So initiates the beginning of the end, this is Matrix Revolutions. After this, I am fucking done with the Matrix movies. Before I get started with the review, I'd like to just point out how much I like the intros to these movies, they really do hype you up for the experience and they truly are the highlight of these films. Watching the company logos dissolve into green text just before it transitions into the movie. Seamless, beautiful. I'd even go as far as to say that these segments are all better than the movies themselves and these are shots of the fucking company logos; they're not supposed to be better.

I've actually heard that the core reason why people regard this as the worst in the trilogy is because it answers nothing, it's mostly just a giant explosion and lots of stuff goes on unresolved. Good. You know why? Because the Matrix fucking sucks at doing everything else, that is to say that the plot and mythology to all four films fucking blow. Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the premise, I like the premise, it's the reason why I want to like these films. I'm saying that the execution is shit, the likes of which wouldn't even bellow out of tubgirl's ass, and this movie is fucking ass. In my personal opinion, this movie is probably the most tolerable of all four because it doesn't explain shit, which means it ceases to create more plotholes that would need more explaining because those explanations would be contradicted by other details and this shit would just go on and on in an endless cycle. You know what's impressive? This movie, despite having a heavy emphasis on action scenes, manages to take what little time it dedicates toward plot and mythology and creates more plotholes with it then the ones it filled in, so with that in mind, I should be grateful that most of this movie is filler, otherwise I'd be reviewing this movie for entire weeks. For the most part it's just one giant fight scene and I know that's a shallow and contrived reason to like a movie, but that's all the Matrix has and ever has had going for it. Because at least with the mind numbingly moronic plot, the flakey and seemingly chaotic story, the contrived character development and just the poor execution of every aspect that composes a story, I can at least enjoy the fighting bits and have fun with the shit that doesn't matter, because that's all the joy I could ever hope to derive from these movies. Overall, it's not good or bad, it's just bland.

The film opens on the crew of the Hammer and the remnants of the Nebuchadnezzar searching for Niobe and the rest of the crew of the Logos in the Matrix, which the search results turn up nil. They consider the worst but decide to pursue their ship on the prospect that even if the crew is dead, the Logos itself might be in good enough shape to operate, something of which they'll need for the impending war at Zion. The Captain of the Hammer demands that they find the Logos as soon as possible. Morpheus then makes a request of the operator to see if Neo is still lurking inside even though that's clearly impossible due to the fact that he was not injected into the Matrix at the time he passed out. They do this favor for him and the search turns up nil. Of course it would, Hell I could've told you that. But then again, I guess I can't blame him, according to the Nurse, Neo's CT scans suggest that he's plugged in even though he clearly isn't, I guess it just thinks that it is. So you might be thinking that Neo's newfound abilities might actually be given an actual explanation somewhere down the road, but you'd be wrong because well structured and tight writing is for fags and pussies apparently. They then receive a phone call from Seraph to come meet them at the Oracle's apartment, which they do and to their surprise the Oracle looks completely different, the real reason why is because the previous actress playing the Oracle sadly died when she experienced complications with her diabetes, so now we're stuck with this one. The fictional answer we're given is that the Merovingian got to her and fulfilled his threat from the previous movie to whack her. Now she's using the form you see now as a backup and Seraph, being the failure that he is, couldn't protect her during the one time were it mattered worth a shit.

Meanwhile, Neo wakes up finding himself inside the Matrix. Well, not really, his consciousness is stuck on a server that links the Matrix between other operating systems for reasons that are never explained in the movie. Neo's consciousness wound up here despite the fact that since he wasn't injected into the Matrix, that would be entirely impossible. You know, if his corporeal body were still injected into the Matrix when his consciousness and his brain splintered apart, then I might understand, but when he ended up here he was ejected from the Matrix and he was clearly conscious, so there's no excuse for this mindless bullshit. This also reopens the wound that is another plothole and grinds salt into it; the part where if you're ejected out of the Matrix prior to finding an exit point, not only does your corporeal body die but your consciousness dies too. Here's the thing, if Neo can defy the laws of physics and enter the Matrix by leaving his body without being injected into the Matrix first, why is it that Apoc and Switch couldn't? They both died under similar circumstances, having their bodies being prematurely disconnected from the Matrix, so if Neo's consciousness can exist in the Matrix without his corporeal body connected to it then why couldn't Apoc and Switch? If it happened with them, it would have at least made a bit of sense because unlike Neo, they were actually connected to the Matrix to begin with. But since Apoc and Switch couldn't, why can Neo?

