Were there a lot of 90s movies like The Truman Show/The Matrix?

Simulated reality has been a recurring movie theme for ages.

Kurt Vonnegut touched on it in Slaughterhouse Five and in Breakfast of Champions, both of which were made into movies in the 1970’s.

Dark City is another example. Watch the directors cut if you can.

The themes of illusion vs. reality, or if you prefer a reality behind the reality, and of being watched and affected by entities that aren’t necessarily friendly have been around for a very long time. I think they’re among the oldest ideas we have portrayed in fiction and folklore. That would be one interpretation, for example, of the Greek mythology, with contentious gods looking on and pulling the strings in man’s inferior little life.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) shows us the machines that run things and how we feed them.

Remember “that man behind the curtain” in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The novel it was based on came out in 1900.

As soon as you start to think about it, there are hundreds, thousands, probably millions of such stories across time and cultures, from the old Hindu and Hebrew scriptures to the superhero comic books of today: transcendent entities of good or evil or, even more disturbingly, no moral alignment at all, contending with one another while casually pulling life and the world this way and that, to the consternation and damnation and—sometimes—the joy of ordinary mortals.

Lord of the Rings.
The Harry Potter series.
Any David-and-Goliath movie, such as the Bruce Willis ones.
etc.

It seems we have always wanted a bigger explanation for our fears and misfortunes than what we can find in the natural world and in ourselves. The way this theme appears in art and entertainment—the idiom in which it’s expressed—varies over time, but it doesn’t go away because it’s so central to our experience. I doubt that it will ever play itself out.

I think there were a lot of films in this or adjacent genres in the 90s. Don’t forget EdTv, Pleasantville, Being John Malkovich, Existenz, and, of course, Fight Club.

I mean, these are just the films I’ve seen. There were probably more, especially since studios seem to get sucked into certain genres together.

Cool World
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Of course, it could be argued that EVERY animated movie is a depiction of “alternate reality”, I suppose…

Don’t dare leave out the thirteenth floor and dark city.

@filmfann I disagree.. Watch the original if you can… The director’s cut ruins the mystery about half-way through. Those scenes were cut for good reason.

@Esedess I am very familiar with both versions.
The directors cut was shortened to simplify the story, which was considered (wrongly) too complicated by the producers and the studio.