After seeing this film, I walked away from the theater sick.  I've never seen such a great series crash and burn so badly.  I have never been so frustrated with a series since The Phantom Menace came out.  Here are is the tip of my iceberg of angst....

• Dumb title. Who was revolting?  The script was the only thing I found to be.  This was a battle between two opposing forces.  The title implies that the population of the Matrix itself would turn against their secret captors.  Don't get me wrong, I loved the battle scenes in Zion, but the title borders on deceptive.

• Plot outline.Things did not lead into one another.  Dissect Reloaded any way you want, every scene was a consequence of the preceding events.  Not so with Revolutions.  I'll deal with that point by point throughout this extended diatribe.

• The Trainman.This was a dead-end plotline and a waste of a character who might have provided significant exposition... had he been used properly.  We all want to know how the Matrix works.  This is a wasted opportunity to set up the conflict that is to follow.  Instead, it is a short-lived exercise in style.  But we saw a subway station before in the first film.  Give us something new.  The only redeeming component of this Act is the discussion with the Programs.  We discover that they have feelings, offspring, and things that we would qualify them as living.  Where does this lead?  Nowhere.  Where might (read: should) it have lead?  This would establish the most important component of the three way conflict of The Matrix vs. Neo vs. Himself.  The Ragnarok of the whole affair would conceivably lead to the opportunity for the Hero to destroy the Matrix to save humankind.  But this would mean destroying another civilization as well.  Does saving one species justify genocide of another?  This is where the audience gets caught up in the struggle, not who can hit hardest.

• The three-way conflictbetween Trinity vs. the Merovingian vs. Persephone.  Reloaded spent considerable time establishing the dangerous "game" between the latter pair.  Here, this is ignored entirely.  The Merovingian's appetite for harming the Oracle is similarly swept under the rug.  Trinity's "cut to the chase" method of dealing with these characters looks great on screen, but it is a premature evacuation from a well-developed script.  In the end, there is no resolution of the conflict with these characters.  The Matrix is restored to its pre-Smithville state, presumably with all the unsavory characters intact.  Where's the justice?  And The Matrix: Part Four is a little uncalled for, so this is hardly a resolution after putting this devoting hours to this series.

• The Architect.Here's a case where an entire chapter of a trilogy was practically dedicated to meeting what appeared to be our Ultimate Evil (read: Vader is to Smith as The Emperor is to The Architect), and they blew it.  Totally!

• The Source. Since the Architect was reduced to a supporting character, one would think that the final chapter would have us face the biggest threat: Part Godzilla, part Satan, and the complete and utter justification of paying full price to avoid encountering any spoilers before this movie made it to the dollar theater.  Our payoff?  This was the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz without the personality.  There was no development of this thing; he was just a huge talking head.  Literally!  This is not the Final Nemesis we want to see the Hero face.  The persistent (a la Close Encounters) visions of the pipeline leading back to the Machine City implied there would be something magical in the end.  What happened?

• Trinity's death.There was no foreshadowing to create any sense of resolution here.  Her death came across as a mere casualty, another waste in a film already full of mistakes.  Further, this deprives the audience of the victory in Reloaded when she is recovered (one of the most powerful moments in the movie for me, and the events leading up to her near-death are dramatically significant enough to bookend that chapter of the series, which, you will recall begins with the prophetic dream sequence).  (I will, however, admit that the music during her resurrection scene was the best in the movie as I was very tired of the endless recycling of the same three themes throughout the entire trilogy.  Or maybe I'm spoiled by decades of John Williams putting everyone else to shame.)

• Neo's death.Again, the lack of foreshadowing left the audience confused.  This failed to satisfy any thematic thread.  There is nothing to indicate that the hero must die in order to save the world.  The only explanation for this comes from the biblical allusions throughout the series (e.g. Zion, Trinity, even little things like Smith's license plate at one point making a subtle book-chapter-verse reference, etc.).  Note that the final "plug into" the Matrix represents a crucifixion (spike driven into his head, not hands/feet) and concludes with the image of Neo lying prone with arms outstretched in the classic pose.  This would work if 1) the Prophesy had not been debunked in the previous chapter and 2) there was any real indication of a Resurrection.  The battle is over; there's no room for a sequel.  Matrix Resurrected?  I think not.

