Long one. Many spoilers.

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2003)

It's one of those movies that you walk out of thinking "damn, that was a lot better than I expected" until you take a moment to think about the entire plot that resulted in this one. If you watch the three movies in sequence, you'll realize that the three seem like a story told by someone who doesn't know how he wants it to end. Someone told me "they intended a trilogy." Well if they did, they intended it without having written it out.
I'll start out with the good. Smith is badass. Period. Everything with him is awesome. The way the clones were EVERYWHERE watching the fight looked cool as all hell, and the fight itself was well done. I liked the environment of the Train Man. The Bane revelation was awesome. The creator was one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a movie.
Now, the bad. The explanation for the Oracle having a new actress was awful. I would have easily bought that we simply had a new Oracle with no memory of the first, not that it was the same one in a different "shell". Whatever.
The idea of the war was pretty bad also. At the end of the first Matrix, the idea was that Neo would lead us to the liberation of the human race and that we would defeat the machines and get our planet back. I guess the Wachowski brothers decided that wouldn't work, because now the idea is that we just want our little hole near the earth's core and leave us alone you can have the surface thanks.
The Architect scene from Reloaded stands the test as being awesome, since everything he said happened. This is the shortest summary possible of the movie: Neo and Trinity die, Zion gets blown all to hell, Smith vanishes, and the Matrix reboots, starting all over. Now, maybe I'm not catching something, but how can the Architect promise to liberate any humans who want to? If the machines need humans to operate... it seems to me that maybe a few weeks after they all get liberated the machines are going to want some humans back. So hooray, we start from square one.
I suppose that's the intent of the movie, if you want to look at it as an apocalyptic story: we lose, we can't win, and the best we can hope for are a few glimmers of peace between war.
But there's other stuff that makes no sense, such as Neo being able to blow up everything in the real world, but back in the Matrix he gets his ass kicked every time he's in a fight. And maybe it's just me, but after following the cable lines and doing all that, and then we find out that we can get rid of them by just flying above them, why didn't we just fly above them? Apparently they can't go in the sky, so get our asses up in the sky.
And I also think the humans should have more than just one of those damn EMPs. One of them took out that whole swarm of sentinels and the two drill things, so just have a few more. Hell, fly up in the sky and start dropping those things like firebombs over Germany. If I was in charge, this war would have ended pretty fast.
Speaking of stuff ending fast, Trinity's death sequence took up nearly 75% of the movie. 20% was the big fight in Zion, and the remaining 5% was some hit-and-miss storyline development. The good storyline developments, as in all three movies, were explanations of what keeps the Matrix going and what its various parts are. The bad parts are when we start up with this war crap. I remember in the first movie a single sentinel or two being simply disastrous. Now all of a sudden a ship can outrun and escape a few thousand of them. And don't even try to tell me that in a few months our technology got that much better.
I also felt no sympathy for the girl. She's a program, I don't care if we save her. Actually, I want her dead. And her parents, Smith, the Oracle, and everyone else. They're the Matrix, the idea is to get rid of them, not save them. I don't care if her purpose is to make rainbows, she's still on the side of the machines.
I, honestly, would have much preferred the trilogy to not have moved so quickly. If the second movie had involved Neo pulling people out of the Matrix and slowly gathering the army, and the third was the army preparing for war, and we were left with a ready-to-roll army about to wage war on the machines, with a glimmer of hope that we would win, I would have been 100% satisfied. In fact, in each succeeding Matrix movie, we're in the Matrix less and less. In the first one, the bulk of the war was fought in the Matrix itself. The second was half in and half out. The third was entirely out, with the very beginning (retrieving Neo and the Oracle stuff) and very end (fighting Smith and the Oracle with the Architect) being our only glimpses in there.
Neo being able to control the Matrix actually ended up being pretty pointless. The only thing it got us was a few answers out of the French guy. The entire war was fought in the real world.
In fact, the only thing Neo did in the Matrix that had any bearing on the plot was make Smith really powerful so they could destroy each other later. Actually that was all Neo seemed to do. He showed up, the Matrix made Smith to balance things out, and they killed each other, along the way completely destroying Zion and at the end giving us the impression that the machine would let us live in our hole for a while. That's all that happened in the end. In exchange for help destroying Smith (which only existed because Neo existed), the machines let humans survive. Actually, had Neo been killed anywhere else in the movie, Smith would have died and the machines would have killed everyone.
Let's review the Neo/Smith/Creator conundrum. Neo was created, creating Smith. As one increased in power, so did the other. Smith was powerful enough to take over everything, including the world. The machine saw this and let Neo fight in exchange for safety for a while. Neo and Smith are equal opposites. In order for Smith to be capable of taking over the world, Neo must be capable of stopping him. It's not like a situation of "Smith can do this, let's hope Neo is strong enough." If one is capable, so is the other. If Neo dies, Smith can't take over the world and he dies. Actually, not "if". If you stopped to think about it, Neo -COULDN'T- win that fight. And Smith didn't really win, either. Had they just kept fighting, it would have gone on forever, they were complete equals. So Neo let himself be destroying knowing Smith would die also. You following? There was no mystery about that fight. They both were going to die, it was foretold as soon as the Oracle said "Smith is your negative". Why? Hell, it's math. What happens on one side happens on the other. Neo dies, Smith dies. Neo lives, Smith lives. In order for it to end, both had to die. And as a result, we got absolutely nowhere.
ACTUALLY, Neo's presence totally screwed everything up. In the FIRST Matrix, the machines weren't attacking. The only danger of them was when ships ventured out to liberate humans and go scavenging. Neo shows up and the machines wage war on Zion. So now we've determined that Neo accomplished nothing. Let's break that down a bit, okay?
1) A few humans are still alive near the Earth's core where the machines can't go (but they do later, so we'll ignore that), and live a miserable life, but aren't attacked. Meanwhile, everyone else is still in the Matrix.
2) Neo shows up, Smith happens, and the machines wage war on Zion.
3) Neo and Smith both die, Zion is totally destroyed, and the Matrix reboots.
4) A few humans are still alive in Zion, live a miserable life, but aren't attacked. Everyone else is in the Matrix, but now they can be liberated if they want. At least until the machines lose too much power and need them back, then they'll wage war again.
If I had to grade Revolutions, I'd give it a 7. Totally objective review. If I had to grade it in terms of how it took the story along, it would get a much lower score. Sorry to make you read all that (if you did at all), but that's my review.

