The trouble with the second parts of trilogies is they're in the middle.  They don't end satisfactorily, they raise more questions than they answer, and the most you can hope for is they provide character development and buildup to make you want to see the third part and find out how the story ends. 

Matrix: Reloaded wasn't a great part 2.  It got heavily criticized by tons of people, including me.  And like its other critics, I went to see the last installment, Matrix: Revolutions, to find out how the story ends.  To my surprise, I liked it.  Not to my surprise, most people didn't.

Matrix: Revolutions starts immediately where Reloaded ended. The machines are on the verge of breaking through to Zion, Neo is MIA, and things look bleak for Our Heroes.  Eventually, the movie breaks down into two plotlines: Movie A is the defense of Zion, and Movie B is Neo and Trinity going to the center of the machine city in an attempt to get the human race spared from extinction.  Neo thinks he can broker this by defeating a common enemy of man and machine: Agent Smith, who has grown so powerful he can now infect humans outside the Matrix. 

Not to spoil too much, but the ending of the film pissed a lot of people off and for good reason: Matrix: Revolutions ends exactly the way it has to end.  In the war between man and machine, machine was going to win.  Period.  The most the human race could hope for was a cessation of hostilities.  This was not going to be a "hero saves the day and gets the girl and gets a house with a white picket fence" ending, which is exactly what Hollywood has trained us to expect.  But the writers didn't give it to us--instead, they gave us an authentic ending to the story, one that fits the story and its characters.  It's good storytelling, and to an extent it redeems the weaknesses of the second installment.

The supporting cast steals much of the show.  Hugo Weaving ("Agent Smith") has way too much fun with this role.  The driving skills of Nairobi (Jada Pinkett Smith) inspired my NASCAR dreams. But my favorite is Bane, played by Ian Bliss, as a human infected with Agent Smith's program.  Bliss does such a good job of channeling Hugo Weaving - every eyebrow raise, the twitch of his mouth, the way he says, "Mis-ter Andersssson" - that I scrutinized the screen trying to figure out if it was indeed Weaving. 

There's plenty of fight sequences to satisfy action junkies, and the invasion of Zion sequences visually drive home the idea that the human race doesn't stand a chance.  This film goes easier on the philosophical mind-bending and sticks to finishing the story, which it does the only way possible. 

On the whole, I think the trilogy should be taken as a whole.  I remember how much people fussed and fretted over the ending of The Empire Strikes Back when it was in the theaters the first time, but once the story could be taken as a whole, people could look at the story in total and make a more complete summation of its strengths and weaknesses.  People argue for hours over which Star Wars film is the best and why, but none will dispute that the story as a whole was phenomenal and affected them on some level.  Perhaps the same will happen with The Matrix films once they all come out on DVD and can be watched in succession and debated.   In any event, the trilogy has changed modern sci-fi, given Keanu Reeves a career, made bullet-cams standard in filmmaking, and made skintight black PVC clothing popular again--grand contributions to the world of film.

5-Jan-2004