So with the fourth Matrix movie coming up, and it having been two decades since I last saw these movies (and tbh, since I was about 80% sure — I’m now 100% sure — I never saw the third one at all), and with the movies available as 4K HDR Blu-rays, I figured it’d be a good time for a rewatch/watch.

My basic take is that this trilogy is actually pretty good, which is massive revisionism of my 2003/2004 judgment that the second one was so phenomenally terrible that I refused to even see the third one. Some of this, I suspect, is the benefit of low expectations: When you’re pretty sure a thing is going to be bad and it’s basically okay, you’re impressed; when you’re going into it expecting it to be amazing, well.

But part of it, too, is that I think watching them all as a single unitary experience, rather than spread out with years in between them, forces you to accept them on their terms. There’s no “omg, that ending, let’s spend months theorizing about What It All Means and then be annoyed when the third one doesn’t live up to what we expected” distractions.

But regardless of the reasons for my evolving opinion, I now think the worst you can reasonably say of the second and third movies is that they introduce a bunch of new elements that maybe didn’t strictly need to be there, they have some wonky pacing, and that they take the series in a different direction than the first movie promised — a notable thing about both of them is that while the first movie is all focused on the super-cool digital world and barely has any time in the grubby physical world, the next two are both deeply physical, with lots of sweaty raves and a boatload of non-superhero regular fighting.

(As a tangent, it’s actually striking to me how much the third movie felt like a Gears of War game. The swarms in particular must have been visual references for the designers of the games.)

So yeah, my revised-from-decades-later perspective is that the first movie is almost perfect, one of those rare gem-like movies that’s just marvelously constructed; and that the second ones are shaggier, sloppier, and not as good, but not at all worthy of the opprobrium that people (me included!) heaped on them at release. I’m really curious now about where a fourth movie goes and what it does.