Popular reviews

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  Review by Gabriel Vazzoler ★★★★½ 1

  I don't understand why so many people give this movie a low rating, really. In my opinion it's a great sci-fi movie, with a plot that holds you until the last second and destroys all attempts to solve the mystery in advance. The choice of colors and how they change when the time in the film changes also pleases me, and last but not least, the way they managed to make a script like this with few characters and even fewer actors makes this film a must-see for all the sci-fi junkies out there.

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  Review by Keith ★★½

  Reasonably fine genre piece with few surprises (the big ones can be seen a long way off), but still an agreeable mix of dated special effects (feels 15 years older than The Matrix, they came out the same year) and giant turds of embarrassingly clunky dialogue. Wait- that doesn't sound appealing, you say?- well then steer clear, my friend.

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  Review by MovingPictures ★★★½

  THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (1999) US/Ger col 100m.
  Directed by Josef Rusnak, who also wrote the screenplay.

  Based on the 1964 science fiction novel "Simulacron-3" by Daniel F. Galouye. This has been made before as a 3 1/2 hours Television-serial in Germany, called Welt am Draht/WORLD ON A WIRE (1973) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
  One of the producers for THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (1999) was actually Michael Ballhaus, who was Fassbinder's EXCELLENT cinematographer during the 1970's.

  Cast: Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D'Onofrio, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dennis Haysbert.

  Situated in 2024 with cyberspace-time travelling back to a seedy and gorgeous-looking RETRO/NEO NOIR Los Angeles 1937. Quite retro-futuristic, or futurist-retroic?

  This was a TERRIFIC american neo/retro noir watch.
  The visual effects might look outdated…

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  Review by maddie ★★½ 1

  guy chose plastic over paper...

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  Review by Wood ★★★★

  It's like if Blade Runner and the Matrix had a baby that they dropped on it's head a lot. But like both those movies, I had a lot of fun basking in these strange worlds. It's certainly dumb, and the twist is pretty obvious, and doesn't really go as deep as the concept allows. For a cyber noir from 1999 I think it holds up pretty well.

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  Review by LAckerman ★★★ 3

  I do enjoy these Twilight Zone-esque sci-fi thrillers from the 1990s despite their many drawbacks. 'The Thirteenth Floor' isn't really an overlooked cult classic nor is it worthy of such a designation, but it's just about good enough to warrant a look-in from those who missed it the first time around. I think it flew under the mainstream radar at the time due to a lack of marquee names in the cast and an underwhelming marketing campaign -- Columbia Pictures clearly had no idea how to sell this to an audience and incomprehensibly spoiled the entire plot in the trailer. We also know that this just happened to come out on the backend of monster smash hit 'The Matrix', which…

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  Review by Joe ★★★ 4

  Looks great and has loads of atmosphere (plus some great performances, particularly in its supporting cast like Vincent D'Onofrio and Dennis Haysbert), but it never really coheres as a thriller even if it does a respectable job concealing the book's big plot twist. It isn't hard to see why audiences would have been more interested in The Matrix's endlessly exciting action bonanza over this even when they're sharing some of the same basic themes.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★½

  A perfectly adequate re-hashing of stuff from more interesting movies. Destined to have been forgotten.

  Discussed on Episode 62 of The Suspense is Killing Us.

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  Review by B E R T ★★★½ 3

  I have always been really averse to sci-fi films, but I think all this time I’ve been watching the wrong ones because lately I’ve watched some that have been really great such as Gattaca and now The Thirteenth Floor. I suppose my vibe of sci-fi is cool 90s stylish sci-fi with a cyber punk edge. This was awesome, loved the time travel stuff and Gretchen Mol what a great actress, actually an awesome female cast.

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★½ 5

  My wife bought this by mistake, thinking it was the name of a different film she saw when she was younger.

  Our second and biggest mistake was actually watching it, though.

  I think calling it "a bewildering pile of crap that was about a thousand times worse than the worst Quantum Leap episodes" was what I described it as at the time and my view hasn't much changed now. And like most films that I hate most of all, it fritters away a really good idea and set-up for some cheap homages and rip-offs and little identity of its own.

  Vincent D'Onofrio in particular is utterly dreadful here, so bad that you can hardly believe this was the same actor…

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  Review by ultraviolet ★★★★★ 2

  better, than The Matrix, yes, i just said that.

  every scifi fan needs to watch this

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  Review by Matt ★★★ 1

  Comfortably the second best techno thriller from 1999.

  Though this predates The Matrix by two months, it's easy to see why one would compare the two. This is far more of a noir-ish melodramatic mystery than an assault on the senses classic actioner but the general ideas are the same - residents in simulations controlled by others in the real world, with all the moral quandaries that brings.

  The acting's pretty shoddy here and the final act a huge rush to get things resolved, but the attention to detail and characters were really enjoyable and it's a proper story to enjoy watching unravel.

  As a bonus I preferred the track used over the end credits to what the Wachowskis used in theirs (though RATM are goat contenders) - here we got Erase/Rewind by The Cardigans which is an utter banger of a tune. Dat bassline.