In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity's so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise.
Why it is hard sci-fi
An anthology that fills in the prehistory and edge cases of the Matrix world. The two strongest episodes, The Second Renaissance Parts I and II, are a documentary-style account of the war between humans and machines. The labour-rights crisis, the trial of B1-66ER, the destruction of Zero One, and the orbital sky-burning that ends the war are presented as historical record with the films usual hard rule that the planet is permanently uninhabitable above ground.
Science inside it
Robotic labour and the legal-economic chain that produces an autonomous-rights movement, planetary-scale solar engineering as a weapon, and a fusion-by-bioelectricity premise that is famously thermodynamically wrong but is the price of admission to the Matrix franchise. The films also include a working orbital communications failure case in Beyond.