• Seraph. In case you don't know him by name, this is the Asian man: part Jackie Chan, part Chow Young Fat as The Killer, and with all the Crouching Tiger moves at twice the speed.  Here is a character worth developing.  He's a corollary to the Oracle.  If we understand where he comes from, we understand more about the Matrix and the Programs that reside in it. And, hell, he looks great on screen. He's an amazing asset for when you have that battle inside the Matrix where you take on all the bad guys.  Oh, wait, they didn't bother to include that scene this time around.

• The final battlebetween Smith and Neo.  Ultimately, unless I completely misunderstood it, Neo looses.  He dies (is "assimilated" by the Smiths), but then the Machine feeds its power through him as though he was a Trojan virus, and that power (NOT Neo's!) destroys Smith and co. from within.  What was that all about?  I get the "decent into Hell" bit, but that would make the "Big Machine" God in this whole thing and Neo his son if you go for a literal interpretation, and that doesn't make any sense.  I just don't get it.

• The Morpheus/Niobe/Lock triangle.  This is never addressed.  Sure, we know how it is going to end, just the way we know how all movie romances end, but that's not what we're paying to see.  Granted, I don't want to see Lawrence Fishburn kissing anyone, but you don't build something like this across two movies just to drop the ball at the ten yard line.  And, yes, I'm disturbed by this fact enough to use a football analogy.

• Martial arts?This is the bread and butter of the trilogy, but it was in short supply in the final installment. Imagine a Star Wars movie where they have only a single, abbreviated lightsaber battle.  It just doesn't make any sense.  Compared to just the tea house scene in Reloaded, Revolutions falls far short.  The engagement between Smith and Neo lacked the energy to keep my interest and the repeated each-bigger-than-the-last explosions every time the opponents collided was as overdone as the "There's always a bigger fish" routine in Phantom Menace.  They just continually alternated between a little hand-to-hand material and the big explosions rather than pacing the fight such that there was a real climax to it.

• The sky. A similarly unresolved issue is the "blackening" of the skies.  If humanity and/or the machines are ever to prosper, this has to be addressed.  It is not.  Maybe I'm being a little too scientific here, but the planet is an energetic dead end (i.e., a closed system) unless it receives outside input within a few years.

• The dichotomy nonsense.I'm not buying the Oracle's story.  Smith and Neo are opposites?  The Oracle and the Architect are opposites?  No, they're enemies.  That's a far cry from this Yin/Yang business you're spouting, lady.  Your gaudy earrings do not make the (subliminal) case for something this story has never provided the evidence for.

• The theme of Choice.This is a major point underlying the entire premise: What distinguishes Man and Machine?  Who programs who?  Who is in Control?  The only nod to this -and such a weak one- was the exchange of Smith: "Why do you continue to fight?"  Neo: "Because I choose to."  It fails to deal with these issues in spite of devoting much exposition (the penultimate scene with the Architect, in fact!) to this theme.  This is a philosophical question with implications throughout the film's universe and well into our own, dealt with in as far-ranging areas as the legal system, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence.

• Re-Neos? The revelation in Reloaded that Neo was the sixth "anomaly" produced cyclically by the system was destructive to his significance in the eyes of the audience.  The hold-out for me was that the pattern would gain some significance in Revolutions.  It did not.  Another failure on the part of this script.  For that matter, I had a big problem with this aspect from the start.  For six "Neos" to cycle through, some memory of them would by passed on culturally, even if the population went through a bottleneck (i.e., 7 men and 14 women or whatever it was; which fails to explain the racial diversity).  This did everything to harm the story and nothing to constructively advance it.

• The Matrix. This is the core of the series.  What did we see of it?  Aside from people inexplicably running around on the ceiling and a silly latex dance club, we experience nothing of the inside of the Matrix except for the Neo/Smith battle at the end, and it is so rapidly mutated by Smith between our previous visit in Reloaded and the return in this film that we do not see any semblance of our last encounters: the unforgettable freeway chase/battles and Neo's martial arts melee at the castle.

