Every part of GiS has been, per article "endlessly ripped off, referenced and remixed". Whatever one liked about original GiS, there's a derivation out there that turns dial to 11 and makes the original feel basic in retrospect. But that's testimony to GiS greatness.
I watched The Shining for the first time in around 2012 and when commenting to an older friend about it I said something to the effect of "It's good, but I didn't feel it was exceptional." to which he replied saying that "Yes, but consider that it was the first real film of that genre, it only seems "okay" today because you're comparing to all the films of the same genre which came after and were largely influenced by it."
I don't know enough about films to know that if he said was accurate, but it's stuck with me.
I was about 16 when The Matrix came out and I find it interesting asking people who were born after it came out what they think about it, if they've seen it their reaction is typically (much like me with The Shining) "seemed alright", while for me at the time the movie was phenomenal and in terms of many of its special effects, unlike anything I had ever seen before.
There are a number of films: The Matrix, the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Avatar, I’m sure many others that were just so different and jaw-dropping in many ways when they first came out—in those cases because of effects of various types mostly—that it can be hard to appreciate their novelty at the time.
Those are two of my favorite films. But Citizen Kane was largely unique as opposed to a precursor of a type. And Casablanca just put everything together in a package that really wasn’t that distinct from plenty of other love stories set against a WWII backdrop on the surface.
To me, both Citizen Kane and Casablanca feel pretty revolutionary in editing, compared to what was prevalent at the time. But this has intrigued me to do some '41/42 comparisons.
The "Lord of the Rings" novel is that way too to anyone not steeped in fantasy. It might be hard to imagine for many people these days that "elves" and "dwarves" strictly meant children's fairytales before Tolkien. Magical rings, wizards, dragons with tunnels of gold ... seems so cliche now it is easy to see why someone would wonder what the big deal about Tolkien is.
Elves and dwarves didn't strictly mean children's fairy tales prior to Tolkien. There's plenty of semi-popular prior art where they feature, like the Worm Ouroboros or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Poul Anderson also published The Broken Sword the same year as LOTR, which shows a lot of the same influences as written by a very different author.
Tolkien's importance is that the specific kinds of creatures he wrote became the default for virtually all subsequent authors and the popularity/quality of the works were pivotal in establishing fantasy as a "proper" genre.
I have to disagree with both. I help a colleague teach a class in which students often read necromancer, and it often has a deep impact on them. The cloned ninjas and laser weapons are uninteresting to them for the reasons mentioned above, but the Necromancer + Wintermute dynamic and central plot is fascinating to them.
I think it’s slightly different. Tolkein made fairy tales grow up, but people already had some familiarity with these things. Tolkien gave them a new way to think about those things.
Gibson’s strength was that he could describe—in an accessible way—concepts that were quite foreign to most people at the time.
Not the original GIS, but GIS: Standalone Complex is still one of the best examples out there of "realistic" special forces action scenes. A lot of screen time spent getting all the pieces into position, culminating in just a couple seconds of fast-paced action.
