Still slogging through The Matrix: see Fritz Lang's Metropolis instead
Well, I still haven't managed to slog through the rest of The Matrix, but see it as a sort of guideline for computer games: If your imagination hasn't been dulled by tv and video games and computer graphics, video games are flat by comparison; if your imagination has been dulled by tv and video games, you might need a sort of road map to help liven up the video games coming from this movie, so the film characters round out the flatness of the video game characters....

Very derivative. Fritz Lang's Metropolis still has it all over this one. The French Delicatessen is another variant on this subterranean other-world lower depths sort of theme and, for that matter, so is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, which I saw not too long ago in a theatre (The Orpheum in Los Angeles) with a student who was in awe of the special effects simply because they were not digital special effects and so were much more exciting to him. I was impressed with his reaction.