Not a film for the uninitiated, Matrix Revolutions picks up immediately from the second film's cliffhanger ending. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is trapped in limbo between the Matrix and the real world, where his comrades Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) are busy preparing for the machines' imminent assault on Zion. To rescue Neo, they enter the Matrix to demand his release from the sneering Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), who appears to be holding court at a fetish ball. Meanwhile, Neo's arch nemesis Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) continues to replicate at a rate alarming even to the machines controlling the Matrix. Sprung from limbo, Neo pays a visit to the Oracle (Mary Alice, taking over for the late Gloria Foster), where he realizes that his destiny lies in Machine City. While Morpheus and Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) race to defend Zion from the machines, Neo and Trinity embark on what may be a suicide mission to end the war between humans and machines.

The thrilling centerpiece of Matrix Revolutions is the machines' relentless assault on Zion. Swarms of tentacled Sentinels descend upon the subterranean civilization in tautly edited and technically dazzling sequence reminiscent of the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars (1977). It's so impressive that Neo's final showdown with Agent Smith feels somewhat anticlimactic in comparison. Quite frankly, their hand-to-hand combat, even in mid-air, gets old fairly quickly. Otherwise, the Wachowskis wisely keep the slow motion, kung-fu acrobatics to a minimum in Matrix Revolutions. They also leaven the overly solemn tone with some much-needed deadpan humor. As a result, the actors seem more relaxed and less mannered than in Matrix Reloaded. Reeves still comes across as a polite, slightly abashed surfer dude at times, but not to an embarrassing degree. Of his co-stars, Weaving makes the most vivid impression, glowering with tongue-in-cheek menace as the endlessly replicating Agent Smith. One of the busiest actors in Australian cinema, Weaving has played everything from a drag queen (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) to an elf king (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) with equal conviction. He also shared the screen with a then unknown Russell Crowe in the offbeat black comedy Proof (1991), in which Weaving plays a surly blind photographer.

Although Matrix Revolutions ends on a rather hopeful note, it ultimately envisions a grim future for humankind. The Wachowski brothers' dystopian vision cleverly synthesizes such disparate sources as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, mythology, the Bible, and the fiction of Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner), among others, to depict the perils of technology run amuck. Intriguing, frequently confusing, but mostly entertaining, Matrix Revolutions wraps up the trilogy's narrative loose ends in a reasonably satisfying fashion.