Existenz>>>Matrix

Good core ideas being explored ie playing around with the idea of human adaptation to an increasingly polluted environment: eating plastics (microplastics), how art adapts to this inward shift of focus to the anatomical and having corporations, governments and activist/terrorist groups all vying to define the way humanity adapts.

But they decided that the story they wrote to hang all this conceptual exploration around was something everyone had already seen before (man, who before was doing just fine in life, gets put on the spot by various groups govt, corps and terrorists, eventually falls in with the terrorists and then in the third act it concludes) so they ended the film right at the end of act 2 and used all the extra time saved by cutting act 3 to have scenes which just explore/fill out the world without moving the story much.

Problem is, I like those kind of stories: Brazil, Total Recall, Deus Ex and so on. I like a good tightly paced 80's/90's action scifi movies where it's a tight package, but it still has good concepts about to mentally chew on so tangibly feeling it drag throughout and then end right at the end of the start of Act 3 when the plot was actually moving left the whole experience a disappointment.