I'm going to go out on a great, long, crooked and creaking, swaying and ready to drop to the abyss limb here, and say that I liked this movie better than The Matrix.I really don't want to sway anybody who might want to spell out all kinds of tirades about Virtual Reality movies, like Owen Glieberman does in E.W. I have a small reason for liking a movie, and I will never try to explain that the reason why I enjoy something is because it was good, i.e., I know what I'm talking about to the exclusion of everything else. I like a movie which entertains. I was immensely entertained by The Matrix, but that great chasm of misunderstanding the exact moment in the fiction's history when the robots take over mankind (also glossed over by King Jim in the Terminator films), I didn't need to get that in The Thirteenth Floor because it wasn't there.
The Matrix bends the familiar Virtual Reality plot. The holodeck in the Star Trek "mythology" is a place where the crew can lose themselves, but they walk around in it. In Lawnmower Man, the Virtual Reality is experienced by hooking into the computer. The late Millennium movies do seem to want to explain that "reality"  is virtual. Perhaps it is the filmmaker's attempt to try to explain the turning of a thousand year odometer by disguising reality as a computer program. The actors better watch out, because they can be digitally erased anyway.
But, as usual, I ramble. This review isn't about The Matrix, or about filmmaker's attempts to solve the riddle of the Universe. This is about The Thirteenth Floor, a movie I probably wasn't going to like going into it knowing it was produced by those responsible for Independence Day and that movie which elicited from me a yawn  the size of a Stargate.
(Not to mention a certain computer generated lizard.)
Let's say The Thirteenth Floor is L.A. Confidential , Devil In a Blue Dress, Chinatown, (I obviously can go on and on) disguised in a Virtual Reality plot, and enhanced with computer graphics. I am really a "fan" of computer graphics, and this movie uses them well. I feel the programmers (undoubtedly still licking their wounds from the Godzilla debacle) decided that this movie deserved to be buried. The media did not seem to know what to do with this movie, and on top of that the reviews were negative. Well, I think the movie is good. It sways just past medium on the Mikometer, but that isn't negative.
What I like about the movie is , it looks good (photography and production design). The actors are believeable.I read (I'm sure it was Calendar, but probably Kevin Thomas. I'm sure Turan doesn't waste his time on movies like this) that the actors were forgettable because they weren't famous. What?? Gretchen Mol delights. Vincent D'Onofrio (you know him as the skin decaying alien takeover guy in Men in Black.) does a mean Don Stroud, and Craig Bierko has just exactly the screen prescence of a Dylan McDermott, which I feel is justified I guess because I always liked Dylan as the L.A. detective in The Blue Iguana. (He was a bounty hunter, but I need the detective metaphor to mesh with my mention of Chinatown earlier.)
What The Matrix expouses in flash, I believe The Thirteenth Floor relates in style. Particularly that L.A. Confidential, the past is the past, Roger Rabbit Red Cars on Broadway type of style that seems to be so prominent in the computer graphics.
I love the fact that the sepiatoned old style postcard look of the 1937 sequences are commented upon when Dylan, I mean Craig (I forget the character's name. He has two of them, and I saw the film a week ago.) mentions that the "colorization" scheme needs to be tweaked.
All these Matrices remind me of Max Headroom, anyway, and I felt that The Thirteenth Floor was intelligent and visually stunning, but not as a "thrill ride". (The Matrix does have it's "mythological underpinnings" but basically it , like that souped up printmaster program from George, is a thrill ride. )
The Thirteenth Floor is a movie about deceptions, much like Chinatown.
The deceptions are cloaked in a Virtual Reality program, however.
Let the science fiction junkies revel in this paradox. I thought Gattaca was boring, but I feel The Thirteenth Floor is a thought provoking exercise in the thriller genre. I'm not going to bring up noir at all (but of course I just did).
This isn't the best movie ever made, kids, but I'd go see it if I were you, and make it quick. It won't be around for long.