The Matrix
As much as this film has been talked about to death, we sometimes forget that the first Matrix introduced (and attempted to mainstream) a lot of Eastern philosophy and existentialism into an action movie, which few American films had done before, or at least not as blatantly as the Wachowskis did it.
We can all chortle at the lame CG and one lined emptiness of Neo in the movie when we look back on it now, but we didn’t feel that way when the first movie dropped. We were all lining up to see it, and all talking about it afterwards. Hell, that was the first time I saw Laurence Fishburne’s complexion in HD IMAX, and it was terrifying (like the landscape of the moon).
The second film in the trilogy began to really show where the series was heading (convoluted trainwreck?), but it was not until the third movie that we figured out just how poorly things would end off. Gone are the hints of Neo being a sort of new Jesus, replaced with Neo being a new Jesus. It was clearly a trilogy that knew what it wanted to do, but did not know how to actually pull that off without crapping out a cliched, cheesy ending to what was an otherwise original ride up to that point.
Hell, the ending was so bad that my mind repressed it. Honestly, how did the movie end again? Neo as Jesus and some new world was built, right? WHACK!