I saw it, and enjoyed it for what it was. I will say that it very much felt like a few "Matrix" projects mashed-up together. I especially feel like the new characters could have stood on their own as a miniseries much better.
It was like two movies. The first act was amazing, and the second was just a marvel clone. They should have just stuck with the meta self-referential in-matrix story for the whole movie. Furthermore, they could have taken it even further and epxlored the idea of onion layers of reality, with magical realms, multiple dimensions a la spiderverse, etc
I don’t understand how they made the marketing scene with so much self awareness and then failed to capitalize on it. It’s a really great start. They pretty successfully deconstructed it.
They could have played that note all the way to the end. They could also have triple down on matrix cliches awesomely to reconstruct it. But they fell is some shitty middle ground.
Man, they could have called it matrix: reconstruction and then done literally that.
Edit: I felt that while watching it. The scene where he enters the mirror and finds Neil Patrick Harris was a really compelling moment. I suspect there was a moment in the writing process where neo blue pills at that point instead. Sigh…
Yeah, rather than the happy ending, kind of wish that Neo lost, was recaptured, and went right back into game designer life, leaving the audience feeling ambiguous about the whole film.
It really was a middle ground. The first third promises deconstruction and meta-stuff, but then the rest of the movie is redoing Matrix cliches, right down to the utterly confusing final rescue sequence in the real world coupled with the awfully shot final chase sequence in the Matrix.
The real world rescue sequence really was confusing, and on top of that was comprised of a bunch of really uninteresting characters. They kept saying it was extremely difficult but it didn’t really come off that way in the film.
It reminded me of the final sequence of Reloaded, it did the "character describes plan as plan happens on-screen", but at least the mission in that movie had some tension after things went awry when the Sentinels attacked the third ship that wasn't captained by Morpheus or Niobe.
