Everything that has a beginning has an end -- so speaks the Oracle. And surely that's the most encouraging word, the most energizing word, the most fortifying word, in the third and final installment of the Wachowski Brothers' man-versus-machine trilogy. (Or "tril," as you may prefer to call it, taking your cue from "Trin," Neo's sweet-talk diminutive for the lovely Trinity.) An end, at long last, to the cluttery computer animation and congested digital compositing, an end to opacity and obfuscation, an end to double-talk and gobbledegook, an end to befuddlement and boredom. The script, whether with a grin or a grimace, has been booby-trapped with lines that seem to give voice to the viewers' or the filmmakers' innermost thoughts: "I wish there was an easy way to get through this, but there ain't." Or: "I know it's difficult to understand." Or: "I don't know what he can do to save us." The "he" is of course our uniquely gifted hero -- the anagrammatic Neo -- the One -- and there's no good reason to doubt him if, in this make-it-up-as-we-go-along narrative, he will be able to see more clearly and deeply into the nature of things after his eyeballs have been burned off his face with a sparking power line. How can we be expected to know what such a man, if that's what he is, can do for us? We could only wish that, whatever it is, he would just hurry up and do it. It's much too late to wish he had quit after the first installment. Or before it. Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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