PART 2: Many of my complaints still hold (the shoddy explanation of the new Oracle actress, why only one damn EMP, those things), but my idea that the plot as a whole went nowhere, though true, could have been the intention.
I truly doubt that, since the ending was portrayed as though that was the victory that they had all hoped for, but if you back up a bit and think about it, it's a pretty cool apocalyptical message: The machines win, and the best we can hope for is to be allowed to survive.
Unfortunately the directors/writers made it seem like that was a "victory" and gave us that damn rainbow ending. That might have been my problem. After three movies, we still lose. This "one" was no more special than the others. And, as such, we'll come across another, and the whole thing will start over again.
Although, the thing I don't get is that if there was more than one "one", why in the first Matrix, they determined that all this had happened a few hundred years ago? Are all these "ones" happening and Zion is being destroyed and rebuilt happening every year or so? Why didn't Morpheus know? If he didn't, that means that it would have had to have been before his time, and I doubt "ones" were happening a few weeks after the Matrix was up and operational.
Actually, a whole lot of the explanation would have had to have taken up MUCH more time than Morpheus had said. Logically, there are kids around in Zion now (The Kid, for instance), who would remember Neo if another "one" comes around. We didn't get any indication that they recognized what was going on, so they must pop up every hundred years or so. As such, there's no way there could be any before him, unless the layered Matrix theory holds true. In that case there could be a "one" in Zion right now, and the cycle will continue forever until the end of time.