As the movie opens we find that Neo has gone wireless and gotten himself trapped in a Matrix train station. It seems he no longer needs to be "jacked in"  in order to enter the Matrix. Trinity, in an act of love, coldly shoots, punches, and kicks to death about a dozen guys before managing to spring Neo in a romantic moment executed with military precision. He would have, no doubt, done the killing himself except he was trapped in a loop where he had no powers.

While analyzing romantic aspects is not our main purpose, we must say that there's more romance in a chemistry set than chemistry between Trinity and Neo. Something about mixing remorseless homicide with passion just doesn't click. Yes, we know that if humans in the matrix are not dispatched they can morph into agents, but it's not their fault. Furthermore, as we noted in our last review, they feel real pain as well as die physically when they die in the matrix. The film gives us the excitement of violence free from bitter realities or moral ambivalence that might spoil the fun.

It's no great surprise that The Matrix has not just become a popular movie but also a somewhat popular insanity defense. According to Stephen Kiehl of SunSpot.net "the 1999 film has been used, with some success, in at least ... three ... murder cases in which young defendants attempted to justify their crimes with allusions to the movie's philosophy that the world people live in is only a dream sequence controlled by a computer. Violence is condoned as a way to get out of the fake, oppressive world of The Matrix." This argument is now being used in yet a fourth case, that of sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo. (http://www.sunspot.net/news/bal-te.md.drawings05dec05,0,6939899.story?coll=bal-home-headlines)

After being freed from the loop, Neo heads to the oracle for a mumbo-jumbo session and then back to the real world where he commandeers a ship. He and Trinity take off for the machine city. Along the way he gets in a fight and has a couple of high voltage cables jammed against his eyes. This fries his eyes, yet doesn't electrocute him.  Once blinded he acquires magic vision that enables him to see golden glowing images.

Since going wireless, Neo has acquired the ability to blow up the octopus-like sentinels using thought and a few dramatic hand gestures. This is very convenient since he's attacked by about a bazillion of them on his way to the machine city.

When Neo's new powers are about to be overwhelmed by the massive number of sentinels he simply has Trinity fly their ship above the clouds. The ship is designed with heavy submarine-like hatches and thick looking metallic walls, hardly the design of an aircraft. Evidently it's supposed to levitate using electrostatic force. So, to create lift the ship would have to charge not just the plates on its exterior but also the ground beneath it. If both had the same charge they would repel each other and create a lift force. Charging the ground under the ship would be no easy trick. The required electric field would be so large it would ionize the surrounding air. The ionized air along with the conductive ground would rapidly dissipate the charge. Maintaining the charge would require an impossibly large amount of energy. It's comic book physics at best.

By contrast, the movie does not even attempt to offer a mechanism for making the sentinels fly. These metallic devices have the weight, size, and power to crush humans beneath their tentacles. There is nothing about their design which suggests they should be able to levitate. From a physics standpoint it would have made far more sense to make them spider-like crawlers rather than flying mechanical octopi.

Back in Zion the real fun begins. A gigantic cordless drill bit punches through the roof of an even more gigantic domed room and falls to the floor a considerable distance below. It has evidently bored through countless miles of rock to build a tunnel reaching Zion. We're left wondering how this device removed the debris from the channel as it bored since it's immediately followed by a horde of sentinels. As we mentioned in the last review, the machines still haven't figured out an easy way to get rid of humans.

Indeed, if the machines keep restarting Zion as described by the Architect in the second movie, then surely they must have some control over its infrastructure. Why not simply turn out the lights, water, and air supplies when it's time to get rid of Zion's rabble? Better yet, if humans must be given a choice, make it between the matrix and a one-way trip to Zion. Also, make sure that Zionites have no idle time to engage in the evils of contemplation. The old standbys of ignorance, disease, famine, and drug addiction would do nicely in this regard. Obviously, humans who are allowed to both contemplate and wander back and forth are eventually going to get into mischief.

Once inside Zion the sentinels exhibit schooling behavior and fly around in streams. This is highly logical since it makes them easier to be destroyed with machinegun fire. If they scattered and attacked simultaneously from multiple directions they could easily overwhelm the humans. Give each sentinel a pistol and they could quickly dispatch the humans with gunfire alone. But no, the sentinels mostly kill by striking, stomping, or otherwise entangling humans in their squiggly tentacles. Nearly everything about the sentinels, except their huge numbers, seems designed to make them marginally effective in combat.

The great domed room or dock is defended by some turret-mounted machineguns, infantry, and a small army of soldiers piloting oversized robotic exoskeletons. These armed forces bravely throw just about every available wartime cliché and stereotype at the invading hordes. There's the grizzled GI Joe-type captain, the fearful young cadet who bravely rises to the challenge, the doomed extras, plucky heroines, etc.

Human operators are strapped onto the front of each robotic exoskeleton. These grasp oversized machineguns in each of their grippers. Their massive arms and legs are apparently driven by powerful hydraulic muscles designed to mimic the movements of their human operators.

