The Matrix Revolutions (2003) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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You say you want a revolution?

The Matrix Revolutions is an unsatisfying end to series that sparked the imaginations of many viewers at the dawn of the internet age. It concludes the storyline of Neo and the human resistance, but your mileage may vary.

First Impressions

The trailer for this conclusion to The Matrix trilogy features Neo confronting hundreds of Smith’s in a battle royale in the rain. Neo warns the machines that Smith is out of control, and it’s up to him to stop the rogue AI. Meanwhile, Zion and the humans fight for their lives as the Sentinels breach the dock and attack. Who lives? Who dies? And how revolutionary is The Matrix Revolutions.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Picking up immediately where the previous film left off, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) wants to check The Matrix for Neo (Keanu Reeves), who is currently comatose, even though he is not plugged in. Bane (Ian Bliss), who is also unconscious, has brainwave readings as if he’s online. Morpheus and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) log into The Matrix and visit The Oracle (Mary Alice) who says that Neo is trapped between The Matrix and the Machine world by The Trainman (Bruce Spence), in a place which resembles a subway station called Mobil Ave (an anagram of Limbo).

Neo meets a family that is using the Trainman to smuggle their daughter, Sati (Tanveer K. Atwal) from the Machine world into The Matrix because they love her. Morpheus, Trinity, and The Oracle’s bodyguard Seraph (Collin Chou) visit The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) to parley for Neo’s freedom. The Frenchman concedes when Trinity institutes a Mexican standoff. They rescue Neo and take him to The Oracle who tells Neo his power extends to The Source. She also mentions that she is tired and wants an end to the war between humans and machines.

The Oracle also warns of Smith’s (Hugo Weaving) plans to take over The Matrix. He is Neo’s opposite and will destroy everything. After Neo leaves, Smith arrives and assimilates Sati, Seraph, and The Oracle–gaining her ability to see the future. In the real world, the last human city–Zion–is only 12 hours away from being overrun by the robotic Sentinels. Neo is given the hovership Logos by Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) so he and Trinity can travel to the Machine City in a last ditch effort to stop the extermination of humanity. Morpheus, Niobe, and the remaining crew take the hovership Mjolnir (always referred to as ‘The Hammer’) back to Zion.

During these discussions, Bane–who is still possessed by a version of Smith–reawakens and kills the ship’s doctor. He hides on the Logos and attacks Neo after the ship departs. During the fight, Neo is blinded by electricity which burns out his eyes. Yet even blinded, he can still see the Machine code, and Smith, who he kills. Sentinels begin to breach Zion as Captain Mifune (Nathaniel Lees) and his forces use their robotic APU suits to shoot down as many as possible. Link’s wife Zee (Nona Gaye) works with Charra (Rachel Blackman) shooting the invaders with rockets. As the squid-like robots overtake the human forces, The Hammer–piloted in exactitude by Niobe–busts through the doors and lets loose an EMP which disables the Sentinels, but also the human machines as well.

Neo and Trinity reach the Machine City where he can see the power and yellow energy pulsing within the conduits, even while physically blinded. They are attacked by a number of machine weapons, so Neo directs Trinity to fly above the clouds. Breaching the strata, Trinity see’s the sun for the first time in her life–beautiful. The Logos is damaged and crashes, gravely injuring Trinity. She confesses to Neo that she had wished for one more chance to live–which he had already given her–before they kiss, and she dies. Neo confronts a representation of the Machines called Deus Ex Machina (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) to warn it of Smith’s plans. It does not need help from Neo.

Neo bargains for a truce with the machines if he can stop Smith, and Deus Ex Machina relents. The machines provide Neo a way to jack into The Matrix and Neo confronts Smith-Prime on a rainy street. The rogue program has assimilated every character and human in The Matrix and with The Oracle’s precognition already knows he will win. After a prolonged fight where both combatants are evenly matched, Neo realizes the inevitable and allows Smith to assimilate him. The Machines use this opening to provide a surge of power through Neo, which burns the Smith program out of The Matrix, but also kills Neo.

