SPOILERS BELOW
As someone who wasn't a huge fan of the original trilogy (lots of cool stuff going on, but the first film was all world-building and set-up with no narrative drive, and the sequels were a mess), but loved Cloud Atlas and Sense8, I was hoping that this would be a Matrix film that I could love. The first half got my hopes up, the second half dashed them.
It starts off very fun, very 'a sequel about sequels and itself' meta, and confusing in a good way. But one you figure out the general deal - Neo got resurrected and put in another Matrix where the events of the preceding films have been framed as a fiction of his own invention, but now he's created a Morpheus-Smith amalgam AI who, along with some real-world peeps, has broken him out again. It's at this point that it needed to quickly and cleanly cover the events between this and Revolutions then set up a goal and the stakes, and then throw in a bunch of trademark Matrix impressive, impeccably-framed action sequences. Unfortunately, it failed at all of this and instead switched to confusing in a bad way.
It looked lovely, had a bunch of good performances and lots of Sense8 cast members, and had fun playing with the iconography (breaking the trope of woman-trains-less-skilled-but-chosen-man by making Trinity the hero was particularly nice), and doing endless callbacks and character returns in a way that somehow never got annoying (although Smith was a bit crap) but it ended up as a muddled re-run with bafflingly lacklustre and muddy action scenes.
Rating: Disappointing.
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