While their visual impact is impressive, the robot's design is outright silly for combat purposes. Their operators are not even equipped with head-sets. They have to primarily communicate by yelling over battlefield noise. The robots are huge lumbering targets which have to be supplied by an assistant running back and forth with an ammunition laden wheelbarrow. Their machineguns have no apparent aiming system other than watching the tracer bullets. Okay, this could work at close range but is not an efficient way to use ammunition.

Of course, the tracer bullets fired by the robots' guns always fly in perfectly straight lines with no hint of a parabolic trajectory, the machineguns never overheat and are able to blast away for incredibly long periods. The machineguns themselves would produce a substantial thrust which would be applied at the ends of the robot's arms. These would act like levers magnifying the thrust forces and creating considerable torques on the robot. Keeping the robots balanced, stable, and on-target would be a significant undertaking.

Worst of all the robots offer no protection for their operators. The operators do not even wear helmets, let alone flack jackets and there is no armor plating or bullet proof glass around them. Inside the concrete domed room, machinegun bullets would be ricocheting everywhere along with falling chunks of concrete and miscellaneous bits of shrapnel. The operators would be lucky to last 30 seconds in such an environment even without the attacking sentinels.

To come up with the robot/operator combination, the moviemakers have taken the image of the quintessential Hollywood action hero blazing away with a Mac10 in each hand and injected it with steroids. While they have thoughtfully provided assistants with wheelbarrows to re-supply the ammunition, they should probably have equipped them with dump trucks.

In a number of cases, sentinels by the hundreds stream directly toward the blazing guns of the robots and are blasted from the air by the heroically screaming robot operators. This would be about as effective as trying to stay dry by shooting a squirt gun against a fire hose. Yes, it would be possible to knock out the on-board computers and mechanical systems in the sentinels but bullets would do little to counteract their forward momentum.

If two objects collide head on in an inelastic collision (meaning they fuse together) and both have the same magnitude of momentum, the forward velocity of the fused objects will be zero. In the case of sentinels, they would drop from the air. If we assume that a sentinel has a mass of 500 kg ( 1100 lbs) and a velocity of 30 m/s (67.4 mph) its momentum would be 3020 Ns. Assume each sentinel is hit by 10, 20 mm cannon bullets with ballistic properties identical to those used in U.S. fighter aircraft and that the bullets fuse with the sentinels. Each bullet would have a momentum of 104 Ns for a total of 1040 ns. The sentinels would lose only a third of their forward velocity and crash into the robots at about of 20 m/s. This would be more than enough velocity to seriously injure or kill unprotected robot operators.

Even if the machinegun bullets contained high explosive that blew the sentinels apart, the pieces would still continue in a forward path. Blowing the sentinels apart would be like converting them from rifle bullets to shotgun blasts. The fragments of the sentinels would still pummel and seriously injure or kill the robot operators.

Gun smoke and fumes from numerous fires and explosions could easily reach toxic levels in an enclosed underground room, not to mention totally obscure vision. The noise alone would knock out human ability to hear and communicate. As mentioned in our generic section about sound, the threshold sound intensity for pain is about 130 dB. A single  machinegun blast could be as high as 170 db. Setting off hundreds of these per second inside a concrete domed room would be deafening. Mounting a defense under these conditions, using the weapons and tactics depicted would not just be ineffective, it would be suicidal.

A ship finally arrives in the dock and sets off an electromagnetic (EM) pulse which instantly disables all the sentinels. The human commander rails at great length about how the ship has also disabled the defenses as well. We're left thinking that it may have been a good idea. It seems to us that they should simply park the ship, wait for more sentinels, and repeat the process but no, instead it's time to retreat to the temple for a last heroic but otherwise futile stand.

Meanwhile, after a lengthy goodbye to Trinity and a monotonous fight with agent Smith, Neo manages to balance the Matrix's equation and save the day. As the tale draws to a close we are left with an uneasy peace between machines and humans, messianic images of Neo, and an obvious set up for additional sequels.

Since our first Matrix review we've read all kinds of explanations for Matrix inconsistencies. For example, the first movie  told us humans were only needed as an energy source but then went on to say that the machines also had a source of fusion power. We found this to be nonsensical. On the other hand, apologists claim humans are like the batteries in a car. They are used only for startups not as a primary power source. If so, we're still left wondering why the machines don't just use batteries. Clearly, the machines have loads of little machine critters which must run on some kind of energy storage devices.

The movie never resolves the human battery nonsense. In the second movie Neo points out to the Architect that the Matrix needs the humans. The Architect seems to acknowledge this statement but goes on to say that the Matrix could continue to exist even without the humans although at a lesser level. We're left wondering why the Matrix bothers keeping humans if they really aren't essential. About the only explanation seems to be that the system is inexorably programmed to do so.

The many physics and logical inconsistencies associated with Zion can be explained if Zion isn't real but is instead a part of the Matrix. Obviously, this would free it from the constraints of real world logic and physics. However, the third movie seems to indicate that the real world is indeed real. For us, this balances the equation. Although the Matrix series has some masterful parts and philosophical moments it is neither a masterpiece of philosophy nor of science fiction. It's simply a well-made cinematic comic book and unlike endless complicated explanations, this genre does indeed free it from the constraints of reality.