That's a great pick. If we were going to pick a handful of candidates, Matrix definitely would have to be a part of that very short list.
Part of me wants to stump for Blade Runner over The Matrix, if only because Blade Runner had less... prior art, so to speak. It was more of an entirely new aesthetic whereas The Matrix was more evolutionary. The leap was huge, don't get me wrong, but it felt more evolutionary.
Blade Runner's look is something you continue to see today in various sci-fi and games, copied nearly verbatim. It was simultaneously the birth of a new aesthetic and maybe its apex as well. Like, where do you even go with that look? It felt fully realized, right there in 1982.
The Matrix... it wasn't really the look that influenced future works, it was more of the camera work and wild shots. Bullet time, the 360deg freeze circular panning thing, and so on. I guess you do see "bullet time" everywhere now.
There's also something to be said about the relative financial success of the movies. Blade Runner was that influential despite being a box office and critical dud at the time. It's relatively easy (and even expected) for smash hits to wield massive influence. But duds? We have to admit: that's just incredible.
Anyway - awesome pick. Rather than picking one over the other, I would say: they both belong on the Mt. Rushmore of "most visually influential movies."
I watched it again yesterday. I'd forgotten how amazingly real and fully realized that world was. I don't think that movie will ever age. Love your points, agreed on all of them.
eh it's aging. It'll get to the point where it's unwatchable one day. The whole grid zoom thing is the most prominent thing that aged in my opinion. It all happened on a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging.
> a CRT screen which is a definite sign of the times and therefore a sign of aging
Nah, there's any number of in-universe explanations. CRTs in our world were still being sold new as of a decade or so ago. Why shouldn't Deckard have an old one still kicking around in 2019?
Or, if you think they would have been phased out earlier given that Blade Runner world tech developed differently than ours, then: Deckard is just attached to old things. (Remember he's also got a real acoustic piano in his high-rise apartment.)
Or, the entire photo enhancing contraption is produced by some legacy police equipment supplier that's still writing their software in Java 1.3 and using CRTs because...internal corporate reasons.
Or (least plausibly but most just-suspend-your-disbelief) that's not really a CRT, it's a far more advanced brand-new tech that just so happens to also have a curved screen and fuzzy pixels because <insert technobabble>.
Yeah. I'm with you. You're gonna "invalidate" pretty much literally any sci-fi movie of the past if your criteria for "has it held up?" includes "do they somehow have modern-day tech?"
I just think of a Blade Runner-ish world as an alternate path our society might've taken. Had a few things been different here and there, we might not have had LCD screens. Or we might've had something vastly better.
Maybe a way to put it is like like blade runner innovates horizontally, becoming and start its own thing while matrix innovated vertixally, evolving the existing genre?
Part of me wants to stump for Blade Runner over The Matrix, if only because Blade Runner had less... prior art, so to speak. It was more of an entirely new aesthetic whereas The Matrix was more evolutionary. The leap was huge, don't get me wrong, but it felt more evolutionary.
Blade Runner's look is something you continue to see today in various sci-fi and games, copied nearly verbatim. It was simultaneously the birth of a new aesthetic and maybe its apex as well. Like, where do you even go with that look? It felt fully realized, right there in 1982.
The Matrix... it wasn't really the look that influenced future works, it was more of the camera work and wild shots. Bullet time, the 360deg freeze circular panning thing, and so on. I guess you do see "bullet time" everywhere now.
There's also something to be said about the relative financial success of the movies. Blade Runner was that influential despite being a box office and critical dud at the time. It's relatively easy (and even expected) for smash hits to wield massive influence. But duds? We have to admit: that's just incredible.
Anyway - awesome pick. Rather than picking one over the other, I would say: they both belong on the Mt. Rushmore of "most visually influential movies."