The Matrix Revolutions Review

Shot back to back with Reloaded and released six months later, this is where the trilogy's ideas collapse into machinery. The defense of the Zion dock is a genuinely impressive piece of large scale staging, thousands of sentinels pouring through a breach in the ceiling while men in walking exosuits fire into the swarm, and for twenty minutes the film has scale, stakes and clear geography.

It also has almost nothing to do with Neo, who spends the first act blinded and stranded in a train station subplot that goes precisely nowhere and introduces a character called the Trainman to establish a rule the film then abandons. The resolution is a truce brokered with an entity the credits actually name Deus Ex Machina, which is either a joke or a confession.

Trinity's death is given a long speech that plays as filler because the picture has not earned the moment. The final fight, two men flying through rain and driving each other into buildings, discards the martial arts grounding that made the original choreography readable and becomes a cutscene. Bill Pope's photography is still strong and Hugo Weaving is still fully committed. The story around them has stopped meaning anything at all.