Annegelic, it was unoriginal in that none of the ideas in the story were original. It was basically ripped straight out of Ghost in the Machine, and all of the philosophy was thousands of years old (Plato's Caves specifically). Sure nobody had thought of bullet time or whatever yet, but the story itself had nothing that hadn't been thought of before. The second movie was complete bullshit, with all the pathetic wannabe philosophy jammed into a pretentious 5 minute wank at the end of the movie using pretentious wanker words like "ergo" and "apropos", just so the writers could make themselves clever while covering the fact that the speech was lame.
And then the third was just a video game, because the brothers knew that cool images were the only way they'd be able to draw an audience. The end was kinda cool just because it wasn't what I expected, but I'm sure if I bothered to watch it again I'd think it was as lame as the rest of the movie.