Every man a demiurge: a matrix of your own.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

IF YOU WANT TO understand the Matrix trilogy, think of it as a capsule history of baby boom rock. The original Matrix is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea--"What if reality is a great big fake?"--amplified and transformed into an irresistible hook. The Matrix Reloaded is a 1970s concept album: sprawling, pretentious, and ultimately incoherent, but brimming with ideas and virtuoso displays. And The Matrix: Revolutions is an over-the-hill pop star recycling someone else's material--the sort of music you'd hear on a Michelob commercial, circa 1987.

Revolutions was already slated to be the final installment of the series. But even if it weren't, its chilly critical and commercial reception should guarantee that we won't find ourselves awash in ads next summer hyping The Matrix 4: This Time, It's Personal. Indeed, this turgid tale marks the decadent stage not just of a Hollywood franchise but of a briefly vibrant genre.

In the late '90s and early '00s, a wave of films played with the notion that what we experience as reality is a false and perhaps malevolent illusion. The idea wasn't new--it was at least as old as Plato, and it had provided the backbone for many movies already--but suddenly it was everywhere: in The Truman Show (1998), Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999), the Canadian eXistenZ (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), the TV series Harsh Realm (1999-2000), Waking Life (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), and others. The broader idea of prowling about in someone else's virtual world turned up in still more pictures, from What Dreams May Come (1998) to Being John Malkovich (1999) to The Cell (2000). The quality of the films varied widely; the idea at their core did not.

You can credit part of this glut to imitation. But too many of the projects were created simultaneously and independently for that to explain everything. For whatever reasons, audiences at the turn of the century were receptive to paranoid thrillers about inauthentic realities. Call it the demiurge cycle, after the Gnostic notion that our world is governed by a mad ersatz God.

With Revolutions, the cycle stops--not because hardly anyone seems to like it but because, unlike its two predecessors, it barely bothers to engage the idea that set the Matrix trilogy in motion. No longer trapped in a false world devised by an evil intelligence, our heroes are now trapped in an anthology of war movie cliches; no longer skeptical and alienated, they repeatedly proclaim...