The ‘90s are hot right now, but there was more to the decade than Super Nintendo and Jazz cups — like, for example, a certain genre-defining franchise of sci-fi movies. While most of the series came out in the 2000s (plus one in the 2020s), it’s still a good time to revisit the films that virtually defined the turn of the millennium: The Matrix. Plus, all four movies are streaming on HBO Max, making it easy for you to plug yourself in to your couch, grab a bowl of delicious gray future goop, and just watch one Matrix after another.
The original Matrix, released in 1999 and directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, is one of the most iconic, influential, and critically acclaimed movies of all time. It was also a ridiculously big hit, having made nearly $480 million at the box office off of a $63 million budget (that’s been buoyed by subsequent rereleases a bit, but it still counts). The sequels fared a little worse, at least according to critics at the time, but if you take the series for what it is and not what you wished it would be, each movie is fascinating in its own ways.
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The Matrix Is the Smartest Sci-Fi Series of All Time
Image via Warner Bros.
The Matrix, for those who didn’t become unplugged until recently, is about a computer hacker (Keanu Reeves, whose character uses the hacker alias “Neo”) who finds out that the world is not what he thinks it is. In reality, as explained by a fellow rogue hacker named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), the world is a computer simulation run by machines that have taken over the world. Humans are kept in pods that tap into the electrical energy that human bodies produce, which is used to power the machines, and the virtual world they live in is used to make them complacent.
It’s pretty cool stuff, and that’s without even mentioning Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus or Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith, plus the very cool (for the time) sunglasses and black leather. The first two sequels, Matrix Reloadedand Matrix Revolutions, go deeper into the lore of how the Matrix works and why it was created, doubling down on the first movie’s themes of free will and fate and whether or not they exist or can be changed. They’re also incredible action movies, with each one having at least one unforgettable sequence — like the lobby scene, the freeway chase, or the Dragon Ball Z-esque anime fight that ends Revolutions.
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Collider Exclusive · Sci-Fi Survival Quiz Which Sci-Fi World Would You Survive? The Matrix · Mad Max · Blade Runner · Dune · Star Wars
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Five universes. Five completely different ways the future went wrong — or sideways, or up in flames. Only one of them is the world your instincts were built for. Ten questions will figure out which dystopia, galaxy, or desert wasteland you’d actually make it out of alive.
💊The Matrix
🔥Mad Max
🌧️Blade Runner
🏜️Dune
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🚀Star Wars
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01
You sense something is deeply wrong with the world around you. What do you do? The first instinct is often the truest one.
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02
In a world of scarcity, what resource do you guard most fiercely? What we protect reveals what we believe survival actually requires.
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03
What kind of threat keeps you up at night? Fear is useful data — if you’re honest about what you’re actually afraid of.
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04
Which of these comes most naturally to you? Your strongest skill is your best survival asset — use it accordingly.
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05
How do you deal with authority you don’t trust? Every dystopia has a power structure. Your approach to it determines everything.
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06
Which environment could you actually endure long-term? Survival isn’t just tactical — it’s physical, psychological, and very much about where you are.
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07
Who do you want in your corner when things fall apart? The company you keep is the clearest signal of who you actually are.
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08
A comfortable lie or a devastating truth — which can you actually live with? Some worlds offer one. Some offer the other. Very few offer both.
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09
Where do you draw the line — if you draw one at all? Every survivor eventually faces a moment that tests what they’re actually made of.
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10
What would actually make survival worth it? Staying alive is one thing. Having a reason to is another.
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Your Fate Has Been Calculated You’d Survive In…
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. Read all five — your result is the one that resonates most deeply.
💊
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The Matrix
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things, the places where the official version doesn’t quite line up. In the Matrix, that instinct is the difference between life and permanent digital sedation. You’d find the Resistance, or it would find you. The machines built an airtight prison. You’d be the one probing the walls for the door.
🔥
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Mad Max
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you. You don’t need comfort, community, or a cause larger than the next horizon. You need a vehicle, a clear threat, and enough fuel to outrun it. You are unsentimental enough to survive that world, and decent enough — just barely — to be something more than another raider.
🌧️
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Blade Runner
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely. You read people accurately, keep your circle small, and ask the questions others prefer not to answer. In a city where humanity is a legal designation rather than a feeling, you hold onto something that keeps you functional. You’re not a hero. But you’re not lost, either. In Blade Runner’s world, that distinction is everything.
🏜️
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Dune
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards. Patience, discipline, pattern recognition, political awareness, and an understanding that the long game matters more than any single victory. Others come to Dune and are consumed by it. You’d learn its logic, earn its respect, and perhaps, in time, reshape it entirely.
🚀
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Star Wars
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re someone who finds meaning in being part of something larger than yourself. You’d gravitate toward the Rebellion, or the fringes, or whatever pocket of the galaxy still believes the Empire’s grip can be broken. Whatever you are, you fight. And in Star Wars, that willingness is what makes the difference.
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The fourth movie, 2021’s Matrix Resurrections, is a little pricklier than the previous movies and doesn’t fit into a box quite as easily. In it, Neo has been trapped in the Matrix again, but now he’s a famous video game designer who created a hit series of video games called… The Matrix. It’s all literally about going back to The Matrix and figuring out how to reimagine the series for the 2020s. Reeves and Moss are phenomenal in it, and there’s a pointed refusal to do the kind of violent action scenes that the original trilogy was known for.
What Are the Matrix Movies Actually About?
Image via Warner Bros.
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It doesn’t take a particularly deep analysis to figure out that there’s even more going on in the Matrix movies than what you get on the surface. For example, when everyone in the grimy and gloomy real world is somewhat haggard, wearing boring rags with no late-‘90s techno rave fashion sense, but once they enter the virtual world of the Matrix, they look how they want to look — as in, super cool. Even before he “wakes up,” Neo is a boring office drone in his real life, but an ace dark web hacker online.
There are themes of identity in there, about being who you want to be rather than who society (or, literally, the machines) forces you to be, which seems like a uniquely personal and powerful concept for the Wachowskis (see also: their Netflix show Sense8). Not everything in the sequels holds up as well as the original, but writing them off entirely is a mistake and will only result in missing out on a bunch of brilliant sci-fi concepts.
The Matrix movies are all streaming on HBO Max.
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Release Date
March 31, 1999
Runtime
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136 minutes
Producers
Andrew Mason, Barrie M. Osborne, Bruce Berman, Erwin Stoff
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