Weakest installment in a terrific trilogy

Rating: 6/10 (6 November 2003)

In THE MATRIX, the Wachovski brothers created a revolutionary action movie that bent the laws of physics and questioned the line between illusion and reality. In the second film - THE MATRIX RELOADED - the action continued to be fresh, with one of the finest car chase sequences ever filmed, and the exposition of the mythology and the dialogue was transcendant.
The final film neither breaks new territory with its action sequences nor matches the story-telling of the first two. The action essentially consists of good guys in war machines firing tremendous amounts of bullets at octopi-like Sentinels; it has netiher theimagination of the first film nor the cat-and-mouse intelligence of the second.
This film also doesn't answer several key questions raised in the first film. For instance, why will the computers maintain an uneasy peace with the humans? What's keepign them from breaking their agreement with Neo? The Architect gives an answer at teh end of the film that suggests that computers - unlike humans - keep their word; yet, computers have evidenced no such moral code in previous movies, and have no compunction about enslaving and murdering humans.
Another nagging question is: if Zion is in the real, physical world, and not in some computer-generated virtual reality (as the finale of the RELOADED sequel suggested), why are the computers attacking the humans in Zion with "conventional" machines? Why not simply drop a nuclear bomb into the dome of Zion?
Finally, the film falls into formulaic patterns of "bad guy shoots at the good guy but can't hit him; bad guy pounds good guy in a climactic martial arts battle sequence, but then good guy finds inner stregth and fights back."
I found no revelations here, no surprises, no answers that i hadn't intuited at teh end of the second film.
All in all, a passable film, though one that disappointed great expectations.