The first ⅓ to ½ of the movie was extremely weak. The dialogue in particular was very cringe around how Tom was a nerd too scared to talk to Tiffany. In the original Matrix, Thomas Anderson was like a dark web hacker doing illegal shit, and now Thomas Anderson is a rich coward apparently. Also the movie felt like extremely anti-video-game? Like they harped on it a lot that video games were bad, which is weird considering the cross-promotion with Unreal.
The whole thing with “Morpheus” was so convoluted I still don’t understand it. Was he an agent? Some piece of software Neo wrote and injected into the Matrix somehow even though he doesn’t know it exists? What was the point of the character at all?
The fight scenes were a real low point too. The thing that made the original Matrix fight scenes cool was originality. This one had zero of that, it was really just punching and kicking like in basically every movie. Basically no superpowers on display at any time. Getting smashed into a stone wall is not cool or new in the age of Avengers movies. Neo stopping bullets was nice to see but then he did it for like 5 straight minutes. The “bot swarm” scene at the end was indistinguishable from any recent zombie movie and just as much of a timesink – didn’t look cool, didn’t do anything for the plot. The fight scenes were boring, unoriginal, way too long, and pointless.
Agent Smith – why? If “Smith” was a “virus” inside the Matrix how did he end up becoming Neo’s boss inside the game company, yet unaware that Neo – his employee – was his archenemy? What’s the point of him being Jonathan Groff? Why did Trinity look like Trinity to Neo? What was the point of Neo actually looking like some old man with an eyepatch to the rest of the world but looking like himself in the mirror?
The incessant “flashbacks” to previous movies… why?
Also as others mentioned, Trinity was treated as basically a plot device for the first 90% of the movie with no development of her own. And when she ditched her family with basically 5 seconds internal debate, and gave that ultra cringe mini speech (“I fucking hate being called Tiffany!”)… oof.
The ending was exactly what I had predicted and feared when I sat down to watch it – Trinity is the one with the superpower, not Neo. But to my surprise it wasn’t as ham-handed as I expected and I kind of liked it, and they didn’t draw it out that much.
The final scene with the Analyst made me laugh out loud, but in the end I still don’t understand why the humans care about Neo anymore. Like they sort of explained why the Analyst resurrected him and Trinity, though the whole premise of humans as fuel seems even dumber now than it did in 1999. But if the new Matrix 4.0 is so much better than the one that Neo escaped from, who’s wanting to be free? It wasn’t the green dystopia of Matrix 1 anymore, it looked fine. What’s the advantage of being “free” and living in Io for most humans? And what was the point of saying that the events of Matrix 3 happened 60 years ago? And what was the deal with the Analyst’s cat? In the coffee shop fight scene he looks like he’s trying to reach for it like a witch’s familiar but nothing ever comes of it. Feels like something was cut out in the editing room that would explain it.
Despite all that I did sort like it and got chills a few times so I give it a B-. It was way too long though. Lop off 30-45 minutes and it would probably be a better movie.
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