Keeping its promise, the Machines leave Zion. The Kid (Clayton Watson) proclaims to all citizens that Neo did it, just as Morpheus and the Prophecy predicted. The Machines carefully carry Neo’s body away. A black cat glitches on a sidewalk as Sati wakes up inside a rebooted Matrix. The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) meets with The Oracle and Sati in a park outside the city. He begrudgingly congratulates The Oracle on getting the change she wanted. He promises to free any humans that want out of The Matrix. Sati, who has created a beautiful sunrise in honor of Neo, asks The Oracle if she knew what was going to happen. The woman responds she did not, but that she believed.

“Everything that has a beginning has an end. I see the end coming, I see the darkness spreading. I see death.” – The Oracle

History in the Making

The Matrix Revolutions concludes (for now) the story of The Matrix. Following four years after the original film, and six months after its sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, Revolutions picks up the story immediately after the last film and completes the adventures of Neo and his fellow humans. The story it chose to tell is one that did not resonate with audiences as strongly as the previous two entries. Whether that has to do with viewer’s expectations or the rushed nature of the film–being produced concurrently with the previous entry, and released only six months later–is up for debate. But for the final entry in a popular franchise The Matrix Revolutions definitely disappointed many.

Perhaps it was the “on the nose” aspects of this film compared to the others that upset audiences. All three films deal with the philosophical nature of existence, what is real, and the symbiosis between man and machine, but Revolutions has less for the audience to contemplate. It’s as if The Wachowskis decided to be as plain as possible, laying the secrets of The Matrix bare to make sure it was understood. The most obvious example is calling the machine character that Neo confronts Deus Ex Machina. Literally, God in the Machine, the phrase often defines a plot point that comes out of nowhere to resolve the story or assist the character in an unexpected way. Neo’s journey is abruptly put into the final stages in which he appears to live up to his reputation as The One.

Or maybe the audience’s reaction was based on the downer ending for the series. Sure, it ends with a beautiful sunrise, but the two main characters of Neo and Trinity die in unsatisfying ways. Trinity dies in the crash at the machine city, admittedly after seeing the sun for the first time, but in a way that eliminates her character so that Neo is forced to move forward. Neo then sacrifices himself, or is sacrificed by the machines, in order to rid The Matrix of Smith. While a noble and heroic sacrifice, the emotional story core that made up the previous films feels unfulfilled. There’s also a chunk in the middle of the film, about 25-30 minutes from the one hour mark, where the filmmakers seem to forget about Neo entirely. The crosscutting between Zion’s preparations and Neo’s journey stops to focus for a quarter of the film’s runtime on the battle of Zion’s dock, admittedly fleshing out those characters. The film just feels rushed, or the result of a long schedule in which everyone was too tired to think clearly about the best way to conclude the trilogy.

Genre-fication

After Reloaded, which took place primarily in the real world with occasional forays in the digital world of The Matrix, Revolutions splits the time relatively evenly between the real world (Zion and the Machine World) and the digital world (The Matrix and the world between worlds). The elements of cyberpunk and dystopian futurism depicted in the previous two films are continued here, adding in the fetishism for latex and BDSM in Club Hel. From that standpoint, the film exists and connects to the previous film–feeling as it’s set in the same world. It also connects to the genre of Kung Fu cinema with its defining wire work, ballet-inspired action sequences, and fluidity of fights. Though these sequences are not as exciting or involved as the previous entries.

The title of the film also makes an impact in defining the elements of the film. The first film introduced The Matrix. The sequel was Reloaded, in both the sense of a computer reloading a program, and as a second film in a trilogy repeating elements from the first. This third film deals with Revolutions. Many viewers probably take this word in its common phrasing as the forcible overthrow of an oppressor. The humans of Zion are fighting, and rising up, to overthrow their machine overlords. It’s a common enough theme in sci-fi, especially dystopian fiction. But there’s another reading of this word that is not used as much in describing the film, and that’s the rotation aspect, as with a wheel. Given the disclosure in the previous film that The Matrix is on its sixth iteration, the world in which the humans exist is constantly revolving and starting again. This also ties in to the religious themes of Buddhism with karma and the Dharmic wheel.

