The Matrix Revolutions

Essential if you watched Reloaded, meaningless if you did not. This is the back half of that film, released seven months later, and it opens exactly where the other stopped.

It is also the least loved of the three, and the reason is structural. Neo spends much of it separated from the action, and the climax is not a victory but a negotiation: he offers the machines a deal, takes Smith into himself, and the war ends in a truce rather than a liberation. Nobody is freed. The sky is not fixed. Humanity gets permission to keep existing, and those who want it still unplugged can leave. For a trilogy that opened on a man being told he was a slave, ending on terms is either the mature conclusion or a deflation, and viewers have never agreed on which.

The siege of Zion is the best argument for it. The dock battle, with the armoured exoskeletons against the sentinels, runs for a long stretch with Neo nowhere in it and remains one of the largest practical-and-digital set pieces of its era. Revolutions is also the only film here that gives the ordinary people of Zion anything to do, and the Kid's arc pays off a character the sequels had been carrying since The Animatrix.

The final Neo and Smith fight, in the rain, in the air, is operatic to the point of silliness and is clearly meant to be. By that point Smith has become the thing the Architect warned about, a program that will not stop replicating, so the stakes are the machines' survival rather than humanity's, and the enemy of my enemy is the whole ending.