The Machines and Humans Stop Shooting Long Enough to Let Neo Die

The Matrix Revolutions ends with a truce, not a victory. Zion survives the machine invasion. Neo does not. Agent Smith is destroyed when Neo lets the rogue program assimilate him, and the machines pull back from the human city. That is the shape of the third film, released worldwide on November 5, 2003, by Warner Bros. Pictures. It runs 129 minutes and was shot back-to-back with The Matrix Reloaded.

It is also the weakest of the original trilogy. The Matrix Revolutions carries a Metacritic score of 47 out of 100. Our score matches the published critical figure: 4.7 out of 10.

Trailer, via Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Neo in Mobil Ave

The film picks up with Neo’s body in the medical bay of the Mjolnir. His mind is stuck in a subway station called Mobil Ave, a transition zone between the Matrix and the machine world. He meets a family of programs, including a girl named Sati. Her father explains that the station is controlled by the Trainman, a program loyal to the Merovingian. Neo tries to board a train with the family. The Trainman refuses and overpowers him.

That stretch is the movie’s best idea. A hero trapped in a waiting room, unable to move between two worlds, is a clean premise. The film does not linger there. It treats Mobil Ave as a corridor and hurries on.

Seraph, Morpheus, and Trinity Confront the Merovingian

In the Matrix, Seraph, Morpheus, and Trinity confront the Merovingian and force him to release Neo’s consciousness. The scene is a negotiation with a program who treats power as a performance. It works because Lambert Wilson plays the Merovingian as a host who enjoys his own table talk. It fails because the outcome is never in doubt. Neo has to get out, so Neo gets out.

The Oracle Loses Her Powers to Smith

Neo visits the Oracle. She tells him that Smith intends to destroy both the Matrix and the real world. She says Smith is Neo’s opposite, produced by the Matrix trying to balance itself, and that everything that has a beginning has an end. That line is the film’s tagline: “Everything that has a beginning has an end.”

After Neo leaves, a large group of Smiths arrives to assimilate the Oracle. She does not resist. Smith gains her powers of precognition. Mary Alice plays the Oracle here. Her calm is the point of the scene, and it lands.

Niobe Gives Up the Logos

Back in the real world, the crews of the Nebuchadnezzar and the Mjolnir find and reactivate Niobe’s ship, the Logos. The captains plan their return to Zion to help its defense. Neo asks for a ship to travel to the Machine City. Niobe, moved by her encounter with the Oracle, offers him the Logos. Neo leaves with Trinity.

Bane has stowed away on the Logos. His consciousness has been secretly assimilated by Smith. He takes Trinity hostage. Neo realizes what Smith has done to Bane, and in their fight Bane blinds Neo with a power cable. Neo then discovers he can still see machine source code in the real world. He uses that ability to kill Bane. Trinity pilots them to the Machine City.

The blindness is the film’s sharpest turn. Neo loses his eyes and gains a different kind of sight. It is the one moment where The Matrix Revolutions adds something instead of repeating itself.

The Machine Invasion of Zion

The human city of Zion defends itself against the massive machine invasion. Commander Lock, played by Harry Lennix, holds the line. Harold Perrineau returns as Link. Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe flies the Logos into the Machine City. Keanu Reeves plays Neo. Laurence Fishburne plays Morpheus. Carrie-Anne Moss plays Trinity. Hugo Weaving plays Agent Smith.

The final battle is where the film spends its money and loses its argument. The machines come in numbers, the dock falls, and the scale is real. But scale is not stakes. The Matrix Revolutions has more hardware on screen than either predecessor and less reason to care about any of it.

Casting Changes Behind the Scenes

Two casting facts sit behind the finished film. Zee was originally played by Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, before filming was complete. Her scenes were reshot with Nona Gaye. Jet Li was offered the role of Seraph and turned it down because he did not want his martial arts moves digitally recorded.

Those are production details, not defenses of the result. They do explain a certain unevenness in the human-side scenes. The film was assembled around an absence.

The Matrix Revolutions by the Numbers

The gross is the interesting number. $427.3 million made The Matrix Revolutions the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2003. It was also a decline from both of its predecessors. The audience showed up and then stopped showing up. That is what a franchise looks like when the promise outruns the payoff.

What the Trilogy Leaves Behind

The Matrix Revolutions was the final installment in the original trilogy. The storyline continued in The Matrix Online, a video game that has since closed. A fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, was released in 2021.

Reviews at the time were mixed. They praised the visual effects and criticized the lack of new ideas and characterization, along with the final battle. That read holds up. The effects still work. The ideas do not.

The Matrix Revolutions is not a bad film so much as a film that has run out of things to say and keeps talking. It resolves the war between humanity and the machines with a bargain, not a win. It kills its hero and calls that a conclusion. It brings back Smith, the Oracle, the Merovingian, and the Trainman, and gives each of them a scene rather than an arc. The best material — Mobil Ave, Neo’s blindness, the Oracle’s surrender — is scattered across a movie that keeps cutting away to a dock.

The Wachowskis built a world in 1999 that asked whether the ground under you was real. By 2003 the question had become whether the story under you was finished. The Matrix Revolutions answers yes, and answers it at length.

2003 sci-fi · Agent Smith · movie review · Neo · The Matrix Revolutions · Wachowskis