The end of the revolution: Matrix #3.
As in the first two movies, the Revolutions characters speak as if their every utterance were encased in word balloons drawn with a fat-tipped Sharpie?particularly Morpheus, the bald mentor played by Laurence Fishburne, whose resonant bass voice could make a brownie recipe sound like the Gettysburg Address, and villainous Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), an introspective digital assassin who talks like a cross between Richard Nixon and Hamlet. At one point, Smith ponders the stupidity of all humans, who spend each day "trying desperately to justify an existence that is without purpose or meaning," after which point Neo kicks his ass.
This Marvel Comics introspection is interspersed with foot chases, hand-to-hand fights, shootouts and large-scale mechanized infantry battles. The action-to-talk ratio is much higher here than in The Matrix Reloaded, but unlike the vast majority of big-budget action adventures, the violence in this trilogy doesn't offer a break from the screenplay's ideas. Instead, it illustrates them. And in the end, that's what sets these films apart from their many imitators and competitors. As lavishly destructive and willfully ridiculous as the Matrix series can be, it remains defiantly (perhaps nostalgically) tied to life.
Compare this movie with visually similar comic book/videogame pictures like Spawn and Laura Croft: Tomb Raider and Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, and its virtues become much more apparent. Its action sequences are the meat that entices the videogame generation to eat its pop-intellectual vegetables. The trilogy's mythic situations, while cartoonish and mayhem-driven, resonate with modern moviegoers, and will continue to resonate long after the trilogy's buzz has faded and its fashions, music and technology have become dated.
The key question these pictures raise isn't the very 1999 query, "Are we living in reality, or an incredible simulation?" It's something more primal and timeless: "Do we run the machines, or do the machines run us?" The third installment complicates that question by suggesting that the war between man and machine may not end, as so many science fiction epics do, with humans in triumph and the machines in eclipse, but in some other way. Like a harder, smarter version of Return of the Jedi?which many of its setpieces superficially resemble?it attempts to end the series in a satisfying way while simultaneously elevating it into the pantheon of pop myth. It doesn't quite succeed, but I admire it for trying. (Warning, major plot spoilers ahead.)
The third film begins with mankind's anointed savoir, Neo (Keanu Reeves), trapped in limbo between the Matrix and the post-apocalyptic real world, where the beleaguered humans of Zion are preparing for a final battle with the machines. His limbo is a subway stop?cleaner and better-lit than the Matrix norm?where he awaits the arrival of the snaggletoothed Trainman (Bruce Spence of the Mad Max pictures), a kind of ferryman figure who can transport people from one world to the other without requiring them to jack in. In this scene, Neo meets an Indian-American family that isn't real, in the flesh-and-blood sense; they're simulations designed to make the Matrix feel more credible to human slaves who live within it. They've acquired something like free will and self-determination. These digital parents have had a daughter whose existence is purposeless within the Matrix's program and who therefore is a candidate for deletion. Here, as in the second movie, the Wachowskis shift their attention from humans who've been reduced by slavery to a machinelike state, and refocus it on the products of machines?digital creations whose artificial intelligence asks whether machines can have souls.
Exhibit A is Agent Smith, who was always a bit too introspective for a mere software program. In the second movie, he gained a degree of independence from the program, plus the ability to reproduce himself like a virus. In this movie, his power has grown to the point where he must be considered the third side in the war. He's a wild card?a two-fisted virus that exists to destroy everything in sight, and now seems to despise the pitiful humans and his machine masters in equal measure.
The Wachowskis crosscut between Smith's ascension to near-omnipotence, Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) trying to destroy the machines in their own city, and humanity's Alamo-style last stand in Zion against a swarm of Sentinels. The latter provides an excuse for one of the most intricately designed and punishingly violent large-scale action sequences in sci-fi movie history: a showdown between the humans in their biomechanical combat suits and the Sentinels that gain access to Zion via holes drilled in the city's cistern ceiling and swarm down by the thousands like enormous metallic hornets. While the humans fight valiantly?with many fleeting images of soft flesh ripped apart by hard steel?the filmmakers cut away to Morpheus and Niobe in a hovercraft, trying to reach Zion via a power tunnel to disable the machines with one of the few remaining electromagnetic pulse bombs.
Geeked-out yet? Didn't think so. It has now become unfashionable to admit enjoying the Matrix trilogy, much less admiring it. Hipsters moved on after the first one, and grumpy Boomers (and a few younger critics) took the release of the admittedly poky second installment as an excuse to proclaim that this particular emperor had no clothes?that these movies were just videogames with dialogue, or R-rated, multicultural Star Wars ripoffs, or anime with actors, or Joseph Campbell for dummies. Pick your insult.
I like these films, not just for their technological innovations, lavish action sequences, controlled compositions, deft editing and eerily focused tone, but for their unfashionable determination to connect everyday reality and pop fantasy. And I think the pop-culture backlash against them (big box office to the contrary) has been arbitrary and somewhat unfair?more a reaction against marketing hype than the movies themselves.