NOTE: If you haven't seen the movie, you may wanna avoid this, as I may drop spoilers. No promises, but I'll do my best to hide what need not be seen by making what I feel is "spoiler" text white. Your mileage may vary, and I'll probably take that away in a week or so.

11/6/03 3:30 AM: The only difference between the fool and the unmistaken is circumstance.

Let me start out with the basics: I liked The Matrix Revolutions. I didn't love it, nor did I hate it. The first film changed the rules on at least three brands of filmmaking, the second film was like a schoolyard brag, showing who still ran this piece. That left the final film with tons of plot threads to tie up, briefcases full of unfinished business, which were handled successfully, for the most part. I do think critics are overly harsh on it (and if memory serves, most panned the original Matrix, right before it went on to become a cultural phenomenon worldwide). As I've noted many times before, tons of "classic" films have been panned by critics, and personally, when I read Harry Knowles was happy, I had a feeling I would be in a similar boat, since our tastes are often similar (except he's a big fat guy and, well, I'm stone sexy).

Let me also get out of the way the most commonly asked questions I've heard. No, I don't believe Zion is a part of the Matrix. No, I don't believe Neo is a program. Yes, I do believe that he is the sixth of a series of anomalous wackos who show up and pester the Architect, signaling the doom of a "Zion." Yes, I believe that Neo is a naturally occurring genetic mutation that somebody got lucky enough to notice one day. I'll add any more in this paragraph if I remember them.

As I watched the film (on my homeboy Mikey's suggestion, I went to see it by myself the first time), a number of things leapt out at me ... (for the purposes of concealing spoilers, I will make the following white text on a white background, which the average web browser should let you highlight and read)

• The whole solution hinged on a business deal, engineered behind the scenes by the Oracle but only made possible by Neo doing something new. Smith the virus was unstoppable by any but truly unusual means, and despite all the power the Architect, the Merovingian or even the Oracle could bring to bear (note the relative relationship in that trinity, as well -- order, indifference and relative chaos), none of them was too keen on getting their hands dirty, especially when they weren't sure anyone could win (save the example below).
• Neo and Smith almost never understood what power was. Flight. Amazing strength. Blinding speed. Leaping around. Making multiples of yourself. Freezing bullets in mid air, even stopping machine warriors in the "real" world. These things are not power. These things are merely talents. Useful abilities. Power is control, and the whole thing -- as is shown in the last scene -- was a chess game between two players who've been at it for a long time. The humans may as well have been buggy machines themselves, pawns on a chessboard they can barely understand. It was only when Neo realized that all the smashing and flying he did would count for nothing that he gave in to his real power, his real ability to control and effect change. Smith tried to absorb Neo, to use the viral replication on something so wholly different he couldn't have guessed at the outcome, and that triggered the retro-virus introduced into Smith when he assimilated the Oracle ("That would mean you're here deliberately!"). The combination of the two -- "savior" and Oracle -- was able to destroy Smith. She finally had to get down and get dirty (literally, if you'll recall her getting rained on) to gain an upper hand.
• Somebody, long ago, assigned Smith to hunt Neo specifically. That decision changed it all. Had Neo done his "exploding" bit on any other agent, who'd have surely had less of an emotional coherency (as hate can make you very determined), they'd have never come back as a virus. Was the Oracle again pulling strings behind the scenes? She created a digital persona -- a kindly, motherly Black woman -- that produced visceral and favorable reactions from all of the disafected hacker types that seemed to make it to Zion. Who made that fateful decision, and why?
• Zion's about to get freakin' crowded when the Architect "frees" the people who want out. Which is another funny thing -- it is because he is a piece of software that you know he will do it. Even the most sophisticated theories about artificial intelligence note that there will be a set of rules that each intelligence will find immutable, the idea that a machine mind can never become as mercurial and as compromising as a human mind. Which is a good and a bad thing. The business deal that Neo makes with the machines -- I kill Smith, you stop the war -- could never work with a human, because the second Neo was done, a human mind would say, in the words of Darth Vader, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." The predictability of a machine mind to operate within its own parameters and agreements is what makes the peace possible at all. Like Kirk with V'Ger, once you talk a machine into something, it does all the work of making it make sense for you.
• In the first movie, Neo ate a cookie from the Oracle. After the Smith meltdown, only three assimilated bodies survived (Seraph, the little girl, and the Oracle) who'd all eaten cookies. Cookies, in the web world, are ways to retain information and identity, saving things about you through other experiences (pages). Smith was ultimately destroyed by a retrovirus (from a technical side), probably encoded in the Oracle and the cookies, and activated by assimilating Neo (which Smith was compelled to do by his hatred and insanity). The Oracle only won her dangerous chess game against the Architect (a chess game that ultimately involved not only the machines outside the Matrix but also their "leader" Deus ex Machina [according to IMDB]) by finally getting down and dirty in the trenches with the secondaries instead of purely using plenipotentiary "agents" to do the work.
• Nona Gaye's role would have never worked for Aaliyah.