Societal Commentary

One thing that hasn’t been discussed in The Matrix articles on Sci-Fi Saturdays is the religious imagery of the films. There are many other articles that get into deeper readings of these themes, but the most prominent is the Christian symbolism of Neo as a Christ figure. His name is an anagram of “one,” and him being described as The One is very much in line with the idea of a messiah. His Christian journey concludes here as he dies in order to save the rest of humanity, his body assuming angelic proportions as seen with the bright yellow and white source code.

But the films also adapt a number of Asian religious influences including karma, the nature of the yin and yang, the birth and reincarnation philosophy of Buddhism. While Rama Kandra may feel that “karma is only a word,” it represents much of what the trilogy is about. As a concept, karma is defined as “the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.” Thus, for individuals that follow the teachings of spiritual reincarnation, the summation of your actions in one lifetime influences your position in the next. So if you were nice to people your status would be increased, but if you were evil, then your following lifetime would be worse. This also ties in with the duality of characters; the yin and yang symbolism from Chinese philosophy.

The idea of yin and yang is that for every light there is also darkness. The duality of characters is something most sci-fi fans are familiar with, from the pairing of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or even Captain Picard and Shinzon in Star Trek Nemesis. Smith has clearly been Neo’s foil since the first film. In Revolutions The Oracle states (almost too) explicitly that they are opposites, as she sits at her table wearing her yin/yang inspired earrings. This idea of opposites being intertwined also leads into the themes of symbiosis introduced in Reloaded. Just as Neo and Hamann discuss the controlling nature of man over machine/machine over man, Revolutions has the machines realize that there is also a symbiotic nature between them and the humans. Deus Ex Machina begins its exchange with Neo declaring that the machines need nothing from the humans, but that is inaccurate. They have been harvesting humans for power for centuries, and now they require Neo to purge the Smith-clones from The Matrix, lest the whole environment collapses. Neo doesn’t request freedom for his people, understanding the intertwined relationship of the species. Instead he only asks for peace between humans and machines. A detente that The Oracle had been working towards and hoping would occur at some point.

The Science in The Fiction

Technologically there is one overarching theme from these trilogy of films, which is the burgeoning humanity of artificial intelligence. Whether that is Smith seeking to be something more than himself, or Rama Kandra telling Neo that he loves his daughter Sati, the series has been showing the machines ability to become closer to humans. And since the programs and machines of The Matrix are all played by human actors, they all exude a different personality. The Merovingian is presented as a hedonistic Frenchman that takes pleasure in manufactured sexual encounters, or taking in a rave and local BDSM club. The Architect is an officious bureaucrat who is obsessed with order and accountability, while The Oracle is more of a free spirit. She may be even more of a chaotic figure than some see, since she really is the one to incite the revolution, or at least continually attempt to. Neo’s final parley with the machines for peace is a unique accounting for the humans, as most other sci-fi films that deal with artificial intelligence tend to portray the machines as absolutely logical, and willing to exterminate humanity at all costs (see last week’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as a moderate example).

The Final Frontier

While Revolutions ends definitively with the sacrifice of Neo and a truce between the humans and machines, there is still a hint that something else may happen. The Oracle does not know for certain, but she suspects that she and Sati will see Neo once again. Of course, if studios had their way, a new Matrix film might have been out within a few years. But The Wachowskis had their stake in the storyline and felt as if they had said all they needed to say, choosing to instead focus on other projects. But in 2021 Lana Wachowski decided that there was at least one more story to be told, and created The Matrix Resurrections, in which the characters of Neo and Trinity were alive again (resurrected ‘natch), and many social and thematic ideas from the intervening two decades were pursued, to vary degrees of success.

All in all, The Matrix Revolutions and the trilogy as a whole, offers a thoughtful look at technology, spirituality, and humanities interaction between them. The film wraps up the story in a logical way, even if audiences disagree with the final product. Especially with the replacement of Mary Alice as The Oracle, which is a little jarring, especially since the “explanation” for why The Oracle looks different is housed in the video game Enter The Matrix, released in conjunction with Reloaded. Gloria Foster, the original actress, passed away prior to filming her scenes for Revolutions, so Alice stepped in. Things change, and not everyone is happy with the way that happens. Sometimes that change is the End. Maybe remembering that “end” is just a word will provide some solace in the fact that it happened.

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