Fight Clip Club: The Matrix

FCC today is all about a film that's iconic in the realms of stunt fighting, and cinematic technology.

The Matrix

(The first one, natch.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past quarter century, you’ll be at least somewhat familiar with the revolutionary tech used for creating the special effects in the first installment of The Matrix series. Watch any behind-the-scenes documentary about the phenomenal tech inventions inside this movie, including bullet time, that the Wachowski siblings and their cinematographers and heads of photography made iconic. Many over the top or sci fi style fight scenes these days are all made with CGI; made in much the same way as video game cutscenes are: mostly if not all animated. But remember what video games used to be like in 1999: they were much blockier and less cinematic than they are able to be today, and so using all this advanced tech to create these enhanced movements was actually truly amazing, groundbreaking, something nobody else was doing. And mostly it all was still made with practical effects, as opposed to animation. This is 1999, pre-everything-is-shot-in-CGI, and you can see how the quality of these fight scenes stands the test of time because of this.