Matrix Convolutions. "Resolutions" would have been better

Rating: 4/10 (14 November 2003)

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. Before you stop reading to avoid finding out the ending that supposedly wraps up the issues raised in the first two Matrix movies, let me suggest that you'd do better to just make up your own resolution. It will make more sense than what you see in this movie.
And for those of you that already saw the movie & thought the convolutions of the script were evidence of a great & complex movie, stop working so hard to reconcile this script. You're putting more energy into this than the script writers did.
First of all, the symbolic & philosophical ideas that worked for me in the 1st 2 movies got diluted here. Neo, AKA Jesus Christ, is going to sacrifice himself to give us back our freedom to choose, even in the matrix. Smith, who already represented the matrix society's need for choiceless conformity, fittingly clones himself to fill that conformity. Would've been nice if this movie spent more than just the last 5 minutes on these ideas.

Too much of the movie is spent on fight scenes involving myriad waves of squid repeated over & over ad nauseum. I'd rather see the myriad Smiths. In fact, I think anything in the matrix beats watching World War Squid. This Human Vs Squid War, reminiscent of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" in its squidliness, leads to a climax of Neo Vs the anti-Neo Smith, or is it an anti-climax of anti-writers, culminating in the antithesis of logic? ...*Big-Time Spoilers follow*...
For a movie series that prides itself on logic, the ending is completely illogical. Although Neo returns choice to the people in the matrix, he apparently is also rescuing the matrix from the demise left by Smith. The machines agree - scout's honor - to back off if Neo rescues them from Smith. I have several problems with this resolution. (1) If the matrix was designed to keep humans pacified in order to make good batteries of them, a world of only Smiths mean only good things for Neo's buddies in Zion. (a) Either the humans have all died (since we were told that if you die in the matrix you die in the real world) & there are already no more fuel sources for the machines, or (b) the humans have all woken up because they were released from their dream-state. Either way, they're no longer helping the machines. And (2), that crap about the machines willingly backing off from finishing off the humans because of their "deal" with Neo makes no sense. There is no advantage gained for the machines by this "truce" since the machines easily have the upper hand at this point. Are we to now believe these machines suddenly have a morality when it comes to dealing with humans, whose only interaction with the machines has been as batteries or battle casualties?
Also, there are other problems... (1) As a friend of mine warned me before I saw this movie, there is no valid explanation as to how Neo gains powers over the machines in the real world. (2) If the machines are so smart that they can turn the human race into copper-top zombies to serve at their ionic pleasure, how come they can't simply (a) re-program the matrix themselves or (b) return it to an earlier state, or (c) just remove or replace the Smiths programatically? Are we to believe that the millions of machines that conquered the surface of Earth can't come together to write a better program than a man from 200 years earlier? And what's at risk anyway, the Smith program already took over the matrix?