The movie is good overall. Its daft, fun, and continues on the world of The Matrix in a logical fashion. The Matrix Online is canon but has no real bearing on the story told, it jumps far enough into the future of the world to feel original but keeps enough characters and info about the originals around to keep it consistent, and leaves a lot of space for more media if the creators feel like adding more.
I love that there was no "happily ever after" with the ending of Revolutions. The machines eventually go into a resource war between each other thanks to Neo fucking up The Matrix power supply. People are still enslaved in a new Matrix, but there's now different cities of humans with different ideologies outside of it. Some machines are working with humans, even programs existing in the real world that are on the humans side, using a crazy tech that involves magnets and ball bearings.
I love that the central concept is that Neo is caught in this perpetual nightmare machine that generates electricity for the machines that don't want to live in harmony with humans, but he's been leaving himself breadcrumbs of support throughout (in the form of programs that reflect his own ideas of old friends and enemies), to help himself escape it. A machine thinks its a waste to put Neo to rest after his death, and decides to rebuild him and Trinity, putting them inside a Matrix where they're both teased with memories of their past association, which generates an incredibly huge amount of power, to keep the machines going. Neo gets out with the help of some people who absolutely idolise him, and he decides to go back in to save Trinity from being bluepilled forever, because he loves her.
There's a strong thread of identity in this film. The Morpheus of this movie is a program made by Neo, disguised as an Agent to avoid detection by the machines. The original is dead because its been 60 years outside of this new Matrix (and he got killed in The Matrix Online anyway, but that's never mentioned in the movie). He's more flamboyant and playful than the original Morpheus, but this is a recreation of how Neo remembers him, or perhaps an idealised version of Morpheus, or just the small fragments that Neo can remember outside of the poison that the machines keep feeding him. A man with a penchant for being ostentatious, as evidenced by the outfits he wore in The Matrix originals, and his famous original dojo fight with Neo. Same goes for Agent Smith, who exists as another program created by Neo, disguised as the shark-toothed CEO of the gaming company Neo works for in the new Matrix (Andrew Wilson of EA was absolutely the inspiration for him). It seems Neo never really saw him as a proper adversary, more like a rival that pushes him onwards to exceed his current capabilities. The Smith in this film appears to be fully out to kill Neo, even bringing back The Merovingian and his Exiles to attack Neo, but ends up flipping close to the end to help Neo out during the final segment of the film. Neo gambles on designing this Smith to be like this as it helps him shake off any doubts he might have.
One section that gave me a good chuckle was Neo trying to kill himself in the new Matrix, right after he receives a Game Awards trophy. Can Geoff Keighley really drive a game dev to suicide?
For the action scenes, they were likely the weakest part of the movie. There's one long fight that occurs in a moving bullet train in Japan, and the camera flies all over the place like mad, and its completely unclear what's going on for most of it. I understand why they did this, because the enemies in this scene are people within the Matrix who have been driven berserk by programming (think fast zombies from modern zombie films), and the windows have been smashed so there's a lot of wind, but I'd have preferred the camera been steady so I could make out what's actually going on. Otherwise, I think the fights were alright, actually. The hand-to-hand stuff is still there, plenty of big gun fights too, though I feel like they slacked by having characters standing a little too out in the open while exchanging shots, with nobody actually taking any hits, to my memory.
I also can't remember any music from the movie, which is surprising. The original 3 all have standout music that really made scenes, but this one really lacked that. Maybe I just need to watch it a couple of times, but everyone remembers the use of music in the originals, even though they're from 20 years ago.
Anyway, I'm rabbling at this point. I've written this between various distractions at work so it'll probably look like an insane mess.
