Not to sound insulting, but I think most negative reviews just don't get it

Rating: 10/10 (27 October 2018)

No spoilers here, and I'm not going to get into the philosophy, hidden meaning or anything else like that here...
To judge this film, or any of the three films as something that you should 'get' as a stand alone movie is ridiculous. Yes the first movie can be viewed this way and justly deserves a strong rating. The Matrix introduces the story, the characters, the premise and concludes at a pretty natural break in the overall storyline. To that end Reloaded introduces more characters and develops the story further. However if you need the third movie of a trilogy to introduce more, and not be dedicated to the conclusion of the story then you should love Godfather III.
So what is there to 'get'? There is much that you can understand about the making of these movies prior to ever watching the movies that will help immensely in my humble opinion. First the Wachowski's directorial debut was Bound with a whopping budget of 5mil, then on to Matrix at 65mil, and from there to Reloaded and Revolutions at a combined 300mil! I have read 2 versions of this. What is the same in both is the they wrote the entire Matrix trilogy as one story and wanted to sell it that way to a studio. The difference in the two stories is what their motivation for Bound was. One version has it as an audition to the studio for funding the Matrix, the other is that it was not. Regardless it was filmed in the 38 days largely because of the Wachowski's extensive planning and clear vision for the film. This is one thing for Bound, but quite another when you consider they did the same thing for the Matrix trilogy. They story boarded all the scenes for the trilogy once they started the production of the Matrix. They had all three movies made in their heads, down to how every scene looked prior to ever starting them. Further, if the technology did not exist to put on film what was in their head, then they just went ahead and created that also.
I highly recommend these films be watched in a 'marathon' fashion, but what I would recommend even more is that you start with Matrix Revisited, to see the journey you are about to go on.