Speaking of prophecy: The Matrix Revolutions is now upon us, confirming my forecast of a pathetic dwindling of the series, while resolving the trilogy's eclectic oracularism into greeting-card Christianity. Should you be determined to put yourself through the experience, you should know that the modal average shot in this installment is of a shaky, blue-gray background, crossed very noisily by yellow and orange streaks. (They represent bullets or electrical sparks, of which there are a gazillion.) The background music, which runs nonstop, sounds like an amplification of one of Richard Wagner's attacks of dyspepsia. The dialogue goes like this:

"No, we did it."

"Some things in this world never change."

"But some things do?"

(A verbatim excerpt.)

Laurence Fishburne's face has bloated toward near-Brando fullness (I hadn't realized the rebels of Zion ate so well), Keanu Reeves seems more stunned than ever (with no boyishness left to redeem him) and Hugo Weaving, as a computer program that is far more expressive than any human in the picture, now is pressed to overact for hundreds of himself.

For most Nation readers, The Matrix Revolutions will be interesting only as an embarrassment to Cornel West. (Wanting to be movie-cool, Professor West accepted a cameo role in this and the previous episode, and so embedded himself in the hippest film of the late Clinton Administration.) But for Nation readers who have seen The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, there is something more to be learned from this picture, which will no doubt add mightily to the revenues of the Matrix trilogy even while loosening its grip on the popular imagination. Here, too, we encounter a theme of mediated experience, and of truth versus lies. But simply on the level of plot, the filmmakers, the Wachowski brothers, fail utterly to sustain their premise. After the last booms and screeches have cleared from the air, after salvation is declared and the final, timid half-irony is proposed (for anyone desperate enough to seize on it), the horror that set off the story remains in place, unchanged and now, apparently, forgotten.

Have a good life, Wachowski brothers.

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