Instead, Reloaded and now Revolutions waste $15-20 of your money and five hours of time on what could more accurately be titled The Matrix Rebooted. Without spoiling too much, the ending is not only unsatisfying, in many ways its infuriating in the way it renders the preceding ominous signs of the apocalypse coming - not to mention Joel Silver's unending proclamations of these film's genius - completely hollow. If this is genius, this is genius in love with itself, without any sort of editing or checks and balances to keep it in line. If Reloaded was convoluted and episodic, at least it still left you hopeful for Revolutions. Now that it's here, I frankly wish it'd never came.

Largely, Revolutions is about the machine/human showdown at Zion that was brewing all through the last picture, as well as Neo and Trinity's journey to the Machine City as a last ditch effort to end the conflict. The early scenes are the best, mostly because at that point you're still holding out hope that Revolutions is building to a, well, revolution, though you'd even settle for a couple of choice revelations. To its credit, the intellectual gobbledy gook is toned down in this installment, though in its place we are treated to inane war film clichés and Zion politics, instead of the kung fu action and mind-teasery that made the first Matrix so fun (not to mention cool).

Maybe The Wachowskis felt their original material had been so co-opted by so many of the action films that followed it (several of them by Silver, who is definitely not above cashing in on a hit) that they felt they had to go in a different direction. Certainly there's no fault in trying something new, but it's foolish not to consider these sequels failures on certain levels. Now that it's all said and done, we're left with two sub-par movies that do little but tarnish the reputation of their fabulous source. A primary fault is pacing. Why did this one story need to be told in two lengthy rambling movies besides the obvious potential for twice the box office? Revolutions alone features a half hour period where its three main characters - Neo, Trinity, and Agent Smith - don't appear on-screen once. Their absence in the siege of Zion only emphasizes further how empty and cold those scenes feel. And despite the beauty and power of that final Neo / Smith fight, it feels like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle stuck in the wrong place, or perhaps the wrong puzzle altogether.