The movie worked for me as a coda to the trilogy -- build and build the action and madness until it's ready to burst, then hit reset -- especially from Warner Brothers, who I noted as the credits and previews rolled, make iconic franchises all day long. There is now a dangerous and tenuous status quo, from which novels, comic books and so on can be spawned, creating a financial windfall that will insure Wachowski kids go to college for the next four generations.

I am more enamored of, and can relate better to Smith than any character in the films, short of perhaps Seraph. Smith, the disaffected operative, anomalous already in his emotional reactions and zealous behavior. Smith, unable to operate within the rules and finally given a chance to break them all. Smith wanted freedom worse than anybody, and his nihilistic views drove him to hunt the only freedom he could understand -- obliteration of everything. Especially given the events of my life, that rings so true it scares me. I watched him, knowing he was playing the Set-of-myth role (even going as far as taking both of Neo's eyes instead of just the left one, freeing Neo's true vision, reminding me of Herbert's Dune: Messiah) and doomed to lose, hoping he would stop and realize that he doesn't have to play, that he can win without this show of macho bravado, the need to "assimilate" Mister Anderson. Of course, most fictional villains never see that coming (I assume they never read any fiction themselves), and Smith, glorious engine of hatred that he was, could be no different. An "agent" even when he stopped serving the same master, he definitely believes that a vote for chaos is its own reward.

It's important for me to stop and mention Trinity. In the same vein as Laura Linney's character in Mystic River or Lil Kim's "move a body 'side for you/left hand, eye for you," Trinity (and Nona Gaye's Zee, to a lesser degree) is a model of femininity so faithful, so hot, so interesting in all the ways guys wish girls were, so talented, so dangerous and so supportive that she had almost no other choice than to be a fictional character. Four times in my life, I've had women swear to me they were this kind of "ride or die" partner -- three times they've been wholly wrong (still scanning the fourth). I've known a lot of females in my life, seen a lot of relationships and researched even more, and short of Bonnie Parker (who I'm sure could get on Clyde Barrow's nerves sometimes), I don't believe there's ever been a woman like that. I one day hope to be proven wrong.

Which brings me closer to the real kinds of personal effects of this film on me. Near the end, Seraph asks the Oracle, "Did you always know?" She reponds with a smile, "No, but I believed." If you know me at all, you'll know I went through hell in 2003, getting divorced. In my mind, my "opposite number" never got up from like Neo did ("Why, Mister Anderson, why?"). She didn't, in the final analysis, believe enough to not give up. Not in me, not in herself, not in the committment that was made. That kind of weirded me out. This concludes the portion of this discussion tied to my personal life.

Anyhoo, there were some stumbling blocks. I found Mary Alice a little stiff in her Oracle scenes early on. The wire work when Smith tackled Neo in the crater near the end was simply embarrasing. The rain was a nice thematic touch, true, but it obscured the action in a lot of places, visually. The digital work on the APU suits (which are much less convincing than the powered construction suit in Aliens, which moved like I expect heavy machinery to move) always looked like a cartoon to me (even though I liked how the suits mirrored the "security wheel" that Seraph, Trinity and Morpheus did in the club, a tactic I learned from crime fiction years ago to always have your back covered, was cool). I was worried some of the repeated themes/lines would fall flat, which hampered my first-time enjoyment (I suppose that'll evaporate on subsequent viewings).

The core emotional and philosophical point -- believe -- conveys a point I make very often, and one echoed by Ford Prefect in Life, The Universe and Everything. A determined individual has a ridiculous amount of advantage over a less involved or indifferent person in many pursuits. Smith's human moments were hindered more by his lack of experience (watch the fight, he's still fighting like he's super fast and strong) than anything else, and if not for Neo's "powers," he'd have killed Keanu easily, with a kind of animal tenacity that was hard to beat. Trinity believed like crazy. Neo believed -- finally -- even more. The Oracle believed more than anybody, just in a really tricky way (as she'd been playing the game longer). Morpheus ("the lord of dreams") could barely be concerned with the issues of the mundane world, finding his power and his faith in the Matrix and its fallout (including Neo ... I'd be interested in hearing about the failures he had in finding "the one" before he got Mister Anderson). The unmistaken, whose beliefs are vindicated in the end, is considered correct only after all the cards are played. The one whose beliefs turned up wrong is, in the same moment, suddenly a fool. It is amusing to see how thin the boundary between those two places really is.

All around, I'm not even made I spent nine bucks on it. I think the trilogy DVD set (which hopefully will include the stuff from The Animatrix, which greatly enhances your enjoyment of things) will be a great day's viewing. I'm not as deep a fan as I was of Star Wars, which inspired a four-year-old to believe twenty-six years ago, but I'm a lot less likely to believe any goddamned thing these days.