• Neo's extra-Matrix abilities.  The explanation here for Neo's powers outside the Matrix is so contrived and thematically barren I thought I could have died!  Here's my (and I'm sure a lot of others') version of what could/should/would have happened: The original concept of the Matrix is that humans live in a world they think is real.  Once they are made aware of the unreality of their surroundings, they can manipulate them to an apparently superhuman degree.  Neo excels in this respect within the Matrix.  In fact, his abilities exceed all previous expectations in this respect.  Now, outside of the Matrix in the "real" world, he begins to tenuously manifest these abilities anew.  Same story, different setting.  The third movie should have been about him discovering that he had escaped one facade, but had not yet reached the surface.  The conclusion would have meant that he was searching for the source of the global subterfuge.  Where this could have lead may have been any number of things.  What the Matrix v.1.0 and 2.0 could have represented or what purpose they served could have been dealt with in any number of ways.  Personally, I would have enjoy something daring on the part of the filmmakers, something akin to the third act of Spielberg and Kubrick's A.I. (which, admittedly, left a lot to be desired overall).  But maybe I'm just in a Matrix.  In a few months the theaters will -surprise!- release "The Matrix Redux" and we'll find out that Chapter 3 was all just another dream sequence and we were deluded.  Somebody unplug me!

• The End. I thought the fight was to "free minds."  The only concession made to this previously main goal of the entire story cycle was the final conversation between the Oracle and Architect, an incidental, "Oh, they'll be freed."  This is after the implied foreshadowing of the power plants, the very symbol of humanity's enslavement.  "Anti-climax" is an understatement.

And in both series the third film squandered nearly everything it inherited from the second chapter.  For one thing, it went off on a dead-end detour from the main plot for the heroine to rescue the hero (Trinity for Neo as with Leia for Han at Jabba's Palace).  As with Jedi, the main cast gets the weaker, more pretentious material as when Neo visits Yoda... er, the Oracle to learn the truth before heading off to confront the Big Bad Guy.  In the meantime, for better or for worse, the best material of the film (the battlefield scenes in Zion!) was entirely in the hands of the supporting cast (Yeah, Han and Leia try to pick a freaking lock while Lando and some freak named Nien Nunb get to fly the Falconinto the new Death Star!).  Indeed, in this film Morpheus, who was a principal character for the first two films, falls into a supporting role alongside Niobe.  She and the other Zionites were the only payoff from the enormous set-up of the second chapter.  At least it wasn't a rehash of the first one as Jedi was.  And there weren't any Ewoks.

As you can probably guess, I loved Reloaded, which is where so much of my disappointment stems with regard to Revolutions.  I think the second film will eventually be regarded as the artistic triumph of the series.  Yes, the first movie was very innovative, but like Star Wars, it matured in the second installment.  It will take a while for that consensus to emerge, but I predict it eventually will. Empire Strikes Back initially felt a similar backlash, particularly since it ended on a downer, but twenty years later every film aficionado recognizes this to be fact.

As I have stated repeatedly though this litany of disgust, I had really expected Reloaded to represent the set-up for a much more intelligent follow-up.  As bad The Phantom Menace was, one thing that paradoxically made it a better film (and at least one other major critic made this point) is that Attack of the Clones made you view the entire first film as the premise on which the second was built.  Given how difficult to follow Episode II was with all the different characters and competing factions, having the first film under the audience's belt allowed easier viewing.  This helped you to appreciate the lack of action in Phantom Menace, but I'll be the first to say that nothing can ever excuse the poor direction, acting, or dialogue!

I just ran across and interesting story treatment for Revolutions over here.  It isn't perfect by any stretch (e.g., it fails to correct the atrocity that was the Trainman chapter of the film), but it represents an alternative history to the one we all know and hate.  If anyone has any alternate scripts, please send them in to me or point me to them online.  Email me here.

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