The Matrix Revolutions

The Matrix Revolutions
Promotional film poster
Directed by	Andy Wachowski Larry Wachowski
Written by	Andy Wachowski Larry Wachowski
Produced by	Joel Silver
Starring	Keanu Reeves Laurence Fishburne Carrie-Anne Moss Hugo Weaving Jada Pinkett Smith Harry J. Lennix Harold Perrineau
Cinematography	Bill Pope
Edited by	Zach Staenberg
Music by	Don Davis
Production companies	Village Roadshow Pictures Silver Pictures NPV Entertainment
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release dates	October 27, 2003 (2003-10-27) (Los Angeles, California, premiere) November 5, 2003 (2003-11-05) (United States)
Running time	129 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$110 million
Box office	$427,343,298

The Matrix Revolutions is a 2003 American science fiction action film and the third installment of The Matrix trilogy. The film was released six months following The Matrix Reloaded. The film was written and directed by the Wachowski brothers and released simultaneously in 60 countries on November 5, 2003. Despite the fact that it is the final film in the series, the Matrix storyline continued in The Matrix Online.

The film was the second live-action film to be released in both regular and IMAX movie theaters at the same time.

Plot

After the events of The Matrix Reloaded, Bane and Neo are unconscious. Neo's neural patterns suggest he is in the Matrix. Neo finds himself trapped in a subway station, a transition zone between the Matrix and the machine world. Neo meets a "family" of programs, including a girl named Sati, whose father tells Neo the subway is controlled by The Trainman, an exile loyal to the Merovingian. When Neo tries boarding a train with the family, the Trainman refuses to let him aboard and punches Neo into a wall.

Seraph contacts Morpheus on behalf of the Oracle. The Oracle informs Morpheus and Trinity of Neo's confinement. Seraph, Morpheus and Trinity enter Club Hel to persuade the Merovingian to release Neo. The Merovingian demands "the eyes of the Oracle" in exchange for Neo's release. Trinity provokes a Mexican standoff, forcing the Merovingian to release Neo.

Troubled by visions of the Machine City, Neo visits the Oracle. She characterizes Smith as Neo's exact opposite and negative, who threatens to destroy the Matrix and the Machine City. She states that "everything that has a beginning has an end", and that the war is about to end. After Neo leaves, a large group of Smiths assimilate Sati, Seraph and the unresisting Oracle, gaining her powers of precognition. This also has the effect of destabilizing the Matrix.

In the real world, the remaining crew of the Nebuchadnezzar and the Mjolnir ("Hammer") find Niobe's ship, the Logos and reactivate it. They also interrogate the now-awakened Bane, who claims he has no memory of the events of the earlier battle. As the captains plan to return to defend Zion, Neo announces that he needs a ship to travel to the Machine City. The captain of the Hammer refuses, but motivated by her meeting with the Oracle, Niobe offers Neo the Logos.

Niobe pilots the Hammer through service tunnels in order to avoid the Sentinel army. They discover that Bane has murdered a crew member and presumably hidden aboard the Logos, but are unable to warn Trinity and Neo since Bane would have control of an EMP and disable both of their ships. Bane ambushes Trinity, taking her hostage. Neo fights Bane and to his horror, realizes he is Smith. Smith blinds Neo by cauterizing his eyes with a power cable. Despite his blindness, Neo sees the glowing form of Smith and kills him. Trinity pilots them to the Machine City.

In Zion, the defenders deploy Armored Personnel Units tasked with fighting the Sentinels and infantry armed with rocket launchers to destroy the two drilling machines. Zee (Nona Gaye) and her partner manage to take down one of the drills, but the APUs are unable to hold the docks and Captain Mifune is fatally wounded. Mifune tells the Kid (Clayton Watson), who has been rearming Mifune's APU, to open the gate for the Hammer. Kid pilots the APU and opens the gate. The Sentinels are on the verge of overwhelming the humans when the Hammer arrives at Zion and discharges its EMP, disabling the Sentinels but also the remaining defenses. The humans are forced to retreat to the temple's entrance and wait for the next attack, which they believe will be their last stand.

Neo and Trinity are attacked by the Machine City's defenses. Neo uses his powers to destroy the incoming weapons, but Sentinels overwhelm the ship. Neo tells Trinity to fly the Logos into an electrical storm cloud, disabling the Sentinels but also the ship's engines. Trinity sees sunlight and blue sky for the first time before the ship free-falls into the Machine City. Trinity fails to restart the ship in time and it collides with a tower, the impact causing several pieces of the tower to pierce the ship, killing Trinity.

Neo enters the Machine City to bargain with the Machines and their leader, the Deus Ex Machina. Neo warns that Smith is beyond the Machines' control and will assault the Source. He offers to stop Smith in exchange for peace with Zion. The Machines agree, and order the Sentinels to standby. The Machines provide a connection for Neo to enter the Matrix. In the Matrix, now wholly populated by Smith's copies and in a constant thunderstorm, the clone with the Oracle's powers steps forth, claiming that he has foreseen his victory.

