Horribly disappointing conclusion to a trilogy that never should have been

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2003)

**Warning, spoilers ahead**
You know, it's after movies like this that I shake my head and think to myself, "What the HELL were they thinking?!" The Matrix Revolutions is so stuck in its own contrived and pretentious self-importance, that the writer/director duo apparently forgot about everything that made the first movie such a brilliant piece of work such as CHARACTERS and PLOT. How about instead of wooden caricatures that talk like something out of a bad Star Trek episode, you give us people interesting enough for us to actually care about? Morpheus, Trinity, and Agent Smith, are barely given any screen time, for example. Most of the movie focuses on the main battle between the machines and the humans, but, get this, not a SINGLE SOLITARY main character even takes part in the battle! By the time the embarrassing conclusion rolled along, I wanted to cry. This ending is so laughably conceived, so pathetically executed, that it had me looking back on the second installment of the Matrix series with fond memories. If you know the story of Jesus, you know how this movie turns out. The directors even went so far as to put Keanu Reeves in a cruciform position with a melodramatic latin chorus blaring distractingly in the background -- I almost halfway expected to see fanatical survivors running around screaming and yelling about the soon to come rapture and return of their "savior." This movie will be no doubt compared to classics such as "The Wizard of Oz," "Star Wars," and "Lord of the Rings." All of them follow the same archetype. The difference is that where others succeeded, this one fails miserably. How would you feel if at the end of Star Wars, instead of Luke defeating his father and having the emperor killed, instead of the Death Star being blown up, instead Luke "sacrificed himself" for the rebellion, and in turn the emperor said "ok, I guess I'll leave you guys alone now" and the Death Star went away and never bothered anybody again? Yeah, that's how I felt at the end of this movie. This never should have been a trilogy. The first movie was good enough. Now, because of this debacle of a film, its legacy will be forever tainted. Absolutely pathetic.