Written by Luke Barnes
Summary
Yet another franchise is brought back from the dead only to be dissected, demystified and reinvented in a new trendy way, without seemingly understanding what made the first few and its later sequels, to a lesser extent, work.
The first ten minutes of this film gives you enough reasons to turn it off. The dialogue is terrible, this is a problem for the whole film, and seems to think it is saying something deep when actually a lot of the deeper philosophy of the series seems to have been carved out of it. Pair this with a group of new characters that look, act and feel like cosplayers doing their best to make a fan film and you are given your first red flag.
To make matters worse the whole meta idea of Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, being a games developer who made the Matrix as a game and in this world everyone knows about the events of the trilogy not as events that really happened but as sections of a popular game is just awful. In this early part of the film they make funny meta comments about how WB is forcing them to make a sequel to it, and about various elements from earlier films, this does not come across as funny or deep it comes across instead as smug, pretentious and up its own arse. They also manage to throw in a good number of left wing talking points during this early section of the film seemingly for no reason other than to be trendy and have certain parts of Twitter praise them.
Honestly the way this film recontextualises the other films it makes them borderline unwatchable, and hence forward I will pretend like this film doesn’t exist.
The only reason it has got a one is because Reeves is trying and is allowed to have some fun with the role.
Overall, please save your money.
Pros.
Reeves
Cons.
It ruins the previous films
It is too meta
The writing is awful
The new characters look and feel like cosplayers
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Another Millennial Reviewer 