Although this movie is much better than the 2 subsequent matrix movies, it's still awful IMO. The storyline isn't particularly as interesting as it thinks it is. The dialogue and styling is so in love with itself when it has nothing actually very clever to say or show. And it looked very odd and into its own aesthetic rather than having all of the visuals and other spectral effects constructed for the sake of the story so that the aesthetic mostly wasn't the center of anyone's mind.

A lot of the ideas that this movie addresses somehow seems to be a lot of people's first introduction into imagining that our entire reality is an illusion. Which is odd. I remember abstractly thinking along those lines long before ever seeing this movie. And I was a teen when I first saw the matrix movies. And I didn't think the Matrix presentation of the concept was any better than a lot of the imagined ideas I had had in my own head. In the end, until we can demonstrate any matrix-like-reality (Like what Neo gets when he takes the pill) it's all just mental masterbation. And although there is nothing wrong with mental masterbation, I find that it's best if you invent a fun fantasy while you're already in that realm if you're going to bother. I've never felt that the Matrix world was fun and never found it very compelling because it's so divorced from the only reality I really know. I couldn't really relate or empathize with any of the protagonist characters. Perhaps thr reason for this is that the characters in the story are constructed to be symbols for other things rather than just interesting and relatable in their own right to the typical person.