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.
The Matrix Is the Smartest Sci-Fi Series of All Time
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 Reloaded and 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.
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?
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.
- Release Date
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March 31, 1999
- Runtime
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136 minutes
