I’m going to make a rare departure from technical stuff for a moment.  I’ve seen Matrix Revolutions twice in the last twelve hours, once in IMAX.

A number of people have asked me for an opinion.  To sum up in a spoiler-free manner:

First off, IMAX was better, though not enormously so.  (Oddly enough, Reloaded was enormously better in IMAX.)  As an example of state-of-the-art action movie making, it kicked ass.  But what about the underlying theme?  Let’s summarize:

The Matrix was a movie about kung fu vs. evil robots that asked and answered the philosophical question “what is the nature of reality?”

The Matrix Reloaded was a movie about kung fu vs. evil robots that asked and answered the philosophical question “what is the nature of free will?”

Matrix Revolutions was a movie about kung fu vs. evil robots that asked and answered the philosophical question “if Neo got into a fight with Agent Smith, who would win?”

We return you now to your regularly scheduled programming.

Commentary from 2019:

As I’ve noted before, the VSTO team code names and whatnot were all taken from The Matrix, and it was a fun theme.

I am not “spoiler averse” but I saw the first movie in the series knowing absolutely nothing about it, and was thrilled to discover that it had kung fu, evil robots, and literal brain-in-a-vat philosophy undergrad thought experiments. Sure, lots of it was hokey and unbelievable, but it had such energy, and was genuinely surprising.

I should not have been surprised by a reversion to the mean in the sequels; the original was hard to top.