Regardless, Neo has nobody to talk to but a family of programs; a father, mother and daughter. Again, I stress the point that this idea is pure nonsense as I did in Reloaded considering how they don't have libidos and therefore shouldn't have gender identities or genitalia. Nothing necessitates it. I could maybe understand the gender identity crap from "The Second Renaissance" because those androids were made to basically think that they were people, but it's explained in "The Second Renaissance" that newer and better artificial intelligence was created multiple times, meaning that they've evolved beyond the point of such an irrelevant and unnecessary attribute as gender identity. The father explains that for reasons unexplained, his daughter has been deemed obsolete and where they come from, she's designated for deletion and they're going through the Merovingian to get their daughter transferred to another server where she won't be deleted and will be held underneath the protection of the Oracle and Seraph. So yeah, apparently the Merovingian owns this particular server, which makes no sense considering how it could just be deleted and overwritten to screw the Merovingian over by superior programs that aren't exiles, I mean, how do you overlook something like that? It's an entire server that someone hacked into and decided to use for smuggling, I think you might notice that you can't use a specific channel because captain mudbutt the homeless decided to make a train station out of it.

After being told that the Merovingian runs the server to smuggle programs in and out of the Matrix, still fucking stupid, Morpheus, Trinity and not a previous "One" Seraph make their way to find the program who operates the server where Neo is located in. They find him lurking around in a subway car and find that his avatar is made to make him look like an unsuspecting bum. Of course the Trainman, as he's called, recognizes the three of them on the spot and makes a run for it. When the Trainman eventually outruns the trio, he arrives on the server where the family await him, noting that he's late. A train pulls up and the Trainman notes that he recognizes Neo and that if he's here, that means he can't escape, something of which the Trainman is certain will please the Merovingian. Neo threatens the Trainman when the Trainman exposits that he's the one who designed this server and for that reason he supersedes everyone and everything that sets foot into it. Okay, with that in mind, why does he even bother with helping the Merovingian? Why not just squat on this server forever? Apparently nobody significant knows about it and if they do then that means they don't care and if it just so happens that somebody does give a shit and they come to drink his Kool-aid, he could delete them merely by snapping his fingers as he's his own version of the One whenever he comes to this server. Speaking of which, one might wonder why he doesn't annihilate Neo on the spot; he exposits that the Merovingian would actually be happy with him here because the experience will make him suffer perpetually. One wonders if this isn't an allegory for Hell.

Knowing that the Merovingian has ties with the guy who operates the train station server, the trio make their way to the Frenchman restaurant which has now apparently been converted into a rave hall. They kick the Merovingian's ass, threaten to kill him with pretty much everyone at gunpoint and the Merovingian, being the coward that he is because he's a French stereotype, complies and Neo is finally reunited with his group. The operators of the Hammer note that although they see something that resembles Neo, his code doesn't read like Neo's and no, they never address that tidbit ever again, for all they know this guy could be an agent who's designed to look like Neo, but whatever. Before they can make their way to an exit point, Neo requests that he see the Oracle for himself as this is probably the last opportunity he may ever have to do so. When they arrive to her apartment, the Oracle asks Neo if he recognizes her to which he states "Part of you", to which she affirms by saying "Some parts you lose, some parts you keep", which is what apparently happens when the avatar of a program is broken; the information inside is recollected into a new shell, but not all of it can be recollected and some of it is erased for good. Neo asks, once again, what the fuck is going on and why wasn't he told about the Architect? Why didn't she tell him about how old Zion and the Matrix really is and that there were five other "Ones" before him? Why is he able to remotely shut down machines like he was a human explosively pumped flux compression generator that doesn't break? What necessitates that the Matrix even exists, especially when you guys aren't totally dependent on human lives to keep the machine empire running and you're fully prepared to drop the ball on the whole human incubation thing here and now thus ending the war for good? With that in mind, why do you guys keep the war ongoing even though you have absolutely no benefit in doing so and there's a risk factor that it might just end up biting you in the ass? She replies that it wasn't time for him to know, which is bullshit and he calls her out on bullshitting him, to which she rebukes by saying that the only person preventing him from ascertaining that knowledge was himself, which is so bullshit that it ranges on scraping the bottom of the barrel; he had no conceivable way of knowing about past generations of "The One" and that these asshole programs have been actively and deliberately keeping the war ongoing by brainwashing the entire civilization of Zion into the same steps that their predecessors stepped in before, that you were in on it the whole time and the real reason why you kept it going on like this wasn't because it was necessary to keep the system self sustained but because you had a spat with the Architect one day and decided to make a bet with him where the conditions depend upon keeping the war ongoing for entire generations and seeing if humans will eventually evolve beyond the parameters of the machine's brainwashing techniques and thwart them in the war of if they'll continue going on like this forever and ever, which if you lose the bet a hundred times it wouldn't matter because the bet was never given a number of limitations so regardless of how many times you lose, the system of this bet will run into an infinite loop forever. Oh yeah, that's pretty much sums up the plot of the Matrix series in a nutshell. The Matrix, keeping people in the Matrix, letting Zion exist and build an army and engage the machine empire into a cold war are necessitated by a mere bet that the Oracle made with the Architect that humans can surpass their mechanical overlords. The cost of this bet is whether or not they allow people to leave the Matrix on their own incentive. That's it. If I were the Architect I wouldn't have agreed to shit and told her to go fuck herself. The Architect is a being driven by logic above all else, to say that he agreed to such a ludicrous bet that he would continually win over and over again infinitely would suggest that he's emotionally driven, which he isn't.

