That movie in particular I feel like if you didn't see in theaters at the time of release that a big part of the experience is completely lost on you. Literally audiences had never seen anything like it.
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.
I remember going in blind to the film and the first scene with Trinity completely blew everyone in the theater away. One of the greatest openers in action cinema history (if not the greatest)
Thirded - the early bullet time sequence with Trinity was mind blowing at the time.
More recently, when I've had the chance to rewatch the movie I've shifted my awe to the helicopter crash scene [1], which contains so many elements that were unprecedented at the time in an incredibly neat way. It's one of those things where they could have just settled for one of the effects and still do something incredible for the time, but they went ahead and pushed the envelope so much further.
The movie is pretty much that - just the plot would have been sufficient for an incredible film but they had so much creativity to spare that they also reinvented the genre's cinematography because why the hell not?
That link, and the releases after the original 35mm release and the DVD, all feature a colour-correction that wasn't there when the movie was first released. The movie had a slight green edge on its original release, but it wasn't THAT green. It's a shame they toyed with it.
Likewise. I was deep in grad school at the time, and didn't pay much attention to the rest of the world. My knowledge of The Matrix was that I'd seen some posters, some friends asked if I wanted to go with them, and I did. We didn't even talk about the movie on the way there, it was just "the move that weekend". Absolutely blown away is right. From the opening all the way through to the ending and credit roll.
It was 1999, not easy at all to get deeper information about just released movies apart from some 2-3 paragraphs from critics' on newspapers.
I also went blind to watch it after school with some friends, it was a mind blowing experience compared to the 90s action movies, everything else in the genre before that just felt bland and unpolished. I went 3 times on the same month with different people to re-watch it.
I first saw the scene on a tiny airplane seat headrest screen and remember being jolted awake by how mind-blowing it was. I watched the movie twice on that trans-Atlantic flight.
Same with Transformers (2007). Audience was agog and cheering. But if you weren't there on the day, you'd never understand. The level of CGI dominance would come to be normal these days, but at the time it was unprecedented. I was lucky to see it opening weekend because it was a huge release (blew out Titanic's opening weekend). Nowadays it has the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect but at the time it was unbelievable.
I also found the CGI to be too busy to follow anything going on and it didn't improve with subsequent movies. I called it "motion soup" at the time and haven't come up with a better term for it.
Feels slightly different in that the Matrix is original so literally nobody in the GPs audience knew what to expect whereas Transformers has been a thing (comics, toys, hundreds of TV episodes) since the mid 1980s. I also feel like the early 2000s had a lot of good CGI movies (LOTR, King Kong, etc) so that to me doesn't explain it either
I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.
I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.
I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.