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I remember going in blind to the film and the first scene with Trinity completely blew everyone in the theater away. One of the greatest openers in action cinema history (if not the greatest)

Likewise. I was deep in grad school at the time, and didn't pay much attention to the rest of the world. My knowledge of The Matrix was that I'd seen some posters, some friends asked if I wanted to go with them, and I did. We didn't even talk about the movie on the way there, it was just "the move that weekend". Absolutely blown away is right. From the opening all the way through to the ending and credit roll.

It was 1999, not easy at all to get deeper information about just released movies apart from some 2-3 paragraphs from critics' on newspapers.

I also went blind to watch it after school with some friends, it was a mind blowing experience compared to the 90s action movies, everything else in the genre before that just felt bland and unpolished. I went 3 times on the same month with different people to re-watch it.

Thirded - the early bullet time sequence with Trinity was mind blowing at the time.

More recently, when I've had the chance to rewatch the movie I've shifted my awe to the helicopter crash scene [1], which contains so many elements that were unprecedented at the time in an incredibly neat way. It's one of those things where they could have just settled for one of the effects and still do something incredible for the time, but they went ahead and pushed the envelope so much further.

The movie is pretty much that - just the plot would have been sufficient for an incredible film but they had so much creativity to spare that they also reinvented the genre's cinematography because why the hell not?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI4UpBjdJ3s

That link, and the releases after the original 35mm release and the DVD, all feature a colour-correction that wasn't there when the movie was first released. The movie had a slight green edge on its original release, but it wasn't THAT green. It's a shame they toyed with it.

I first saw the scene on a tiny airplane seat headrest screen and remember being jolted awake by how mind-blowing it was. I watched the movie twice on that trans-Atlantic flight.

The Matrix ranks third in my list of 'wow' moments in the cinema.

Joint first is the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and brontosaurus (?) in the true-dinosaur scene of Jurassic Park (not the raptor eggs bit).

SPR's opening was just visceral, especially on a huge cinema screen.

And Jurassic Park's use of the subwoofer meant you really felt that first scene.

FWIW Lost in Space, the year before the Matrix had 'bullet time' in it and no-one seems to remember that.

Same with Transformers (2007). Audience was agog and cheering. But if you weren't there on the day, you'd never understand. The level of CGI dominance would come to be normal these days, but at the time it was unprecedented. I was lucky to see it opening weekend because it was a huge release (blew out Titanic's opening weekend). Nowadays it has the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect but at the time it was unbelievable.

I immediately loathed the first Transformers film because of all the wasted talent for a movie with such poor writing and pacing.

I also found the CGI to be too busy to follow anything going on and it didn't improve with subsequent movies. I called it "motion soup" at the time and haven't come up with a better term for it.

I think Robot Chicken called it Baysplosions (Michael Bay + Explosions)

Feels slightly different in that the Matrix is original so literally nobody in the GPs audience knew what to expect whereas Transformers has been a thing (comics, toys, hundreds of TV episodes) since the mid 1980s. I also feel like the early 2000s had a lot of good CGI movies (LOTR, King Kong, etc) so that to me doesn't explain it either