SPOILER
ALERT
The overall shell of the movie was good and despite its faults I still kinda enjoyed it. There were good ideas, but the execution was lacking in almost all departments. Lore-wise, everything seemed shallow and lacking depth, from characters to the world itself. Side characters that were not among the main cast, including the crew members, served as largely forgettable, even nameless background, whereas in the Trilogy we've got to see some personality and depth of almost all side characters, even some nameless ones. We barely learned about the world Neo woke up to. We've got only glimpse of Io, but without really seeing the people, politics, social and religious diversity and the general struggle. In the Matrix, we are visiting only a few recurring locations, and we don't get to see much of the world beyond them, and because of that the world feels quite small. Lack of depth and detail is the biggest sin of this movie. It has many more sins and faults, but this is the one that really stands out. We can also see that both choreography and cinematography falls behind The Matrix (1999), which is rather disappointing. M4 should have been split into 2 or 3 movies, so there would be enough time to properly, in detail, present the world lore and characters to us the same way it was done in the Trilogy and at the same time focus on the love story as they did. With limited time and focusing on that love story in M4, we experienced that everything else was, unfortunately, sacrificed in the process. The trilogy presented us with many good questions and forced some deep thinking, centering around many important things like social identity, politics, gender, love, religion, belief and everything in between, while M4 was largely stripped of that and was pretty much left with just 'love'. Also, the Analyst mentions that his Matrix is running on misery and suffering, while in the glimpse of the digital world we see, everything is pretty much the same as the old Matrix, aside from the social and technological progress. One of the somewhat 'smaller' things that pains me in this movie is how they absolutely butchered Merv's character in the scene where his appearance makes no sense, and the whole factory scene feels pretty much forced just to meet a certain quota. First thing is that nothing of Merv's personality remained as he was reduced to obnoxious, vulgar, angry man, and second is that there was no point for him to be there at all and direct his anger at Neo, since all of them - Neo, Smith, Merv - were all victims of Analyst's changes after he rose to power. There's also a question of how Smith tracked the crew there in the first place, since it's pretty much an equivalent of standing in front of the specific hardline, and mirrors were definitely more common than hardlines in the old Matrix, with certainly at least a few even just around Trinity's repair shop. I could really go on and on about M4's issues, but I covered the most glaring ones, although I should probably also mention the abundance of meta commentaries and partially unnecessary flashbacks. The movie definitely stands way behind the Trilogy, mostly because of its lack of depth and detail. It's still a good watch if you turn off thinking and don't try to dwell on the lacking details, but overall it's pretty much just a 6/10 movie.