I remember watching the first movie as a kid and feeling the ultimate confusion be thrown at my face while being overwhelmed with some of the craziest fight scenes I had seen for about two hours. My kid brain loves that shit. I still look back fondly over that movie. It still confuses me in ways I’ll never fully understand it’s one of a kind. I never got around to watching the other movies though. My family was more about fantasy and other world sci-fi stuff. So I just never had a good chance to sit down and watch the sequels. That changed last night. I went in thinking this would blow my kid mind again, but instead I was very bored until the cool fight scenes would pop up. What I enjoyed about the first movie was the way you didn’t know or understand everything that was happening. Making this video game they’re playing in feel like a sort of magical place that the world depends on. Instead we get a story of a man fulfilling a prophecy to keep a group of people from going through genocide. It gets very religious very fast. Neo is idolized much like Jesus and Superman. While also having qualities of Ready Player One that I didn’t enjoy even when seeing that movie. Because when I call the Matrix a video game we’re talking about things that can only happen in this virtual sort of world they have created and such. Neo has problems with these character alongside him instead of the problems being thrown at him much like in the first movie which gave it this sense of urgency and mystery. Like we were there learning about the Matrix with Neo up until this point. In this movie it tries to build a world around itself intertwining the characters in ways that feel like they’re following a template that came before them. How Neo and Trinity interact with their relationship. How Morpheus goes from a teacher to a preacher. It just feels so vastly different from the first movie it’s hard not to compare. How do you go from groundbreaking ideas to derivative tropes? Seems kinda counter intuitive for a movie franchise like The Matrix. It’s not bad still, there are moments where the fights and CGI really take you for a ride. The slow mo help sell what makes the matrix what it is. The filming, editing, and animating all come together like some sort of harmony. You can tell sometimes it’s CG but not care. The Matrix rides off the fact that it’s a spectacle. It wants you to be in awe of what Neo is capable of. I don’t think that’s enough for a movie though. There are times where the pacing is so off you don’t understand how they get from one place to another. Adding dreams, prophecies, oracles, and so on is interesting but it ended up taking over what the movie was about and what they were able to do with it. Seeing as with this movie’s logic, it was gonna be this way no matter what. We think we have free will until you realize you’re asking the wrong questions. The oracle scenes are pretty mind bending with its philosophy, but that’s truly as interesting as it gets. Along with the movie giving any excuse it can to give Neo a fight scene. 6/10 is appropriate I think. I’ve given worse scores. You’ll likely enjoy this, but who am I to say. I didn’t care much for it, but I get it. It’s still above average so take it or leave it lol.