Awesome ... as in awesomely bad

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2003)

To date, I have yet to have walked out of a movie in disgust. Watching "The Matrix Revolutions", sadly, sent leave-impulses coursing through me during the movie which I had to fight to overcome. Ladies and gentlemen, it is THAT bad.
*MILD SPOILERS*
The treat of the original "Matrix" was just that: the Matrix itself. The characters are much more interesting within the Matrix, the color palette is more vivid, the story itself becomes a mystery, twisting and turning through the various corridors. Even in "Reloaded", the Matrix still stands front-and-center as the venue of choice in the movie. Sure, the rave scene sucked, and yes, the philoso-babble was completely overplayed. Tragically, Morpheus' slow decent into utter irrelevancy begins with this movie. There are flaws -- deep flaws -- that lower "Reloaded" several steps below the original, and yet in the end, the movie still revolves around the Matrix. Within the Matrix (as always), an engrossing set of circumstances unfold, including the highly-charged (and completely enjoyable) freeway chase scene, the Smith clone battles and the Trinity/Smith showdown, amongst others. No, it wasn't as good as the first, but unlike some posters, I found it to earn a passing grade as a decent and sometimes spectacular sequel.
The third movie fails on ALL counts. Bizarrely, the Wachowskis almost completely abandon the Matrix in this movie. The ONE thing that separates this film from another run-of-the-mill sci-fi action movie, and they ditch it. Instead, we get dour, dingy characters who we care surprisingly little for preparing to battle an inexorable swarm of sentinels that, perversely, I began to root for halfway through the movie. The sentinel battle was nowhere NEAR as cool as some people might have you believe. The effects were ok, but definitely NOT "jaw-dropping". We get to see giant swarms of these things getting mowed down by RoboCop lookalike machines, which makes the tense ending of the original "Matrix" (where, allegedly, *only* EMPs can kill sentinels) a complete fraud. The cliched scene where the morphed "face" talks to Neo was so bad that it made me yearn for the rave scene in "Reloaded". The Trinity death scene is so absurd that I had to take care not to burst out laughing in the theater. She's lying there, you sense something is wrong but you can't tell precisely what, then the camera pans out and she's impaled in three places. You think if you were impaled that you might, you know, scream your fool head off in agony? How about bleed profusely? Instead, she and Neo instead have a soft, totally unconvincing conversation (their chemistry is zero) and then she dies. Lastly, the Smith/Neo battle is bad, anticlimactic and underwhelming.
What a terrible way to end the franchise. Don't listen to those that say this movie was enjoyable, enlightening, questioned the purpose of existence, etc. It was an overlong, overloud, overblown yet incredibly underwhelming fraud.
The Matrix: 8.5 The Matrix Reloaded: 6.5 The Matrix Revolutions: 3.5
See the first two but -- trust me -- don't bother with this one. This is one of those rare cases where you're better off not knowing how it all ends.