Excellent movie!

Yes! It's great I just saw it for the first time and I'm amazed it's a wonderfull film with terrific acting and really cool action scenes.
And I completely agree that this is not a rip off of The Matrix or anything else, these elements belong to asian cinema and btw I found this to be a much better film than the matrix, the actors are so much better (compare Kaneshiro to Keanu Botox-face Reeves and you know what I mean) and the FX feels more .. like .. integrate in the movie, dunno how to say that in English, but its not like in the Matrix where you have scenes that are like " Oh check out how cool this CGI is! woahhou!" but are otherwise completely meaningless.

Overall a great movie I'm glad I came across this by sheer coincidence in my local video-rental.

Edit: I might add that there is an exclusion from the acting beeing great:
the american actor, who played the commander of the human base in the future is actually acting disturbingly terrible, his voice is beyond fake, it sounds like the most horrible dubbing.


Basic reading ability is required to fully enjoy this post.

Compare the beginning of the movie with your previous statement. Wow. That was horrible.

However, I liked this movie enough to buy a copy of it.
As others have said, Takeshi Kaneshiro pretty much makes this movie with his expressive and odd sense of humor. And yeah, it rips off so many different movies it's not even funny, but look at the Scary Movie series; people don't complain about that even though it's about as obvious.

And I love how people in particular point out similarities to the Matrix, when the Matrix borrowed heavily from Asian cinema AND the work of Masamune Shirow. Yeah, it rips off Hollywood and virtually every popular movie in the past half-century, but at least it has... well, character could be the best way to say it. Not exactly originality, but character.