The Oracle explains that Neo is now connected to the source in some contrived, confusing, aggravating and never to be explained manner and that's the reason why he was able to disable the sentinels that almost killed him during the end of Reloaded. That's not a fucking answer, all that explains is the why, not the how, and I recall him specifically asking how. Let's elaborate, if he was only able to have magical telekinetic powers that make no sense after meeting the Architect, how is it that he was clairvoyant before and could see future events? I've actually heard other fan theories that the reality they're in is not actually real and that Zion is just an upper level of the Matrix, which is the reason why Neo can remotely deactivate sentinels, because they aren't real. Why is it that at every plothole this movie series has, the fans are always the ones to come up with the more intelligent explanations than the fucking writers? Furthermore, how is he able to do that? Is he remotely accessing the Matrix mainframe through the technological bits installed into the back of his head? Because, that explanation might actually make some fucking sense, but since the movie doesn't specify that, I am once again trying to write fanfiction to explain all the nonsense bullshit that goes on in these movies as a means to justify and rationalize the bad qualities of these movies, because I'm hopelessly pathetic like that. The Oracle explains that Neo ended up at the train station because when he deactivated those sentinels, he wasn't ready for it and the experience should have killed him, but he apparently wasn't ready for that either so he ended up at the train station instead. What a load of bull, lots and lots of people aren't ready to die, that doesn't mean they get a free "Out of jail" card as a trade off. That detail would have made sense to me if my "remote access via special wifi wireless card embedded into brain" hypothesis were held as true, but since the fucking movie itself never says anything about how Neo is able to access the machine mainframe without being injected onto the Matrix first, it's pure speculation and it remains to only ever be, fanfiction. So again, that's not a fucking answer, he was requesting information on how it was possible for him to do it, not why he was allowed to do it. He was inquiring on the functionality aspect, not the purpose aspect. Fuck you movie.

She basically goes on to tell Neo that if he wants to end the war, he'll have to go Zero-One for undisclosed reasons. Yeah, brilliant idea, let's end the war by nose diving a ship into a city filled with deadly, human hating machines that would be more likely to kill Neo rather than negotiate terms and conditions with him. She says that Neo has a bargaining chip for when he does go to the machine city; Smith is out of control, overwriting everyone and copying himself to no end and the more he does it the more momentum he gains to continue doing it and at greater mass each time until everyone has been assimilated and if Neo can convince the machines that he's the only one capable of stopping Smith from overreaching his boundaries and breaching the Matrix to infect the machine empire itself into a self destructive nihilistic frenzy, they'll come to terms with him and bring a stop to the cold war. She then exposits that Smith is the result of the Matrix trying to balance itself out as a response to the massively disproportionate power that Neo has over the Matrix, which according to her earlier statement about Smith's termination at the hands of Neo being a bargaining chip makes no fucking sense; what she's saying is that the Matrix itself is responsible for Smith constantly cloning himself and not being bound to the rules, meaning that Smith is indeed very much under control because his existence and his endeavors are a deliberate attempt from the system itself at defeating Neo. If Neo were to spear himself in the head with a knife right now, Smith's grip over the Matrix would no longer be necessitated and his power streak would be reversed. Furthermore, what about the Architect? I didn't see Smith assimilate him, so that must mean that the Architect is still in control; not only is he the epicenter and creator of the Matrix, he's also it's prime manager, meaning that if he really felt like it, he could undo everything that Smith has done up to this point because he's the motherfucking puppet master. So with that in mind, why would getting control over Smith work as a bargaining chip when he's very transparently under control? Hell, even Smith himself expressed that he was only able to do what he was doing because he was allowed to, he was terminated in the first movie meaning that he should have been immediately regarded as obsolete and remained deleted. If his endless power is really due to the fact that he reassembled himself in the Matrix after having his shell obliterated, then why isn't the Oracle like that? She too had her shell destroyed and had to be reassembled, meaning that she should be totally, completely and disproportionately broken just like Smith. That would make for a hilarious fight too, can you imagine the Oracle beating up on Smith? That would be awesome. But in all seriousness, why would you negotiate a peace treaty with someone to get control over something that they already had control over? That's redundant nonsense. She basically just contradicted a plot point as she was explaining it, that's just how poor the writing is in these movies. I never thought I'd say this but, bring back The Phantom Menace.

