10 Unique Tricks Every Movie Started To Rip-Off

The Trick

Bullet time is one of the most innovative and oft-replicated revolutions of big-budget filmmaking, whereby filmmakers use cutting-edge visual effects techniques to slow the action down and perhaps even rotate around it, giving the audience a more sustained look at the mayhem taking place.

Bullet time of course came to prominence in The Matrix, immortalised in the sequence where Neo (Keanu Reeves) attempts to dodge a hail of bullets fired at him by an agent.

Using a meticulously organised rig of cameras which captured 360 degrees of motion as Reeves performed the bullet-dodge, the Wachowskis were then able to stitch the desired frames together in post-production to give the impression of the camera moving around Reeves while he remained in slow-motion.

Few techniques have ever better depicted the otherworldly and the unreal than The Matrix's bullet time, which so perfectly underlined the bendable non-reality of the Matrix itself and the superhuman abilities of our heroes.

The Rip-Offs

Take your pick - literally hundreds of action films over the last 20 years have employed some form of bullet time, perhaps most prominently in the works of Zack Snyder, who makes arguably abusive use of speed ramping to linger on his quasi-pornographic action cinematography.

Bullet time has also been used frequently in video games, starting with the brilliant Max Payne, while today time-slowing abilities are completely common across genres.

While it's fair to say that bullet time was run into the ground long ago, and few films have done it better than the original article, it can still generate breathtaking results when done well: Dredd's creative use of bullet time-esque slow-mo, for example.