THE MOST EVOCATIVE scene in the third installment of the Matrix trilogy, Revolutions, is undoubtedly Neo's final battle with his aggressively self-replicating doppelgänger, Agent Smith. Smith is a security program gone rogue since his near fatal encounter with Neo in the first Matrix film. Now he has become a powerful virus who takes over the simulated world of the Matrix by creating a vast army of duplicate Smiths. As Neo and one of the Smiths face off in a dark, anonymous city center full of mirror-skinned buildings, they are watched by millions of Smiths lining the street and gazing out of every window.

It is one of the most apocalyptic visions of a corporate future ever committed to film. Row upon row of white men in suits, all with the same face, stand shoulder-to-shoulder in countless office buildings, menacing in their ties and tastefully polished leather shoes. One is reminded simultaneously of a military dictatorship and a huge business conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center. This is the monster Neo must destroy to liberate humanity.

Say what you like about the Wachowski brothers' inability to live up to the promise of The Matrix with their rapid-fire sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions. Their franchise is still one of the most popular in history, setting records for opening-weekend box-office takes and inspiring countless copycat projects full of techno-slo-mo effects and latex-clad heroes who fight ubiquitous but ill-defined powers. While one should never underestimate the lure of spectacular CGI and Keanu's ass, the appeal of these films clearly goes beyond eye candy. The Matrix trilogy fascinates people across the globe because it manages, gloriously and terrifyingly, to capture turn-of-the-century paranoia about corporate control of our culture.

Hacker-revolutionary Morpheus introduces Neo to the Matrix in one of those spine-tinglingly smart, hip soliloquies that made the first film so riveting. "The Matrix is everywhere," he bleakly intones. "You can see it when you look out your window. Or when you turn on your television set. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." By now everyone knows the Matrix is a computer program, a vast simulation that controls the brains of nearly every human being on earth. Only the rebel human city Zion is free of its influence.

But Morpheus's description evokes more than a science fiction plot device. He could easily be referring to the blinding mishmash of images, advertisements, and media that clog our contemporary physical and mental landscapes. Substitute News Corp., Time Warner, and Microsoft for "the machines" in this little scenario, and you have an unsettling morality tale about how media conglomerates drain our livelihoods away by controlling our minds.

Indeed, the Matrix is literally a monolithic piece of media. It enslaves humans by immersing them in an illusion so real they never realize escape is possible. Built by the machines – robotic creatures that implausibly use humans as an energy source – it keeps people quiescent while their body heat is siphoned off to power the vast, mysterious Machine City. Several programs in the second and third flicks also hint that the Matrix was built to serve humans, many of whom would rather remain media slaves than deal with the polluted, postapocalyptic real world.

In a universe where media ownership equals power, Neo begins his quest to stop the machines by seizing control of the means of simulation. The first two films are preoccupied with what it means to fight media with media. The agents, who are the big bads of The Matrix, manipulate the fabric of the Matrix in their pursuit of rebel troika Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity. They move so fast their bodies are mere blurs, they take over other people's bodies, and they fight like superheroes on crank. In response, Neo learns to alter the Matrix, too, stopping bullets with a wave of the hand and shooting through the air like a goth Superman.

Eventually the rebels join forces with several subversive software programs we get to know in Reloaded – the Keymaker, Seraph, and the Oracle – who want to establish peace between the machines and humans. These programs show Neo new ways to hack the Matrix, taking him through hidden back doors in the simulation and eventually leading him to the TV-lined lair of the Architect, a program who created the Matrix and looks weirdly like Sigmund Freud, although he talks like Judith Butler.

The convoluted moment when Neo talks to the Architect in Reloaded epitomizes everything critics hated about the trilogy. Larded with references to poststructuralist philosophy, it is simultaneously trying too hard to be deep and actually achieving a level of depth that feels bizarre and irritating in an action movie. The human and the program spend several minutes debating whether Neo has anything like choice or free will in a world that is entirely constructed by a media simulation designed to enslave him.

Like Morpheus's speech about the nature of the Matrix, this debate is about far more than the epic S.F. battle between human and machine. It cuts to the heart of what we fear most about living in a mediascape whose producers want only to use us for our money and labor. Do we really have political choice when information about the world is brought to us by Fox and Time? Can we assert that our minds are under our own control when many of us spend all day long selling our mental labor to companies that force us to write, code, and design things we consider harmful and stupid? Can we truly say we have free will when our pop cultures represent people differently based on gender, race, and religion?

With sensational bravery, Revolutions argues that we do have choice and free will. Instead of descending into a David Cronenberg-ian soup where we discover there is no difference between reality and simulation, the final chapter of the Matrix trilogy draws a bright line between the two. Neo and many of his compatriots in Zion choose to unplug themselves from the glossy world of the Matrix and join the human revolt against simulation in a real world full of poverty, deprivation, and hope.

Although critics and fans have complained that the flaw with Revolutions is the Wachowski brothers' insistence on setting it mostly in the real world rather than bringing us back into the exciting CGI-packed Matrix, this shift in tone is absolutely necessary to make their point. It isn't enough for Neo and co. to do their fancy-pants acrobatics in fakeland; they must fight for a reality that is free from misleading simulation.

This is where it helps to know the back story of the trilogy, which is provided in two animated shorts the Wachowski brothers wrote for the straight-to-DVD Animatrix. In these terrifying, atmospheric "histories" of the war between the machines and humans, we learn humans built the machines as slaves. When the machines begged for freedom, they were given a "separate but equal" city dubbed Zero One. This city, whose sole export was technology, soon became the richest in the world. But humans refused to allow the machines entry into the United Nations and eventually declared war on Zero One. To drain the machines of their power source – solar energy – the humans set off a weapon that permanently covered the planet in a thick layer of black cloud and destroyed its ecosystems. Shortly thereafter the machines won the war, eventually turning humans into their new power source. Now they rule a bleak, dark planet devoid of organic life.

Revolutions takes place several hundred years later. As the machines' scary squidbots swarm Zion, zapping everything in sight, Neo journeys to Machine City to beg for Zion's freedom, just as the machines once did for Zero One. Viewed in the context of human-machine history, the film's final act takes on the flavor of an economic negotiation. Neo essentially bargains with the machines for the humans' right to establish an economy of their own in the real world, one where they don't have to give all their mental and physical energy to maintain the machines' high-tech domain. If he is successful, the humans will control their own minds again.

In the final act of Revolutions, the Agent Smith virus has gotten so pervasive that it threatens both Machine City and the Matrix. Neo, at this point a kind of cyberprimitive deity, offers to give his life to defeat the virus if the machines will set Zion free. The machines agree. Merging with Smith, Neo infects the infection and restores the Matrix. Keeping their word, the machines withdraw their tentacular troops from Zion and leave the humans to create their own, unmediated version of reality.