The more I think about The Matrix Revolutions, the better I think it was. Disappointing, yes, but I’m not sure that has to do with quality or events of the film itself, but more with it not being the movie I wanted it to be. (Spoilers ahead.)
I enjoyed watching it while it was on, but by the time it ended I just felt like I wanted the Wachowskis to start over and try again. Kenji attributes it to the film not lining up to our expectations. We watched the first one, and in our minds we thought that after it ends and Neo flies off all this cool stuff happens, though we don’t know what it’ll be. Then we see the sequels, and it’s not necessarily that they don’t live up, they just aren’t what anyone was picturing. Put another way, we all bought tickets to see The Phantom Menace expecting to see lots of Jedi and eventually Darth Vader, and out of nowhere we get gungans and a little kid. This isn’t to say that screenwriters should always pander to what their audiences expect, but I think Kenji’s idea explains why Reloaded and Revolutions didn’t satisfy me.
The problem I keep having is that the more I think about how the story had to end, the more I end up right where Revolutions ends. I had thought that it was supposed to be about Neo showing everyone in the Matrix that their world wasn’t real. But in Reloaded Morpheus says that they’re freeing people at a rapidly increasing rate, and The Kid’s Story shows that people can even wake themselves up. Put that together with the notion that even people living in Zion don’t believe that Neo is The One, and I think it shows that the people who are going to wake up do wake up, and people who don’t wouldn’t be able to handle it. So it can’t be just a story about Neo building up a following and convincing the world to follow him to Zion. I started Enter the Matrix again today, this time playing as Ghost. Playing it, I realized that it is exactly what I wanted out of the movies: lots of action inside the Matrix. While this is fun, it also shows me that the war can’t be won from inside the Matrix alone. Agents can’t be killed, and Neo’s already stronger than everything out (in) there. It also can’t be a war story about the fight between the machines and Zion. The Second Renaissance Part 2 shows us that even at the height of our military might the humans lost the war to the machines, so there’s no way a few hundred Zion guerrillas could do it in the present (and as we see in Revolutions, they don’t).
So by the end of Revolutions we have Smith having corrupted the Matrix to a point where the machines can’t stop him. We have Neo, who in choosing the wrong door has broken the cycle necessary to reboot the Matrix, and then we have the two of them destroying each other and leaving the Architect with no idea what to do. Nothing like this has happened before, as shown by Sati bringing color to the sky of the Matrix for the first time ever. By saying that those still in the Matrix will be free, the Architect is pointing to the Christian promise that our bodies will be returned to us at the end of days. What bothers me is not this ending (which I think I like), but that it’s an ending which even the omniscient characters in the story don’t understand. They’re for the first time ever in a situation where the don’t know what’s going to happen, so it just doesn’t feel complete.
And, of course, it isn’t complete. The Matrix is still running in some fashion, and from the press material The Matrix Online will take us into that world. My guess is that it will finally be the battle to convince everyone to wake up, now that the machines don’t have utter control over the world. I’d guess also that The Merovingian and the other rogue programs may have an opportunity to gain a foothold in the anarchy.