10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
3. The Matrix Made Bullet Time Hollywood's Favourite New Trick
The Matrix is unquestionably one of the greatest action movies - if not movies, period - of all time, yet its groundbreaking, Oscar-winning visual effects were so freaking cool that Hollywood spent the next decade-or-so shamelessly attempting to one-up them.
The Matrix's big, splashy VFX coup was "bullet time," an advanced version of slow-motion whereby the camera moves through the space of a scene while time is slowed, giving the audience otherwise impossible coverage of an awesome action beat.
There are certainly movies that have managed to co-opt bullet time in interesting ways - take the jaw-dropping bomb explosion at the start of Swordfish - but most films employing the technique have done so in a lazy attempt to ride the Matrix's coattails.
There are literally innumerable big-budget actioners between 2000 and 2010 that used bullet time without any intelligence or artistry, in turn running the effect into the ground and perhaps even making audiences actively groan whenever it showed up.
Just a few examples include Bulletproof Monk, Charlie's Angels, House of the Dead, Wanted, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and albeit hilariously, Scary Movie and Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.
Bullet time as an effect wore out its welcome and is used rather rarely these days, but for a time The Matrix's mesmerising aesthetic achievements dominated Hollywood, and it was annoying as hell.