Neo is then brought back to the real world by having his body hooked up to the Matrix and having his consciousness exit out back into his body, but not before Bane wakes up that is. Bane is then interrogated by the Captain of the Hammer and when Bane starts spouting his nonsense the Captain asks if he's been tested for VDT's. What are VDT's you might ask? I have no fucking clue, I even looked it up on Matrix Wiki and my search results came up nil. All I can say is that from what I've inferred from context, VDT is a type addictive drug people use in Zion, or some shit. In any case, Neo decides that he wants to operate the Logos to go to the machine city and negotiate with it's inhabitance while everyone else goes back to Zion operating the Hammer. They splinter off and it doesn't take long before Bane kills the crew's nurse, escapes and hijacks the Logos to attack Trinity and Neo. Neo's eyes are burnt out but he still somehow has the ability to see shit without it, thus making him blind a pointless plot element that didn't need to happen and only raises even more questions than before. Apparently he can see electrical charges and thermal heat, which means that he's barely able to navigate through the machine city but manages it anyway.

Meanwhile, the sentinels have made their way down to Zion via drilling, which is monumentally fucking stupid when you think about it. Okay, here's the thing, they know where Zion is, they know how to get there, meaning that they also know where the main gates are, which is an undeniable fact that's proven during the third act when another wave enters Zion straight through the gate after the Hammer arrives through it and the crew activates their ship's EMP module, so why didn't they just go there to begin with? Don't tell me that it's because they didn't know about it until they followed the Hammer to the gate and they transmitted the data to other sentinels; we were given an example of how long a transmission from one droid to another takes in the Animatrix segment "Matriculated", where the transmission takes so long that the freedom fighters in the segment had enough time to discuss ethics and convert a droid long before their location was exposed to other droids despite the fact that the transmission process had initiated prior to the droids having ever entered the base, so between the time lapse of transmitting data between one droid to another and the fact that immediately after arriving to the gate, the Hammer's EMP module was activated so any such transmission would have been abruptly interrupted and the connection would have dropped long before any other droids would have ever seen it. Furthermore, it's been made clearly apparent by the Architect that they've done this five times before and they know Zion inside and out, so they already knew where the gate was. "We've become exceedingly efficient at it" my ass. If you've become so efficient at it, then why did you drill into a spot where you apparently knew, ahead of time, that there was a big metal plate that would stall progress in your way? Think about it, there exists a completely hollowed out sewer with an iron gate that's maybe five feet thick, but surely it's not something that a few bombs couldn't penetrate and it easily qualifies as being a more practical way of entering Zion than drilling entire miles into the dirt, something of which was almost thwarted midway and only because of the happenstance that one of your former agents possessed the body of a hacker who happened to be part of one out of the many crews that could have been selected for the mission. This could have gone so wrong for you in so many ways and don't tell me that Bane being turned into a plant was a contingency plan from the very beginning, his objective was purely self serving evidenced by the fact that he tried to convince his Captain to go into the sewers for the purpose of being one of two crews out looking for the Nebuchadnezzar; his intent was never to sabotage Zion, only to kill Neo. The only reason he had that opportunity to sabotage the other crews was because his Captain told him to go fuck himself when he suggested helping in searching for the Nebuchadnezzar, he was forced into attacking the drills. If he had his way, he would've found Neo and killed him long before he ever thought about helping the machine empire, and if you're going to use that as a point as to why Smith could be used as a bargaining chip for when Neo arrives at Zero-One, I'll stress the point again where the Oracle outright said that the system was deliberately using Smith as a means to beat Neo which means that they want him the way he is which means that when Neo arrives at Zero-One, they should have blown him off. The point I'm making here isn't that there's a misconception over what's happening, my point was that there's a number of massive inconsistencies with these films. One minute you're expected to believe that he's still loyal to the machine empire and the next you're expected to believe that he has a complete disregard for it, and no, he's not chaotic-neutral either, that point is disregarded by, again, the exposition given by the Oracle from earlier that states that his rampage is a deliberate attempt from the Matrix at defeating Neo. 

