quarantine 'em

But there's so much other stuff going on in the movies that this solid core gets stuck in a terse infodump with the Architect, without even the compelling CGI Morpheus used for HIS infodumps, or Neo's nervous breakdown reaction

And this other stuff is... not necessary. Mildly interesting but not crucial. The Merovingian and his backstory with Seraph, programs producing children, Zion internal politics, the Kid subplot...

And more to the point: to reveal a fact like "Neo is part of a repeating cycle of destroyed and recreated Zions/Matrices" is easy to do in one line of dialogue. To reveal it through organic storytelling, and to have its revelation have impact, takes screen time and work

Most of a movie, in fact! For me to say "The Matrix is a virtual reality which subdues humans while machines leech their energy" is equally easy. But that sentence is not a movie. I hope you can see the distinction I'm drawing between having the idea and executing the idea

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Have a million of them. But choose to execute few, well

Build a big universe. Tell a small, COMPLETE story. People are still interested? Find the next story

I particularly enjoy Iain M Banks’ Culture series for this approach.

Yeah this is a very solid example. The interesting part is that you can kind of tell that he was to some extent mapping the Culture universe out as he went, but there was a big buffer between what had been shown and what he had worked out