After reading a recommendation of this movie from this site: howietalks, it jumped out at me that I had to see this movie. The Thirteenth Floor is a mind-trippy movie in the vein of The Matrix or Vanilla Sky (both of which, by the way, are also excellent movies).

Description from Howie's website: "Fun little movie, that takes a while to get to its shocking point…the world is not what you think it is. Makes you think more of what Castaneda meant by the 'lines of the world.' Hunt this one down and throw it in the DVD player."

It starts off with one of the main characters being murdered in somewhat of a throwback to the old 30's murder mysteries. In fact, part of the film is shot in the 30's era style as that is where the characters can go, into 1937 via a massive computer simulation, a virtual reality where you're consciousness displaces the consciousness of one of the computer characters. So while the main time of the story is in the late 1990's there isn't really any confusion about whether the characters are in a computer simulation or not. The story is very clear but will mess with your mind (in a good way) by challenging your boundaries of reality.

The movie's main theme is about questioning reality. Is this real? And am I? What if I found out I was nothing more than a simulation? These are questions the movie begs you to ask yourself. The way the story is revealed, (I won't give away too much), is by a logical story progression, one clue leading to the next. That works for this movie and doesn't hurt it one bit. It is the characters that shine and give life to the plot. There is also a love story within the simulation which is very well done.

What is death? Who dies? If I'm not real, what does this matter? This is a mind-opener that may leave you more unsettled than before you watched it because there is something within the message that applies to you directly. Tag-line of movie: "Question reality. You can go there even though it doesn't exist."