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‘Jurassic Park’ Meets ‘Indiana Jones’ in This Wild ’90s Sci-Fi Adventure Now Streaming for Free

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There are polished classics, and then there are movies like this one, which survive almost entirely on energy, weirdness, and total commitment to the bit. The 1995 adventure thriller is enormous, silly, chaotic, and somehow still deeply watchable because it never seems embarrassed by any of its wild choices. Killer apes, lost cities, lasers, corporate greed, and jungle mayhem all get thrown into the same pot, and the result is exactly as unhinged as that sounds.

That unpredictability is a big part of the appeal. Congo doesn’t have the elegance of the best ’90s adventure blockbusters, but it absolutely has personality. The cast does its best to hold the whole thing together, and ham it up exactly where you’d hope and expect them to, and the whole movie feels like a studio gamble from an era when big-budget genre filmmaking could still get a little messy and strange. And we miss those days a lot, don’t you?

But now that it’s streaming free on Pluto, Congo has another shot at being appreciated for the gloriously chaotic artifact it is. It is demented, and you’ll enjoy it for that. The cast includes Laura Linney (The Truman Show, Mystic River) as Dr. Karen Ross, Dylan Walsh (The Lake House, Secretariat) as Dr. Peter Elliott, Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters, The Crow) as Captain Munro Kelly, Tim Curry (Clue, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Herkermer Homolka, Grant Heslov (True Lies, Black Sheep) as Richard, Joe Don Baker (Cape Fear, GoldenEye) as R.B. Travis, and Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead II, Spider-Man 2) as Charles Munro.

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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

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🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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Is ‘Congo’ Worth Watching?

Roger Ebert felt that Congo is not exactly a good movie, but it is a very entertaining one if you’re willing to go along with how silly it is. Instead of treating its jungle-adventure setup seriously, the film leans into the absurdity, with the cast clearly understanding that they’re in an over-the-top action comedy. That tone is a big part of why it works. It’s a film built for people who watched Saturday matinees, who don’t take life too seriously, and who don’t roll their eyes when they see a cliché but rather, those who point and whistle at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. More than that, Ebert heaped praise on Curry’s performance, because he just has one of those faces.

Congo is streaming now on Pluto.


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Release Date

June 9, 1995

Runtime

109 Minutes

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