2009 will forever be remembered as ‘the year of 3D’, or so it is hoped by film executives worldwide.  This year has seen the release of Up, The Final Destination, Monsters vs Aliens and in a few days, Avatar - the 3D epic which will represent the ‘dawn of a new era’ of film making and ‘redefine cinema as we know it’, according to the rhetoric.

But true innovation is difficult to spot from such a long way off. In a decade that’s seen the epic scale of Lord of the Rings, special effects wizardry in Transformers countless Oscar highlights and the birth of 3D the real year for defining, and indeed defying genres, was 1999.

It might seem a strange choice on the face of it, especially when the year’s most high profile release was the universally panned Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. Instead, the real genre defining films of that year were flattened under the weight of George Lucas’ epic.

The Matrix slipped under the public radar entirely, championed only by a few film critics. It only received their universal acclaim when it spearheaded the DVD revolution of the following year. The film drew upon niche cyberpunk fiction, comic book iconography and the hacker subculture and brought them into the mainstream through positive portrayals of mobile phone and internet technology. The Matrix was also an early example of viral marketing, which made effective use of the internet to promote the film.

Trinity insists she's paid the taxi

Of course, the most groundbreaking aspects of The Matrix are surely the stunning fight choreography, the daring, comic book inspired camera angles and the infamous ‘bullet time’ special effects. Since its release the film has enabled directors to become more visually experimental, raised the bar for fight choreography and effectively spawned the modern superhero film and ‘comic book’  films like 300, Sin City, and Watchmen.

Also released in 1999, David Fincher’s Fight Club was a commercial failure for 20^th Century Fox upon release. Arguably as philosophical and visually stylish as The Matrix, Fincher’s counter-cultural epic introduced nameless narrators, extended voice-over tracks as well as a slick and anarchic visual style.

Now both of them are hailed as redefining the modern cinematic landscape, despite the fact they both had budgets only a fraction of the size of The Phantom Menace, none of the publicity and independent, counter-cultural sensibilities.

Even The Sixth Sense came from nowhere – helped by the unknown status of director M. Night Shyamalan, whose love of classic suspense films allowed him to rewrite the rule book both for horror movies, and showed directors new ways to play with audiences’ expectations. His Hitchcockian style brought scares back to horror cinema, and provided the blueprint for the modern supernatural horror film.

Without The Sixth Sense, Guillermo del Toro’s The Orphanage and The Ring, would never have existed, not to mention a subgenre of ‘twist’ films like Lucky Number Slevin and the Saw franchise.

Despite its critical drubbing, even The Phantom Menace had a hand in changing the face of modern cinema. While the film was accused of pandering to very young children thanks to floppy eared Jar Jar Binks and Watto, the characters represented the first fully digital characters to be integrated into live action and portrayed by real people.  Such characters, though annoying, paved the way for Avatar’s photorealistic 3D cast, as well as Andy Serkis’ Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.

Until the arrival of The Phantom Menace, the public had never before seen sci-fi special effects created digitally, rather than using models and miniatures, or on such a large scale and was arguably the first big budget, digital effects blockbuster of the modern age.

Whether Avatar pulls a Star Wars and sinks without trace, or is regarded as a 3D spectacular remains to be seen, but it’s unlikely that it represents the first of a new age in film. Instead, Avatar and whatever follows is the end product of the ‘new age’ of technological and cinematic innovation began a decade ago – in 1999.

By Phil Reynolds