An ongoing list of trivia and annotations for The Matrix Revolutions follows. See also The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded for references and trivia dealing with characters in the trilogy.
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The Oracle wears two green earrings with a stylized yin-yang symbol on each one throughout this movie. The color green frequently symbolizes the digital nature of the Matrix, while the yin-yang is a Chinese symbol of the dual nature of the universe and existence: light and dark, good and evil, male and female, each needing to exist in balance with the other.
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The young Indian girl Sati is named for the Hindu rite of sati, where a widow burns herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre.
- Sati's mother, Kamala, is named for a character from Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha who teaches Siddhartha about earthly pleasures and tries to distract him from seeking true enlightenment.
- Sati's father, Rama-Kandra, is the man we briefly saw in The Matrix Reloaded being led out of the room just as Neo, Morpheus and Trinity met the Merovingian for the first time. He is named for the seventh avatar of Vishnu (more commonly spelled Ramachandra or simply Rama) who today symbolizes the Hindi devotion to caste and dharma -- resignation to one's fate or destiny. (Vishnu is the Hindu deity responsible for the preservation of the current universe. The Hindu belief that the universe is destroyed and then recreated in its own cycle of samsara parallels the repeated destruction and recreation of Zion.)
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The subway station where Neo meets Sati and her family is labeled "Mobil Avenue" -- ironic since Neo is anything but mobile while he waits there. (In The Matrix, all the street names were taken from the Wachowski brothers' home city of Chicago, Illinois; while there is no such street as Mobil Ave. in that city, there is a Mobile Ave. far from the center of the city.)
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Life101 additionally points out that "mobil" is an anagram for limbo. Throughout this movie, other references to the Christian afterlife are equally prevalent -- the Merovingian operates the underground Hell Club, Neo perceives the Machine City as streams of light, and the wires connecting Neo to the Matrix from the Machine City resemble glowing angel's wings when flooded with power.
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The Hell Club is also a secondary reference to the Merovingian's reluctant wife, Persephone, who in Greek mythology spends a third of every year in the underworld and rules there with her husband, Hades.
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When Neo visits the Oracle in her kitchen, the same song is playing in the background that played on his first visit there in The Matrix: "I'm Beginning To See The Light". This song takes on a whole new significance when he later discovers the ability to percieve the machines outside the Matrix as shapes of yellow light.
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The name of the ship Neo and Trinity use to reach the Machine City is the Logos, Greek for "word" or "the word". In the Christian Gospels, Jesus was sometimes called "the Word", most notably in John 1:1 -- "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the word was God."
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Before the machines breach Zion's perimiter, Zee is making weapon shells to use in the city's defense. In the U.S. during World War II, when most able-bodied men were fighting in the military, women took their places in the factories for the first time making weapons and ammunition.
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Niobe's new ship is the Hammer (or Mjolnir) . In Norse mythology, Mjolnir the name of Thor's magical hammer which represented lightning and was a deadly weapon, returning itself to his hand after being thrown.
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The movie ends with a westernized rendering of a hymn from the Rig Veda:
- Asato ma sat gamaya - From untruth lead me to truth
- Tamaso ma jyothir gamaya - From darkness lead me to light
- Mrityor ma amritham gamaya - From death lead me to immortality