#Matrix sentinel movie movie

While all of this has been happening, Agent Smith ( Hugo Weaving) has been spiralling out of control.

The Nebuchadnezzar is attacked and destroyed by Sentinels, until Neo pulls out his ace card: his powers are now crossing over into the real world, and he’s able to destroy a handful of Sentinels with his mind, the effort of which puts him into a coma.Īnd then comes the cliffhanger. Neo effectively chooses the second option – he heads back into the Matrix to save Trinity, who’s about to experience the death he’s been dreaming of, pulls some bullets right out of her gut, and they unplug back into the real world. He explains, in his uniquely verbose fashion, that The Matrix is an inherently flawed system – it’s such a complex program that it eventually breaks down every 100 years or so and needs to be reloaded. As The One (“the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation”), Neo has a difficult choice to make: be complicit in reloading the Matrix, allow Zion to get destroyed by machines, and choose a selection of people to be freed to repopulate Zion, perpetuating the existing system or, do nothing and allow the Matrix to crash, killing all the humans connected to it, which coupled with the machine destruction of Zion would mean the end of the human race. The Architect drops a bombshell on Neo: he’s not the first ‘One’, this is the sixth incarnation of the Matrix, and his arrival at this point is all by design.

#Matrix sentinel movie movie

When Neo arrives at The Source, he meets The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) – the boring, pretentious guy so brilliantly parodied by Will Ferrell at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards – aka the program that designed and created the Matrix. When he heads into the Matrix and consults the Oracle (Gloria Foster) on all of the above, she tells him that he needs to reach ‘The Source’ of the Matrix – cue plenty of fights, a bit with an orgasm-inducing cake, and an epic freeway chase, all in service of getting him there. Meanwhile, an increasingly powerful Neo ( Keanu Reeves) is having dream-visions of Trinity ( Carrie-Anne Moss) dying, which is – to be clear – a bad thing. But with upcoming four-quel The Matrix Resurrections on the horizon, there’s never been a better time to revisit Reloaded and Revolutions, appreciate everything they did (or at least attempted to do), and understand how it might tee up what comes next.Īs Reloaded begins, everything is starting to come to a head: the war between the humans and the machines is ramping up as the Sentinels start drilling towards Zion (the cavernous underground city where all the freed humans live), and what we soon come to learn is the natural cycle of the Matrix is approaching its end-point too. In the case of Reloaded and Revolutions, it’s the Wachowskis' somewhat admirable predilection for verbose philosophical waffling that makes the nuts-and-bolts story frustratingly difficult to keep track of, in a way the first Matrix never was.

The Matrix sequels are a bit like the Star Wars prequel trilogy: they have a complicated legacy, they used all the shiny new digital tools that early-‘00s filmmaking had to offer, they’re experiencing something of a cultural re-appraisal, and manage to tell great stories in not-so-elegant ways. The problem is, they’re also needlessly hard to follow. (The back-to-back action freak-out of the Merovingian fight and the freeway chase in Reloaded is pure, mind-blowing Matrix.) Beyond that, they also make interesting choices with the ‘chosen one’ narrative, introduce some cool new characters (Niobe! Link!), and open up our understanding of both the Matrix and the real world in fascinating ways. In many ways, though, they’re both pretty spectacular – especially in the action department. More debatable, though, is the consensus on sequels The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions. Released six months apart in 2003, they initially received a mixed reception that has since gone down in history as something of a disappointment. If there’s something film fans can generally agree on, it’s that The Matrix is a masterpiece – a sci-fi cyberpunk classic whose eye-popping action set-pieces still sizzle the synapses in all the right ways.