What if the camera could move through frozen time?
The famous shot is not interesting just because time slows down. The real trick is that the viewpoint keeps moving through that slowed moment — as if the camera has stopped obeying the same physical rules as everything else.
The Matrix used Bullet Time to show action in extreme slow motion while the apparent camera continued moving around it. The effect became one of the film's clearest visual expressions of control over virtual time and space.
BFI · The Matrix and Bullet Time →The filmmakers wanted high-speed photography while the apparent camera moved at ordinary speed. With one physical camera, those demands pulled in opposite directions — a problem the team first considered solving with an extremely fast moving camera.
American Cinematographer · 1999 production notes →Visual-effects supervisor John Gaeta and the Manex team reframed the problem. Instead of forcing one camera to travel fast enough, they built an array of still cameras around the action. The production used up to 120 still cameras for the effect, with motion-picture cameras helping connect the normal-speed action around it.
The still cameras were triggered in sequence, so neighboring viewpoints captured neighboring moments. Put together, those frames could behave like a virtual camera moving around action that was progressing at a radically different speed.
Digital interpolation and compositing helped connect the photographed views and complete the environment. The result was not simply a frozen subject seen from many angles; the shot could move through both space and time in a way a single physical camera could not.
Time-slice techniques existed before The Matrix. What the film did was push the idea into dynamic moving action, popularize Bullet Time, and make the technique serve the story: as Neo begins bending the rules of the Matrix, the camera appears to bend the rules of ordinary photography too.
The breakthrough wasn't a faster camera.
It was a different definition of camera.
The weak question was: how do we make one camera do the impossible? The better question was: why does this have to be one camera? Sometimes the useful breakthrough is not improving the old tool. It is exposing the assumption hidden inside the tool.
If the idea is worth keeping, change the architecture of the tool before shrinking the idea to fit it.