Quote Originally Posted by tombo View Post
The matrix films did nothing for me. I respected, intellectually, the fact that a cool foreign-thriller feeling series with interesting philosophy was so big, but it was so cold and "for people who feel clever" I couldn't muster up any love.
The Matrix, coming out in a world that already had Ghost in the Shell, New Rose Hotel, and The Invisibles, just looked not so great. The action scenes were fun enough, the clothes could be cool, but the central "big mystery" was something we all knew from the ads, before the movie even came out. There really wasn't anything I could see that we needed to think deeply and seriously about. "What if this is a simulation and there's another world that still runs on gravity and hunger and ethics pretty much identical to this simulation-world's?" That's not a deep ponderable. "What if hats were ants?"

The Matrix looked simple and old-fashioned compared to The Thirteenth Floor, and that should have taken effort. At least, The Thirteen Floor asked questions that were a little harder to answer immediately, and characters who weren't terminally naive.