2024-03-31 19:30:32
tst, Culture
Updated 9 hours ago
This Sunday, 25 years have passed since the heroine of the film The Matrix, named Trinity, jumped into the air, time froze for a moment and the camera revolved around her. Many viewers had a legitimate feeling that they had never seen anything like it before. How did the film of the Wachowski sisters, then still the Wachowski brothers, change the sci-fi genre and cinema in general?
In the opening scene of The Matrix, the bullet-time effect is used for the first time. | Video: Warner Bros.
Bullet-time
A group of police officers sneaks down a dark corridor. A car with two agents pulls up in front of the building. “I hope I can handle one girl,” says one of the guards. “Your men are already dead,” he says coldly. And then the pursued “girl” bounces into the air and… here, 25 years ago, the world froze for a generation of viewers on cinema screens. When the heroine Trinity jumped into the air, time stopped for a moment.
The Matrix, which opened in American theaters on March 31, 1999, captured the imagination of audiences with its layered homage to popular movies, books and philosophers, wrapped in an impressive action and visual cloak.
The effect of “freezing time”, first used in the opening scene of the film, came to be called bullet-time and was borrowed by many films in the following years.
The effect itself was not strictly speaking new, it appeared in a simpler form in commercials and other science fiction. But his connection with the so-called wire-fu, i.e. action choreography with actors and stuntmen suspended on wires, which was brought to Hollywood from Hong Kong cinema by Juen Woo-ping, the choreographer of The Matrix, was innovative.
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