What 10 Great Movies Look Like Without Visual Effects

10. The Matrix

Let's kick things off with a ground-breaking triumph of VFX that continues to remain an innovative benchmark 20 years later.

The Matrix popularised the concept of bullet time, of depicting action in slow-motion while freely passing the camera through the scene, and it's a technique that continues to be used widely across blockbuster films today.

The various bullet time sequences throughout the film still look impressively seamless, such that it's easy to forget that most of the marquee shots were actually captured against a green screen.

In this controlled environment, a bespoke camera rig captured footage with a full 360 degrees of coverage, allowing the Wachowskis to effectively stitch frames together and imply a seamless camera pan around the subject.

The slickness of the effect blew audiences away back in 1999, and remains an absolute marvel of cinematic engineering today.

While contemporary blockbusters routinely fail to correctly match the lighting between green screens and backdrops, The Matrix still looks pretty much perfect.