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Photo: KobalĪ $7m outlay brought spectacular returns of over $70m for James Cameron's first great sci-fi action thriller, which spawned a three-sequel franchise, a powerhouse directorial career, and made robotic, former iron-pumping Teuton Arnold Schwarzenegger an unlikely 80s superstar. The Terminator/ Terminator 2: Judgment DayĪrnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.
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Plus: Neo is totally an anagram of "One". He might be pretty, but he's no one-man army. And that's why the casting of Keanu Reeves was a masterstroke. The Matrix marks the point where fans demanded more – they wanted to see themselves on screen. The sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger lunkheadedly charging through armies of ineffectual goons started to look embarrassingly tired.
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What's missing? Girls in skin-tight PVC catsuits? Nope: The Matrix has those, too.īy cherrypicking as many key ingredients from action films as they could (the us-against-the-machines mentality from The Terminator, the wire work from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the star from Johnny Mnemonic), and shooting it through with a timely dose of pre-millennial unease, the directors single-handedly managed to reinvigorate an entire genre. There's action, fighting, cutting-edge special effects, murderous robots, evil authority figures, an overriding pseudo-conspiracy theory and, most wonderful of all, an ineloquent social outcast who eventually becomes a flying kung fu Jesus. In the 21st century, the Wachowskis' The Matrix sequels and Christopher Nolan's Inception have explored new, interior landscapes: the inner world of the mind may be the genre's new frontier. Films like Dark Star and Alien worked a satirical, pessimistic darkness into sci-fi, but George Lucas and Steven Spielberg together expressed its lighter, more hopeful strain. At the end of the 60s, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey broke through into a new level of poetry and wonder. In the middle of the 20th century, sci-fi inhabited the B-picture world of monsters and rockets and intuited a "red scare" anxiety about aliens. George Meliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902) was one of early cinema's biggest hits. Maybe something in the limitless possibilities of cinema itself spawned sci-fi. Sometimes patronised as kids' stuff, the genre seeks to look beyond the parochialism of most realist drama: to see other worlds and other existences, and therefore to look with a new, radically alienated eye at our own. Science fiction has produced some of cinema's boldest and most glorious flights – in every sense.