I think having another three Matrix movies wouldn't be so bad. The first one was very good, the second and third were...adequate Admittedly they weren't great and the philosophical arguments were headache inducing and questionable at best in their logic. The acting was subtle, yet compelling in some case, but in others it was rather flat and lifeless. The action scenes were, for the time, ground-breaking. Finally the story arc was decent and it ended on a note that felt fairly self-contained, yet like a new story could lead from it.
That said, I'm still rather dreading this new trilogy. Why? Because this announcement says one of them will be about the birth of the Matrix. My first thought when I saw the announcement was "Oh God, please don't, please don't, please don't..." Then when I read that line, my next thought was. "Damnit, they are." It looks like this trilogy will be a PREQUEL trilogy.
I have grown to develop a real disdain for prequels. They VERY rarely turn out well. Knowing ahead of time what must happen in order for the circumstances you know will exist to be there, there's limited opportunities for surprises. In addition, it's incredibly difficult for the events needed to set up those circumstances to occur without it feeling like the writers or directors are turning to the audience and saying "See? That's how it went down!", thus destroying a sense of immersion in the story.
I think this immersion-breaking is one of the biggest flaws of prequels; they all seem to come with this sense of, for lack of a better term, meta-narrative, like you can hear the filmmakers silently pointing things out to you. It makes it feel less like you're watching events unfold and more like you're having things explained to you. From my own limited point of view, prequels only really work if they're set far back enough that they're not directly related to the events that occurred in the previous movies. Let's look at two examples. A bad prequel would be The Thing from 2011; in addition to being cookie cutter with a lot of its tropes and containing narrative plot holes, the events were incredibly blatant with their setups, like you were watching the prequel characters assemble the scene that the characters from John Carpenter's film would discover later. Now a good prequel would be Red Dragon, the film set just before Silence of The Lambs. Now the film by itself may have had some flaws, but it did a good job of telling its own story that didn't feel like it was leading the audience by the hand on a tour of setpieces and pointing each one out. It's only direct connection to the next chronological film is when Dr. Lecter is told he has another visitor from the FBI, and just as Dr. Chilton was about to turn the request down, Dr. Lecter says "What's her name?"
So long story short, this new trilogy sounds like it's shaping up to be a prequel, and that's rarely a good thing. The last movie ended with plenty of opportunities to begin new stories, with people now aware of the existence of The Matrix and given the choice to freely come and go between the Matrix and the real world through a tenuous agreement with the machines. Perhaps there could be fanatics who refuse to trust the machines and want to destroy them, so in order to honor their agreement, humanity has to stop them from releasing a computer virus that would bring down the system that millions still rely on for survival. Or perhaps there might be additional rogue programs like Agent Smith that seek to take control of The Matrix and re-enslave humanity, perhaps intending to develop interstellar flight so it can try to conquer other planets. The possibilities are there, but they won't be realized if Hollywood insists on getting bogged down in one story to the point it won't even consider writing a new one, even within the same setting.
