I haven’t watched it and haven’t watched any videos about it or anything, so any spoilers from me would be interesting.
From watching the first three and discussing them over 20 years - I noticed it took a long time for the population to actually get to much of the deeper layers of the original trilogy. It could be that we are seeing this and that this will be a kind of cult film. Some will “get it”, but it won’t bash you over the head and you can easily miss it if you don’t want to experience the movie that way.
For example, in many discussions on the original Trilogy, there was the Christian centric camp, who saw Neo=Jesus, but this way of seeing the original Matrix led to confusion on many points. Neo-Jesus did not “rise again”, nor “ascend”, but instead Neo of another spiritual system was integrated into the Matrix. He did not bring victory of Good over Evil, but instead brought balance.
What I observed with the original Trilogy was that people “learned” new points of view regarding the movie over the course of two decades because their existing point of view at some point during the trilogy did not make sense as it seemed to at the beginning. Which is why I can still re-watch the Trilogy even now from an intellectual standpoint and think about what is going on in a different way than when I viewed it 5 years before.
I think a similar thing will happen with Matrix Resurrections. Or, at least I hope. I hope it is like an onion that I can go back to after 10 years and still see something new.
But yeah, just as with real life - that first realization can never be duplicated again. Any attempt to do so is just “chasing the dragon”.
It looks like it was produced by Warner Bros, not Disney, lol - so there is hope that it runs deeper than just a formulaic attempt. There are also some interesting casting choices, like Neil Patrick Harris. Wasn’t he cancelled, lol? The big question is of course what contribution Lily Wachowski brought to the original trilogy, because with her absence whatever contribution she made in the original trilogy will be lessened in the fourth film.
It’s quite a conundrum, though. Reading the reviews by expert critics, they ding the movie for not ticking all the formulaic boxes they expect movies to make. Another conundrum is that the expert reviewers seem to have wanted the same movie they watched 20 years ago. For example, one reviewer said the original Trilogy was all about Neo and Trinity - but they would surely complain if given that again. It seems to me that the people who don’t like it wanted to relive the nostalgia more, rather than see a new movie.
It might be a while before I actually see it. I stopped going to theaters over a decade ago - when they shrunk the screens down, so from a middle or back row in a multiplex, the picture is actually smaller than my living room or bedroom TV, but is $15 per person. That was even before pandemic. It’s hard for me to see the sense in going to a theatre now. It looks like the DVD / Blu-ray and Netflix release date will be in March, so I’ll probably just wait for that to actually watch it.