The Smith clones watch while Neo and Smith fight, and as Smith now possesses the power of flight, their battle eventually takes them into the sky, where Smith forcibly drives Neo into a crater. Neo is outmatched but refuses to give up, Neo baits Smith into assimilating him, which allows Neo to destroy all the Smith clones from the inside, the same way he defeated Smith in the first movie. The Neo-Smith and the clones burst into light that ripples through the Matrix. After the energy burst, the Oracle's body is shown lying in the crater. In the real world, the Sentinels withdraw from Zion. Neo has sacrificed his life to save the Machines and the humans. The Deus Ex Machina says, "It is done", and Neo's body is carried away by the Machines.

The Matrix "reboots", repairing the damage caused by Neo and Smith's battle. Niobe and Morpheus embrace, with Morpheus's last line being, "Is this real?" The Architect and the Oracle meet, agreeing that the peace will last "as long as it can" and all the humans who wish to be free from the Matrix will be allowed to leave. Sati, who has created a colorful dawn sky to honor Neo, asks the Oracle whether they will ever see him again. She replies that she thinks they will. Seraph asks the Oracle if she knew this would happen, and she replies that she did not know, but she believed.

Cast

• Keanu Reeves as Neo
• Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus
• Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity
• Hugo Weaving as Smith
• Nathaniel Lees as Captain Mifune
• Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe
• Harry J. Lennix as Commander Lock
• Harold Perrineau as Link
• Mary Alice as The Oracle
• Helmut Bakaitis as The Architect
• Lambert Wilson as The Merovingian
• Monica Bellucci as Persephone
• Tanveer K. Atwal as Sati
• Collin Chou as Seraph
• Nona Gaye as Zee
• Ian Bliss as Bane
• Gina Torres as Cas
• Cornel West as Councillor West
• Bernard White as Rama-Kandra
• Anthony Wong as Ghost
• Anthony Zerbe as Councillor Hamann
• Bruce Spence as Trainman
• Tharini Mudaliar as Kamala
• Maurice J. Morgan as Tower Soldier

Actress Gloria Foster, who played the Oracle in the first and second films, died before the completion of her filming for the third. She was replaced by actress Mary Alice. Her changed appearance is addressed in the film's plot, and the directors stated they had coincidentally explored such a change early in the script's development.

Production

Filming occurred concurrently with its predecessor, The Matrix Reloaded, and live-action sequences for the video game Enter the Matrix. This took place primarily at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia.

Sound design

Sound editing on The Matrix trilogy was completed by Danetracks in West Hollywood, California.

Soundtrack

Main article: The Matrix Revolutions: Music from the Motion Picture

In contrast to the movie's predecessors, very few "source" tracks are used in the movie. Aside from Don Davis' score, again collaborating with Juno Reactor, only one external track (by Pale 3) is used.

Although Davis rarely focuses on strong melodies, familiar leitmotifs from earlier in the series reappear. For example, Neo and Trinity's love theme—which briefly surfaces in the two preceding movies—is finally fully expanded into "Trinity Definitely"; the theme from the Zion docks in Reloaded returns as "Men in Metal", and the energetic drumming from the Reloaded tea house fight between Neo and Seraph opens "Tetsujin", as Seraph, Trinity and Morpheus fight off Club Hel's three doormen.

The climactic battle theme, named "Neodämmerung" (in reference to Wagner's Götterdämmerung), features a choir singing extracts (shlokas) from the Upanishads. The chorus can be roughly translated from Sanskrit as follows: "lead us from untruth to truth, lead us from darkness to light, lead us from death to immortality, peace peace peace". The extracts were brought to Davis by the Wachowski brothers when he informed them that it would be wasteful for such a large choir to be singing simple "ooh"s and "aah"s (according to the DVD commentary, Davis felt that the dramatic impact of the piece would be lost if the choir was to sing 'This is the one, see what he can do' in plain English). These extracts return in the denouement of the movie, and in Navras, the track that plays over the closing credits (which may be considered a loose remix of "Neodämmerung").

Reception

Further information: List of awards and nominations received by The Matrix franchise

The film's budget is an estimated US$110 million, grossing over $139 million in North America and approximately $427 million worldwide, roughly half of The Matrix Reloaded box-office total. The Matrix Revolutions was released on DVD and VHS on April 6, 2004. The film grossed $116 million in DVD sales.

The film received generally negative reviews from film critics. The Matrix Revolutions received a score of 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review aggregation site (with a score of 27% when filtered to include only Top critics). The film's average critic score on Metacritic is 47/100.

The Matrix Revolutions grossed $83.8 million within its first five days of being released in North America.

The film was criticized for being anticlimactic. Additionally, some critics regard the movie as less philosophically ambiguous than its predecessor, The Matrix Reloaded. Critics had difficulty finding closure pertaining to events from The Matrix Reloaded, and were generally dissatisfied. The film's earnings dropped 66% during the second week after its release to theaters.

External links

• The Matrix Revolutions at IMDb
• The Matrix Revolutions at Box Office Mojo
• The Matrix Revolutions at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Matrix Revolutions Explained – a comparative-literature-style exegesis of selected parts of Matrix Revolutions.
• Lyrics to Neodammerung, including translation (archived)
• Understanding The Matrix Revolutions – A comparative guide to possible meaning and interpretations of The Matrix Revolutions
• The Matrix Revolution October 27, 2000 draft script by Andy & Larry Wachowski