I got really excited when I first saw the trailer for The Matrix Revolutions. I thought to myself, "thank God! Soon I'll never have to see another Matrix movie!"

It says something about both Hollywood commerce and my own stupidity that I've dragged myself, with a sense of weary obligation, to both Matrix sequels. I'm one of three people on the planet who didn't even much like the first one. Okay, fine, it had those awesome fight scenes. I did like that. But the pretentiousness. The portentousness. The quasi-religious bullshit. Who needs it?

Still, I went to see both Matrix Reloaded and this latest picture. Now, after 4 years and 6 hours, I call finally deliver my post mortem. Here it is: oh, the opportunities missed!

See, I think the idea for The Matrix was a really nifty one. People enslaved by an alien intelligence, their brains kept active in a computer-simulated world. But a few souls manage to escape and fight back, taking the battle to the computer world, where laws of physics don't apply and monster kick-ass kung fu battles are the order of the day. This is a really neat idea, and by the end of Matrix Revolutions, you may have forgotten about it entirely. The filmmakers seem to have, anyway.

Even from the first flick, I felt the concept was being mishandled. All this effort was put into creating a scientifically plausible world, but then they mucked it up with talk of "prophecies" and "the One". What is a "prophecy" in a computer simulation? What is a "messiah"? Matrix Reloaded kind of -- kind of -- put some effort into explaining how all the religious talk fit in. Although Reloaded was a mess of a movie, I left it with some lingering hope that at the end of the trilogy the nonsense would be explained in a way that followed the rules of the movie universe.

No such luck. By the third film, we've totally entered the realm of the supernatural. For all the talk of "Zion" and the Matrix and the Machine world, all you really need to know is that Neo has magical powers. No scientific basis for it ... just magic. Jeepers, that sucks.

The main problem lies with the Wachowski Brothers. They're visionary action directors and stylists. But they should have found someone else to write the scripts, because frankly, they're terrible writers. They've taken a lovely germ of a concept and blown it into a lot of nonsensical goth hooey.

By this final film, you can pretty much forget that the series takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth (although there was one moment -- one beautiful, glorious moment towards the end, when the movie seemed to remember its terrestrial origin). You can forget about the millions of humans trapped in the Matrix -- they're mentioned as an afterthought, in the stunningly anticlimactic conclusion. But if you ignore all the incoherent mythology, you may be able to enjoy Revolutions as an action picture. Just also ignore the fact that the end looks an awful lot like Aliens, and that those ridiculous robot suits provide absolutely no protection for the pilot -- 2 billion dollars worth of futuristic hardware, and I could stop it dead with a poison dart? And try not to let it bother you that, with the machines set to destroy humanity in a matter of hours, people still stop to have long tedious conversations about the meaning of "choice" and "love".

Revolutions is not the massive clunker that was Reloaded. Moments even manage to entertain. But it is awful silly. And the trilogy as a whole? Could have really been something. Alas.