The game concludes with light and noise

"Everything that has a beginning has an end."

This sentence appears on the front page of the production notes handed out at press screenings of The Matrix Revolutions, which opened worldwide Wednesday. It is also uttered by the Oracle (Mary Alice) in response to a question from Neo (Keanu Reeves), "Where is this going?" he wants to know. "Where will it end?"

Neo may be the One, but he can hardly be the only One posing such questions. The talk of endings in this, the third and ostensibly final movie in the series, is so insistent that you may wonder whether the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed it, felt the need to reassure the audience, and perhaps themselves, that it was really, finally over.

There are still a few loose ends that might be spun into future sequels -- "The Matrix Recycled," perhaps, or "The Matrix Recall Election" or "The Matrix Recipe Book and Holiday Menu Planner" (featuring the Oracle's baking tips) -- but the saga of Neo, which began in 1999 when he was a scruffy hacker who took a red pill, has now by all appearances reached its

terminus.

The appropriate response is somewhere between "About time" (about six hours, depending on what's added for the DVD release) and "So what?"

Still it would be unfair to the Wachowskis, special-effects virtuosos that they are, to say that their trilogy ends with a whimper. There is plenty of bright light and big noise in Revolutions -- a ferocious machine assault on battered Zion, a rain-swept showdown between Neo and his nemesis Smith (Hugo Weaving), a giant talking Wizard of Oz head. Some major characters meet gruesome deaths, while others endure heroically. But all this bombast, which may raise an honest goose bump or two, cannot dispel the overall atmosphere of exhaustion.

The first Matrix succeeded by entwining traditional -- and often breathtakingly innovative -- action-movie motifs with the mapping of an intricate and mysterious world. The Wachowskis were pioneers in bringing some of the exploratory fascination of advanced video games into the movies, and The Matrix was so absorbing because the viewer's initial disorientation and gradual enlightenment followed Neo's own initiation into the film's vividly imagined layers of reality and meaning. All of which have, perhaps inevitably, flattened out.

Once the game environment has been surveyed, there is nothing to do but play, which is never as enthralling, especially when the keyboard or the joystick is in someone else's hands. The Matrix Reloaded, which has become the highest-grossing movie of the year in spite of widespread disappointment among critics and fans alike, tried to extend the first film's elegant mixing of action and exposition, only to bog down hopelessly in portentousness and obfuscation.

Reloaded was certainly a lumpy, gaseous treatise of a movie, but viewers of Revolutions may find themselves looking back on it fondly. It was at least overstuffed with potentially interesting new characters, plot lines and make-believe metaphysical conundrums. In contrast Revolutions, which has a roughly equivalent running time, feels padded. The battle for Zion goes on forever and seems designed to justify the picture's enormous military hardware budget. There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of Reloaded have been abandoned.