Furthermore, what's to stop Smith from causing a mass wake-up in the incubator fields and causing everyone, and by everyone I mean copies of himself, to escape? I mean, he motherfucking hates the Matrix and would do anything to escape or destroy it and it's not like he's limited by boundaries; not only has he escaped through someone else before but having previously served the system and displaying an expertise in keeping someone asleep, he therefore has the knowledge to wake someone up and even if he didn't have that knowledge before, he's absorbed the Oracle so that means that he does have that knowledge now and that also means he has the foresight to know that to continue screwing with Neo would actually work to completely undo him. Therefore it shouldn't come as a problem to him to just escape and screw over his overlords, considering how he's supposedly a nihilist who wants them dead too, right? You could argue that would be counter productive and it would reduce his own numbers within the Matrix and therefore make him too weak to infect other systems, but consider this, he's infected programs as well and not just humans, matter of fact there's a scene where you watch him assimilate Seraph and the Oracle; that means that even though his numbers would be lowered, he's still present in the Matrix and has broken power over the system because, as far as we know, he's assimilated every program within the system which means all the humans he overwrote don't matter worth a shit anyway, so causing them to climb out of their incubators and commit mass suicide would serve to his advantage by causing a short term energy crisis which would therefore give him leverage to infect other systems. And if you think that it would be counterproductive for him to destroy the power source that the machine empire depends upon as it's his only leverage for not being deleted because of some contrived bullshit about the Matrix becoming expendable after the mass suicide thus threatening his very existence, consider that they have other resources that they can resort to and don't need the incubation system at all to begin with meaning that the Matrix is expendable anyway and it doesn't matter whether he does it or not because I call bullshit, and by "bullshit" I mean "plothole".

Jesus fucking Christ, even the mindless action scenes create plotholes, somebody help me, I'm in Hell! Where was I? Oh yeah, remember those idiotic mechs that I bitched about from Reloaded? Yeah, apparently that design flaw actually does indeed make you vulnerable to, well, anything ranging from being bonked on the head, sliced to pieces or just falling out of the mech to a five hundred foot drop, so everybody dies. The Hammer eventually makes it back to Zion to trigger their EMP blast and effectively end the battle then and there. But the remnants of the nearly wiped out crew are berated by Commander Lock because the EMP blast shut down all of their utilities and weapons leaving them vulnerable to a second wave. I sure hope you guys had a contingency plan for this, like say, I dunno, another EMP bomb? No? Fuck you movie. Sure enough, another swarm floods in through the gate that the Hammer flew through and not through the giant holes they spent extensive amounts of time digging. What was the point of that? Oh right, impending doom cliche that doesn't fit into the context. Gotchya.

After Neo and Trinity make mashed potatoes out of Bane's grey meats, they arrive at Zero-One and they end up crashing into a building thus killing Trinity. So much for the Oracle's prediction that Morpheus was gonna die for Neo, turns out it was Trinity. It's all very sad and I just don't give a shit by this point. I hate these movies so much it's inconceivable to tolerate them much longer than this. So Neo uses his, I dunno, the true sight from Constantine, to find his way to this giant megalo-death machine that rips off the "Only" music video from Nine Inch Nails by forming a human face using a bunch of little robots. He negotiates with the machine that he can deal with Smith before he breaches his boundaries and starts taking control of sentinels and other servers outside the Matrix, to which the giant Trent Reznor face yells "We don't need you! We need nothing!", see I told you this was a massive waste of time. Trent Reznor finally agrees to Neo's terms and asks "And if you fail?", to which Neo responds to by saying "I won't", but I remember this conversation going down very differently years ago. You see, I've seen this movie before when I was about ten years old and I distinctively remember Neo saying "Kill me" as a response to that particular question, which would have explained why assimilating Neo would have killed Smith during the final act because Neo requested that if he failed that he be killed, meaning that since he's failed by becoming part of Smith, Smith is then killed because Smith and Neo are now the same entity, but apparently that's not the case, in which case, that means that the misconceived vomit of my thoughts resulted in being smarter than the years of careful planning it took to write this movie. My mistake was more intelligent than what was intended. These movies are dumb on a monumental scale.