This article is well-written. The Matrix Revolutions is not. I understand what you are getting at regarding computer games and the like, but for me it's very simple: If it isn't coherent without breadcrumbing vital chunks of narrative in other mediums, it doesn't work as a film. The same applies more recently to The Rise of Skywalker.

For me, both Matrix sequels are an incoherent bore that pointlessly build on what was already pretty much finished in the first film. Neo has already had his death and resurrection, so there's nowhere particularly interesting left for his character to go.

I can say one good thing about The Matrix Reloaded: It has a very cool freeway chase. But The Matrix Revolutions is just a mess. Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity are all absent from the big squiddy battle in Zion, leaving me stuck with a load of secondary characters I deeply don't care about (contrast that with, say, the battles in The Lord of the Rings, where we are deeply invested in all characters concerned). The death of Trinity is lazy and stupid, rather than tragic, and lacks dramatic heft. As for Agent Smith, he was a splendid, sinister villain in the first film, but in The Matrix Reloaded he becomes a caricature. That silly scene where Neo fights hundreds of Agent Smiths, then flies away afterwards (presumably once he's bored), serves absolutely no dramatic purpose and I suspect exists only as a because-we-can bit of special effects porn.

If you were to point a gun to my head and force me to write a sequel to The Matrix, I would have gone down the Matrix-within-a-Matrix route, with the world our heroes wake up in after being ejected from those gooey foetal tubes turning out to be a second version of The Matrix for those who reject the first. I would have had Neo turn out to be not human at all, but a self-aware computer programme that doesn't realise it isn't human which has been placed there for enigmatic reasons. (God put it there to deliver humanity?) At any rate, I'd have had Neo destroy the Matrix, knowing it would also destroy himself, thus freeing the humans, but leaving poor Trinity heartbroken. The end.

So nope, not convinced. But good article nonetheless.