If you are new to my blog, and I recognize it’s traffic is primarily friends and family, I have had an occasional series on the two most influential SF movie by decade. Of course, this is no objective listing but purely by spitball take on the films that had a lasting impact on movies beyond any box office success.

I covered the silent era, quite unfairly I am sure, in a single post, and then proceeded by decade covering the 1930s, 1940, 1950s, 1960, 1970s, and the 1980s.

Now I will continue into the 1990s.

The Matrix – (1999)Personally this is a film that did not work for me. The tropes concerning what is or is not real are old hat and many of the aspects of the plot make little to no sense. (If there is no sunlight, then people are dead and the 100 or so watts you can get from them are hardly worth harvesting.) My biases aside this film, in addition to spawning a franchise with  sequels heavily influence the look of film for the next decade and beyond. ‘Bullet time,’ the hyper slow-motion with a moving camera, stunned audiences in 1999 and many filmmakers quickly copied the stylistic look of the Wachowski Siblings.

Visual style for SF films ceased being the domain of art-house productions and moved into the mainstream.  Love or loathe it, The Matrix influences films to this day.

Jurassic Park (1993) Arriving earlier in the decade than The Matrix Jurassic Park’s impact on filmmaking is difficult to understate. When production began on the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel the filmmakers had planned on using traditional stop-motion animation to bring their dinosaurs to life, a technique that goes back the 1933’s classic film King Kong. However during pre-production the computer graphics team at Industrial Light and Magic demonstrated photorealistic CGI dinosaurs and the world changed. Influencing every special effects film follow, Jurassic Park freed the images on the screen from physical photography to anything that could be envisioned. Every summer is now swamped with good, bad, great, and terrible CGI animation. Studios are learning that great CGI can not save a film and that CGI stunts quickly bore the audience. This year’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens in part are rebelling against the CGI revolution started by Steven Spielberg with Jurassic Park.