An imaginatively apt final instalment.

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2003)

N.B.: POTENTIAL SPOILERS
Philosophically, Revolutions works on the premises laid out in the first two instalments, answering some of the questions they raised and leaving others deliberately unanswered, which is consonant with the trilogy's postmodern outlook. What the third film proposes is that for the world to continue at all, both humans and machines must go on. By annihilating Agent Smith at the cost of his own life, Neo enables the temporary continuation of both species. The salvation of Zion suggests that unplugged humans may indeed manage to survive. Yet, the continuation of the human race epends no less crucially on the perpetuation of the Matrix, for the majority of people simply could not endure outside the simulation and its ephemeral rewards. Thus, whilst rounding off the narrative by confirming Neo's prophesied role, the movie makes it quite clear that the resolution is far from conclusive: the Matrix itself cannot - must not - be annihilated, and this entails the ongoing possibility of imbalances and anomalies corrupting the system.
It is also crucial to remember, in this regard, that Agent Smith is neither a human being nor a machine but rather Neo's negative computational alter ego - the Zero to Neo's One. Indeed, the characters' roles are perhaps best understood with reference to the digital computer's disarmingly simple binary logic (a logic which informs the Matrix narrative right from the point at which Morpheus asks Neo to choose between the red and the blue pills in the first movie). The usefulness of approaching the characters in this way, rather than on the basis of a humanistic model, is attested to by the `Superbrawl'. Clearly, it is not out of sporting fairness that Smith chooses to fight Neo single-handedly and consigns his billions of clones to the status of passive onlookers.
In fact, the final showdown - a far more decisive chapter in the series than the cartoonishly euphoric `Burly Brawl' presented in Reloaded - must be played out in accordance with the rules of the simulation in which it occurs and, ultimately, the only value that truly obtains in a digitized environment is the confrontation of 0 and> 1.
The final instalment of the trilogy is a logical corollary of the situations mapped out by its predecessors. It supplies a denouement congruous with what has gone before but steers clear of definitive endings: the peace is a precarious accomplishment, and the fairytale element permeating the climaxes of the first and the second films is peremptorily denied, as the main characters responsible for the achievement of that peace will emphatically not be there to enjoy it. If Reloaded introduced Eros to the Matrix universe, Revolutions could be said to dramatize the inextricability of Eros from Thanatos.
Technologically, the third film fully confirms the trilogy's revolutionary contribution to film-making through the deployment of virtual cinematography. As the boundaries of the cinematically feasible are innovatively stretched, the very status of reality in a culture, such as ours, that is increasingly steeped in digital technology is simultaneously called into question. Like its predecessors, Revolutions suggests that in constructing complex visions by recourse to digital technology, cinema is capable of questioning the reality level of the world outside the auditorium.
The instability of the parameters of the real is emphasized, in Revolutions, by the ideation of virtual locations not seen in the prequels - most notably: the Carrollian `limbo' between the Matrix and the Machine City in which Neo finds himself trapped at the beginning of the film; the Escheresquely fabulous Machine City itself, to which Neo and Trinity travel and where the hero makes a pact with the machines; and the Merovingian's strobe-washed bondage nightclub, 'Hell'. > The third movie concurrently elaborates the growing convergence of cinema and videogames, especially in the Siege sequence, whereby the distance between the two media is rapidly shrinking in favour of a novel form of technoludism. Some commentators have argued that in deliberately adopting a visual style derived from the register of computer games, the final instalment's main sequences damage the ability to suspend disbelief. However, it could be argued that what the Wachowskis sought to encourage right from the start was not the suspension of disbelief but the suspension of the suspension of disbelief. This is attested to not only by the employment of videogame-inspired techniques but also by the incorporation of the highly stylized visual languages of comic books, graphic novels, manga and animÃ©.
The ending of the trilogy will certainly give rise to many theories and speculations amongst zealous Matrix fans, even if for a number of viewers Revolutions has not turned out to be quite what they expected it to be (whatever that was) prior to its simultaneous worldwide release on 5 November 2003. Perhaps, the people who are most likely to enjoy the film are those who are prepared to leave their expectations at home, and to approach it not as if it were a standalone movie but as part of a bigger picture - which is precisely what it is.
It is also noteworthy, for the record, that when Reloaded was unleashed, back in May 2003, it was branded by several journalists as a `disappointment', yet this statement was soon disproved by both the movie's reviews and its box-office grossing.
Those who have found Revolutions `disappointing' may to some extent be repeating an established trend. Moreover, critics that object to the inclusion of philosophical ruminations in both sequels would plausibly have derided the films as mindless pulp had they not contained those scenes; concurrently, critics that dislike the large-scale action sequences might have abhorred a weightier emphasis on the moments of speculation and self-reflection. The art of criticism rests on an ancient dictum: `heads I win; tails you lose.'
Ultimately, it is the coalescence of unprecedentedly slick action pieces and apparently lofty yet also tongue-in-cheek philosophical perorations that gives the trilogy its distinctive visual and conceptual identity - and all three films contribute in their own different ways to this accomplishment.