In Bullet Time Again: The Wachowskis Reload, David Edelstein says

"The Matrix" changed not only the way we look at movies, but movies themselves. "The Matrix" cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen...

The Wachowskis were aficionados of Hong Kong action movies like Tsui Hark's "Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain" (1983) and "Once Upon a Time in China" (1991) -- films in which the actors (many of them rigorously trained at places like the Beijing Opera) engaged in hand-to-hand combat while soaring and somersaulting through the air. A friend once asked me, "How are the characters able to fly around like that?" and I rolled my eyes and said, "It's a convention." What I should have said is that it's a convention rooted in a philosophy essential to many Eastern martial arts: that the material world is secondary, and that the properly directed mind can triumph over matter.

Yeah, that may be true, but I'm afraid the next 2 Matrix movies won't live up to the 1st. And I bet they'll all look pretty dated not too long from now.