Did anyone notice this movie didn't really end anything?

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2003)

Basically, the main problem I had with this movie was that it promised "Everything that has a beginning has an end". That is simply not the case. Things are right back where they were at the beginning of the first movie!! The machines still have the vast majority of humans hooked up to their power plants, or whatever, they still have all their armies, squiddies, and other robots, and basically still control the world! The humans are still living in squallor under the earth with most of their race enslaved. The Matrix is still around, although it is unclear if all the inhabitants have been...uhm...Smith-ified. So were all the humans that were plugged in destroyed when Smith posessed them and was destroyed? Is the Matrix now the province of the programs alone? Is Neo dead? Are the machines going to taxi him home? Nothing is clear. It's just a train-wreck of an ending to a once promising series. After three movies, the humans haven't made one step forward in the war, and no one seems to notice! Neo didn't defeat the machines, he just stalled them and since the original goal was to free the human race, he's really accomplished nothing. In the end...If you think about it...Neo saved the Matrix from Smith! That's it!! The One saved the Matrix. Ironic, really. And now he's in a coma, Trinity's dead, and he hasn't done doo-doo. So what was the point to this whole affair? Frankly, I think he was better off processing data as Mr. Anderson.
This chapter in a steadily waning saga was little more than a mish-mash of two lame fights, (easily trumped in the first movie by the newness of everything, and the second by the amazing fight with the vampires, the Twins, and the highway chase) several new and poorly developed characters (train-guy anyone?) and some of the worst war movie cliches ever seen in modern film (the plucky kid saves the day, the hardened veteran has a soft spot for the kid, and of course they collaborate to open the door for the heroes, with the help of the pilot's girlfriend in a near-exact recreation of Han clearing the way for Luke at the first Death Star). There were even some outright mistakes. The whole opening of the movie was a mistake and a waste of time. How did Neo get out? They unplugged him when he woke up, but he was never plugged in in the first place!?! The machines can make a billion of the squiddies, but only two of the drill robots? Riiiiight. Overall, it was meandering, dull, and contrived. Enough is enough. This trilogy started out with a nuclear blast, went down to a bottle rocket, and ended with a minor gaseous disturbance in your father's Laz-E-Boy. As a fan, I'm pretty let-down.