Worst of all, the directors destroy Morpheus. Lawrence Fishburne has finally run out of cool. The film is reduced to that most robust of clichés - the weapon defines the person. So, Trinity gets the ubiquitous Wonder-nine, the 9MM Berretta; the Seraph, like all good bodyguards, uses a pair of .45 ACP with its slow, heavy, man-stopping rounds and Morpheus, in a desperate attempt to get some pizzazz back into the role, has a brace of Tech-9s, laser sighted with magnifying scopes no less. All these guns could not save the obligatory shootout sequence from being the worst of all the three films. Will somebody tell these people that you cannot hit anything when you indulge in two handed firing, as sighting is impossible? You never see Cameron's Terminator blunder like that.

The film works another classic mythic theme - the main struggle is actually a holding action to give the Hero time to penetrate the inner lair of the Evil One and destroy the Source. The assault of the machines on the city of Zion is one of the few exciting moments we get, but again their sense of filmic history gets in the way. The defenders use something that looks like the robotic lifter in Aliens with machine guns grafted on and then forget to insert even minimal armoring to protect the operator. It is a level of absurdity that is inconceivable. Neo flies into the heart of Machine City and Trinity dies in the crash. It seems to come as a great relief for her. The Architect and Neo strike a deal that they stop attempting to destroy each other if Neo deals with Smith. This raises the interesting moral dilemma that the other humans still plugged into the matrix are being abandoned for the sake of peace. What was the point of all this strife then?

Smith and Neo face off in a fight in the rain that occasionally reaches the sparkle of the first movie. Smith appears to defeat Neo and assimilate him as he does all the others but he finds instead that it is he who has been taken over and transmuted. This too was a very apt psychological moment. Unless you accept your dark side and assimilate it into your self, true growth and transcendence is not possible Rejecting your dark nature and identifying only with the good leaves you vulnerable to being entirely taken over by evil. It is a truth that great myth of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set out so starkly. But if you integrate the Smith within, accept he resides there, the personification of lusts and greed and ambition, then he can be brought under control. For, Smith is not the only resident in the psyche; the unique quality of being human, of having values and aspirations beyond the merely selfish, also dwell there. We reach our moment of self- actualization only when we accept Smith. That moment of acceptance causes the paradoxical transcendence into one's uniqueness, no longer functioning from the anonymity (Smith!) of the mammalian limbic brain, but as a realization of one's fullest human self. (The process does not eliminate either light or dark but includes them before transcending both. Indeed, if such acceptance and inclusion were not performed, transcending to the next level is not possible.) This is not enlightenment, but self actualization - an equally vital process.

It is a good moment, a conclusion that is maturely downbeat instead of mindlessly optimistic, but by then the audience has been visually over-stimulated to the point of numbness. The Wachowskis did intend some such point as the film closes on an unintentionally hilarious and bizarre note. They use verses from the Upanishads, set to rock music (!), which you almost don't get.

Asato ma sat gamaya
Tamaso ma jyothir gamaya
Mrityur ma Amritham gamaya

From non-being lead me to Being
From darkness lead me to Light
From death lead me to Immortality

Such has been mankind's ambition for millennia, but the revolutions of the Matrix may not be the path.

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