“Look, I’m Sure You Can Understand Why Our Beloved Parent Company, Warner Brothers, Has Decided To Make A Sequel To The Trilogy.”

SPOILERS AHEAD (for both the original trilogy and this movie)!

As someone who loved the original trilogy of the Matrix Movies, especially watching before terms such as “red-pilled” were common in our society, I felt the revolutionary tone of the movie since Neo goes from this person stuck in a corporate simulation to creating peace between the machines and the humans, all in the process of sacrificing himself and  his friends (and lover) to reach this peace.

Well throw that out the window, because like episode 7 of Star Wars, we start again, and the choices from the original trilogy don’t matter that much.

The movie starts out with an interesting premise, in that Neo constantly has these recurring flashbacks of the original movies, and he uses them to create a video game series that has these characters and adventures. He becomes a lauded game developer, but as time progresses, he increasingly confronts these visions of his previous life. He is assigned a therapist (who is the main villain) and increasingly consumes a lot of “blue-pills” to keep his mind in the simulation. 

He joins a video game design team (which is so ironic in that it looks like how the creative team for the movie tried to hash out these ideas and ended up just recycling them). Eventually, Morpheus breaks him out with help of a new cast of characters. Neo is brought to Babylon, and is told what has happened since he was presumed dead. He mentions how need to find and unite with Trinity, his past lover (who is a character known as Tiffany), and with some bullet time and adventures, they fight the psychologist of Neo who states that as “The Analyst” that he created this simulation by putting their bodies close to each other (but not too close) such that he can generate more power for the machines and hopefully stop more anomalies. 1Neo then proceeds to have a confrontation with “The Analyst” to convince Tiffany (who is Trinity in the Matrix) to come with him. She eventually does and a battle ensues and afterwards, they reencounter “The Analyst” and explain to him they will remake the Matrix and he acts smug.

The movie’s highlights were that CGI was quite well done, as the machines looked far more realistic in this movie. Seeing the original cast with performances from Jada Smith (Niobe), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) and Keanu Reeves (Neo) was quite exciting. The opening 20-40 minutes were a great way to set up a new matrix, one in which symbolizes the way people are stuck in this perpetual cycle of doing the same thing, and not questioning the system, and most importantly, made fun of the thought process behind the movie.

The cons were, well, pretty large, but I will lay out the few I think that made more of a difference. The story seemed a bit shallow, simply revolving around Neo trying to save Trinity. Bullet Time was overall not as revolutionary as it was (but age does do that to a concept), feeling more like a gimmick to jump on walls rather than a cool, new way to fight enemies. The main villain was never given much in-depth character development, besides being portrayed as some evil scientist with the intention to “Study Humanity” (as if that’s not what the matrix was built around). 

As a movie by itself, it was kind of interesting, but when it came to understanding where the movie was trying to insert itself, it sort of, to put it bluntly, “didn’t dodge the bullet” of a mediocre sequel. It was created in a similar fashion to the new star wars trilogy, as a way to bring old and new fans together, yet the movie was the equivalent of eating a huge bag of  sour-cream onion chips. If you like the flavor, you’ll finish it somehow, but once you are done, odds are you won’t remember it a day or two afterwards.