The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

My personal threshhold of laughability *for a sci-fi movie not the novel* starts below Starship Troopers. Well, The Matrix Revolutions is much closer to The Matrix than Starship Troopers. Truthfully, I'd like to see a breakdown of people who hated The Matrix Revolutions to see if science-fiction fanboys are few and video-game fanboys are many. Science fiction is the literature and cinema of ideas and convergences: What would happen if...? The willing suspension of disbelief perhaps comes easier to those trained in the skill, which might be like bending spoons. (Big hint from the first two movies: Possibly "there is no spoon" outside of your mind.) All that said, this third movie in The Matrix series remains gripping and well above average. I don't understand how people complain that Keanu Reeves is too wooden an actor to play even a cyberworld messiah then complain when he convincingly (for him and his role) portrays love and fear. What do they want, Benicio del Toro? It seems the haters want Revolutions to be all one thing or another -- just like the first movie, more like the second, more imaginary world, less real world, more action, less talk, fewer battles, bigger fights. (You can't get bigger fights than what we got, if you follow the laws of physics.) You can see how it gets confounding. Better to see Revolutions as it is -- the action-oriented resolution to an intellectual science-fiction trilogy. The philosophical questions are always pivotal to how Neo finds and fulfills his mission of bringing peace to Zion and freedom to willing minds in the Matrix. Consider carefully how the Oracle is concerned with looking forward and making free choices while the Merovingian is concerned with looking backward and rationalizing determinism -- even though he controls the train between the Matrix and the real world -- while the Architect is a construct of the machine world and is constrained with balancing equations. Neo and Trinity negate nihilism and deny determinism by choosing love. Free choice -- and belief more than knowledge -- is what gets us there (as the Oracle sums up at the end). The Matrix Revolutions is the darkest and grittiest of the three Matrix movies because it focuses not on the polished virtual world of the Matrix but on "the real world" inhabited by free humans on the verge of extermination, "the machine world" that's waging a war of attrition against humanity, and a devolving Matrix where Agent Smith has become quite the megalomaniac. Zion's mechagunners are cool but Neo rightly intuits that diplomacy is the path to peace; war has been considered the inevitable path to humanity's annihilation while the truth would be even more apocalyptic. (To add a moral to the Architect's monologue in Reloaded, those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. So if you can't see the Matrix through Neo's inner eyes, at least read Wikipedia for a clue before you choose to complain about Revolutions.) 4 stars.