1999 was the year that Hollywood finally discovered the internet.
Before the last year of the last century of the last millennium, most producers didn't know their AOL from their AA meetings. Which is why the nearest we got to an online blockbuster was Sandra Bullock running around with a laptop in "The Net" or Tom Hanks getting his http in a twist over Meg Ryan in "You've Got Mail".
Then came three films that uploaded the digital age onto the big screen: David Cronenberg's computer-game thriller "eXistenZ"; obscure German-American mindbender "The Thirteenth Floor", and last, but by no means least, the Wachowski Brothers' "The Matrix".
Tapping into the millennial zeitgeist, these three films took us, as Morpheus put it, into "the desert of the real". But it was only the Wachowski brothers' picture that caught the popular imagination to become one of the most influential sci-fi movies after "Star Wars".
From spoofs of John Gaeta's pioneering "bullet time" effects (see "Scary Movie", "Charlie's Angels", "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo", and many more) to outright rip offs like "Equilibrium", "The Matrix" has been rehashed, remade, and repeated endlessly.
Strangely, though, no one at Wachowski brothers HQ has been complaining. Perhaps that's because they know that when it comes to accusing others of plagiarism, they haven't got a legal leg to stand on.
Most filmmakers lift (or pay homage, depending on your viewpoint) from other movies. But the Wachowskis have been liberally helping themselves to other people's ideas like kleptomaniac kids in an unattended sweetshop.
Take the fight sequences. Well aware that they owed more than a few karate chops to Asian kung fu movies, "The Matrix" directors hired top Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping (veteran of countless chop-socky movies) to give the fisticuffs an Eastern flavour.
And that wasn't the only thing from the Orient they plundered. Pinching the visuals and ideas from Manga comic books and anime films (including the seminal "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell"), the Wachowskis threw all kinds of Eastern spices into their sci-fi mix.
American movies didn't escape the brain drain either. Filtered through "The Matrix", it's possible to see not only the cyberpunk noir of "Blade Runner" and the totalitarian fears of "Brazil", but also the stylish visuals and nightmarish plot of cult movie "Dark City" (sets from which were cheekily used in the opening chase across the rooftops).
Then there's the literary references: William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer", the follow-the-white-rabbit mythology of "Alice in Wonderland", Philip K Dick's paranoid short stories, the work of virtually-obsessed French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and even (gulp) the Gospels.
So why isn't anyone complaining about such blatant plagiarism?
Perhaps the moral of this story is one that Hollywood's lesser filmmakers should be made to learn by heart:
If you're going to steal, make sure you do it with style.
And given that "The Matrix" has oodles of style, it's Neo wonder nobody's complaining.
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