>>114843939It's a great work of art in its OWN right, but it's a terrible sequel to The Matrix as such. So, for that matter, are Reloaded and Revolutions.
The first Matrix is really very simple. It's a classic good vs evil, rebellion vs evil empire story. The first Matrix is essentially Star Wars: A New Hope. We even have some of the characters filling the same roles. Neo is Luke Skywalker. Trinity is Leia. Morpheus is a blend of Obi-Wan and Han Solo. Agent Smith is Darth Vader. The Nebuchadnezzar is the Millennium Falcon. The Sentinels are the TIE Fighters. The first Matrix movie's cyberpunk window dressing is just frills surrounding a classic Hero's Journey story. Neo must arise out of his humble beginnings, learn skills from his mentor figure, defeat the dark father figure who serves as a Dragon for the evil empire, and save the day while getting the girl. Really, really simple stuff.
Every single subsequent piece of Matrix media fails to satisfactorily build on this. All the other pieces of Matrix media want to tell a DIFFERENT sort of story, a much less simple and elemental and Campbellian type story. The other two movies and the Animatrix want to tell a story about shades of gray, about humans being bastards instead of heroes, about the dangers of blind faith, about what happens when good intentions go bad, about what happens when you have to accept your limits. And they don't do this terribly well. The Animatrix does it better than the second two movies. But even it has its limits.
The trouble, frankly, is that the Wachowski brothers were never smart enough to tell a more complex, nuanced story. They were always dunces with good taste. They used the first Matrix movie to tell a simple story loaded with cool visuals and a very cool aesthetic, and that's what they're good at so they did it very well. But they got too big for their britches.
