Unplugging The Matrix - Why the sci-fi franchise went south

But what it doesn't provide -- and what, until the sequels, I didn't think it pretended to provide -- was philosophical insight. It seemed fitting that, by way of signaling their philosophical influences in the original, the Wachowskis had Neo pulling from a shelf not Plato's Republic nor Descartes' Meditations, Western philosophy's signal treatments of the appearance/reality problem, but Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard.