Your are talking about common themes. There is a playlist that screenwriters go to and most "sellable" scripts have to follow this formula and touch upon these common themes.
I thought this thread was going to be about strange coindences between movies and life. Like Chris Carter's pilot for the Lone Gunman foreshadowing 9/11! It creeped me out when I got my hands on it and finally watched it! (If you don't want to rent or buy it read the transcript on this link, especially Scene 12!)
I mean Chris had written this a whole year before it was shot and it was shot in 2000!
Along the lines of the thread's intentions and Chris Carter, did anyone see Harsh Realm? Was conceived at the same time as the Matrix - essentially the same story with a very similar setting - got to bring down the world inside the computer program otherwise the program will destroy the real world. They were both released in 1999 and Harsh Realm got buried because its effects budget was 1/10th of the Martix's. Most of the time these kind of coindences are not coindences. They are just two studios trying to get out the same film under different titles - kind of a film studio ultramatch knock down. But in the case of Chris Carter, he had no info about the Matrix.