Quite simply, we had never seen anything like it.

Sure, the 90s gave us all manner of giddyingly brilliant special effects, what with robots melting into pools of mercury in Terminator 2 and Steven Spielberg resurrecting dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but this one movie changed everything -- and made sure our jaws had to be picked up off the floor.

Borrowing recognisably from Grant Morrison's fascinating comic series The Invisibles, The Matrix wove a familiar cyberpunk plot -- of our percieved reality being a virtual construct fed to our brains while reality itself was decidedly more sinister -- but the filmmakers made two significant changes: first, they brought the high-concept conspiracy theory premise out of geekdom and Internet messageboards and made it blockbusteredly mainstream; and two, they blew us out of the water with sheer visuals.

In a disturbingly green-lit room, Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith sits across from Keanu Reeves' Neo, and speaking with the patience usually extended to a six-year-old.

Smith's proposal to cooperate is met by vulgar defiance from Neo, and Smith puts on his sunglasses in return. Neo, already on the back foot, asks them to lay off 'the Gestapo crap,' but Smith -- one of the finest villains in contemporary cinema -- has already smiled, and that's never good news.

Revisit the video here. With a macabre simplicity, Smith simply makes Neo's mouth disappear. Along with, momentarily, the audience's heartbeat.

Anything that inspires such colossal wonderment is a miracle of a motion picture.

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