I wrote a super long effortpost about the fact that the Wachowskis are postmodernists, and the first Matrix movie worked because it was deeply steeped in postmodernism. The problem with every Matrix movie since is that you need a stroy other than postmodernism to have an arc, and they couldn't make any other story as effectively.

If anything though, the postmodernism of the Wachowskis is why the Wachowski brothers became the Wachowski sisters -- they deconstructed the essential nature of their biology and subverted them. It's a symptom of the problems with 3 of the 4 Matrix movies. Of course, "The mind makes it real" is objectively false -- the mind is a highly parallel thing where not every part can directly manipulate every other part. People feel pain, people think they're dying, people think they're dead, but they keep going because the thing that makes their hearts beat lives elsewhere, somewhere more primal than the higher brain functions.

By contrast, its contemporary Fight Club actually does something neat, it has 3 parts to its arc: Postmodern deconstruction (the Fight Clubs everyone remembers); Modernist postmodernism (Project Mayhem) where tearing down society becomes industrialized, systematized, and made into a machine where the individuals involved are just pieces of a grand narrative (of tearing down grand narratives); and finally adopting something older than modernism itself, standing next to the girl you like after fighting to try to stop the bombs from blowing up the buildings. People never seem to remember the last two parts of Fight Club, but the fact that they're there makes it a much more complete story imo.