride in the film, having to battle a human possessed by Agent Smith (Ian Bliss - as Bane - doesn't get enough plaudits for his spot-on impression of Hugo Weaving's Smith) before hitting (rater literally) Zero One and confronting the machines' governing core AI, the amusingly-named Deus Ex Machina. For those who enjoy the Matrix films because they get to see Keanu Reeves kicking a lot of butt, Reeves has surprisingly little of that to do in this movie before the big finale. The ending is also surprising, with perhaps the lack of a massive, apocalyptic finale that people were expecting. Instead, the film draws for its resolution on the idea of an negotiated settlement, a deal between humans and the machines, rather than the machines being wiped out altogether.

This resolution disappointed a lot of fans - who wanted a more definitive, final ending rather than what felt like setup for more sequels - but it does have some virtues. The overwhelming superiority of the machines makes any kind of outright human victory over them implausible in the extreme, so resolving the story in another, logical way which was well-established beforehand is a good move. It also pays off the fans who watched The Animatrix beforehand, which made it clear that the machines are thinking, feeling, sentient beings who have very good reasons to hate and distrust humanity, and the war isn't as one-sided as it seems. Of course, for the 99% of viewers who hadn't (and probably still haven't now) seen The Animatrix, it's an altogether less resonant conclusion.

There are plenty of other things to like about The Matrix Revolutions, such as the lack of overlong, overwrought martial arts scenes (something that bogged down Reloaded), replaced by more realistic fistfights outside the Matrix; the top score (this film easily has the best original score of the three, and the least reliant on pre-existing songs); the relatively intelligent (if not entirely emotionally satisfying) finale; and the reasonably impressive action set-pieces. There are also other things to dislike: some of the elements in the ending are not entirely clear (is Neo dead or not?), the personal stakes in the Zion battle are low (we don't really know these people very well) and, although the film is trying to respect the audience's intelligence by not spelling out every little thing, sometimes this results in obfuscation. For example, I spent ages trying to work out what the machines were doing to Neo's body and how that saved the day before I realised they were activating the source code in the One program, resulting in the Matrix rebooting and removing the "infection" in the process. In short, doing exactly what the Architect told us it would do in the previous movie. It's a smarter ending than I first gave it credit for, but it still feels not well-communicated.

The Matrix Revolutions (***½) can't hold a candle to the tight focus and wild inventiveness of the original film, but it's still a watchable and entertaining action movie, and has both better pacing and a stronger structure than The Matrix Reloaded, and far less overwrought fight scenes. So much of the film taking place outside of the Matrix itself is a bit of a risk, confirming that the "real" post-apocalyptic future is less interesting than it might first appear, but broadly speaking the movie works okay and delivers an interesting, if underwhelming finale. I'm interested in seeing where Lana Wachowski can take the franchise in the forthcoming fourth film in the series. The film is available as part of a box set with its predecessors in the UK and USA.