hen last we left our intrepid rebels, Trinity (Moss) had been saved, Neo (Reeves) was in a coma, Morpheus (Fishburne) had lost his faith, the Nebuchadnezzar had been destroyed and Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) had gone missing. And the machines are still boring straight into the heart of Zion, the last human settlement.
On The Hammer, one of two remaining hovercraft, Morpheus and Trinity receive a message from inside the matrix. Seraph (Collin Chou) tells them that the Oracle (Mary Alice, stepping in for the late Gloria Foster) has some news for them. Neo is in trouble.
After knocking out a group of Sentinels, Neo's consciousness has somehow found its way to the Train Station, a netherworld between the machine world and the matrix. The only way to escape is through the Trainman (Bruce Spence). And the only way to the Trainman is through the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), the vengeful Frenchman who has put out a bounty on Trinity, Neo and Morpheus.
Seraph leads Trinity and Morpheus to Club Hell, the underground lair where the Merovingian holds court with his duplicitous wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci). A gunfight ensues, as a result of which the Merovingian agrees to help them.
Back in the matrix, Neo learns from the Oracle that Agent Smith (Weaving) has grown more powerful than ever. Can Neo save Zion? Only he knows, she says.
Meanwhile, back in Zion, Cmdr. Lock (Harry Lennix) has grim news for the ruling council. The machines will breach the hovercraft dock. He will muster the settlement's army of massive armored personnel units, or APUs, to make a stand, but the outlook is bleak.
The Hammer finds Niobe's ship, the Logos, and prepares to return to Zion for the final battle. But Neo decides his destiny lies elsewhere: in the heart of the enemy, the Machine City itself.
A laundry list of unanswered questions
The Matrix Revolutions, the final chapter of the Wachowski brothers' epic SF trilogy, has finally arrived, and the climax and denouement are surprisingly anticlimactic. Though the movie promises to answer all questions raised by the two highly ambitious earlier installments, the movie focuses mainly on kick-ass action and turgid war drama, with the obligatory resolution of the Neo/Trinity romance. Viewers will leave the theater appreciating the technical wizardry of the enterprise, but with the sense that the Matrix franchise has completely lost any shock of the new. We've been there, done that.
On the plus side, the baffling philosophical ruminations of Reloaded have been pushed into the background, and Revolutions delivers virtually nonstop action after an early, plodding setup. The directors, aided by an army of technicians and visual-effects artists, intercut three suspenseful narratives effectively, and the extreme SF action sets a new standard for films, as promised.
In particular, the deafening battle against the machine invasion of Zion dazzles. It starts at a high level and just gets bigger from there. Faced with almost too much to take in on a first viewing, the viewer eventually surrenders to the velocity of otherwordly images, marveling at the magnitude of the virtual cinema. This is marred only by creaky dialogue that would have been laughable in a 1940s-era World War II movie.
Similarly, a chase involving The Hammer through the tunnels of the real world raises the bar for SF chase scenes. Fans who were amazed by a similar pursuit in the animated Final Flight of the Osiris will be all the more surprised by this one, which is several orders of magnitude more complex.
Neo and Trinity's final mission to the Machine City has its own thrills, as does the final rain-drenched fight between Neo and Agent Smith. But the romantic scenes between Trinity and Neo draw unfortunate comparisons with the wooden romance of Star Wars: Episode II.
Otherwise, it's odd how quickly an audience can become accustomed to sequences that blew the mind only four years ago. Some of the early scenes in Revolutions—such as the assault on Club Hell—are so reminiscent of earlier ones that they have almost no effect on an attentive viewer. It truly is time for us to leave the Matrix.
