The Matrix and Terminator before it have one thing over the slasher movies that preceeded them, they both at least provide a reasonable rationale for having some villian that can't be stopped.

There is clearly a need by the movie going public to have this entity that can't be stopped, the burden on movie creators is to come up with something that is unstop-able but not so fucking stupid that it just can't sustain itself.

The reigning king of the rational unstop-able entity was Terminator prior to Matrix. Matrix (and maybe "Blade") provide the most reasonable story platform for having an entity that can't be stopped AND for having a hero capable of superhuman feats.

I personally don't expect anything from movies like Matrix and Star Wars, I don't expect religion. AND, I personally find it a fucking joke that Joseph Campbell and George Lucas were friends, since neither one of them seem to know dick about religion.

Joseph Campbell may have been an expert on religious facts, but the man was the most boring clueless fucker on religion who ever fucking lived.

Of all the sci-fi movies I have seem, I would say Dune has the most religious overtones, in that, to me at least, it seems to be presenting Kundalini Yoga in a form that idiot *ucking westerners can understand (Dune replaces the Kundalini SNAKE With a Worm).

This brings us to the ending of Matrix.

One of the recurring themes in religion seems to be that everything is as it should be; everything happens as it was intended to happen.

After all the fists and fury in Matrix, in the last minutes of the whole big thing, we learn that the hero was DESIGNED to do exactly what he had been doing. In the last minutes of Matrix, we learn that the HERO was merely one of six previous versions of the HERO all with the same purpose. In the last minutes of Matrix, we learn that the purpose of the NEOs have always been to act as sort of a feedback loop to keep the Matrix program current and valid. This in and of itself is fucking brilliant. This one sentence at the end of matrix makes the whole series a standout.