These were the years of challenge to the Hollywood studio system. Independent visionaries with nothing more than daring and provocative scripts, a camera, and low budgets suddenly made big splashes. Art houses tested the multiplex. Inventive camera and editing techniques went up against conventional narrative styles. Audiences were confronted to face difficult subject matter and were taken into realms well beyond and beneath the mainstream. Filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino, Jane Campion, and Richard Linklater pushed the filmic envelope well beyond previous tolerance limits with movies like Slacker and Pulp Fiction. Minorities and other marginalized communities were able to shift their stories and visions into the main fabric of society with films like Crying Game, Do the Right Thing, and Bound. Uranus was alive and well in movies at this time.

However, it was Uranus's magic in the form of special effects that really stole the show during the 1990's. With the digital revolution, the gap between the mind's imagination and the silver screen significantly narrowed. No longer confined to labor-intensive, awkward physical models, special effects teams could build three-dimensional worlds and creatures on a computer workstation and, with it, the credibility and convincingness of special effects took a huge leap forward. With Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Matrix as bookends, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction was populated with spectacular eye candy that mesmerized young and the young-at-heart.

As Neptune gave the forum for Uranus's brilliance through the medium of film, Uranus also awakened us to the imaginal dimension of Neptune. Spirituality and the supernatural; romanticism, gothic, and high art; and the gorgeously transcendent—all Neptunian themes—pervaded the years of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction. An unprecedented number of films with overtly spiritual and metaphysical themes dominated big box office and independent cinema. With the success of Ghost, Sixth Sense and Field of Dreams, Uranus allowed Neptune's otherworldliness to penetrate this reality. Yet it was arguably through independent and foreign films—films like Dead Man, Wings of Desire, and Jesus of Montreal—that allowed Neptune's sanctity to descend most fully onto this earthly plane. The Uranus-Neptune conjunction also witnessed a passion to portray the ultimate love story on screen. The very human translation of the Neptunian dimension—the search for the ideal other or ultimate loss of self through love—became the leitmotif that suffused so many of the films of this era: The English Patient, the Nora Ephron trilogy (When Harry met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail), Shakespeare in Love, Immortal Beloved, Far and Away, and the megasuccess of Titanic.

However, films of the past several years demonstrated that Neptune isn't always about high romance and "love and light." On the contrary, a gothic streak permeated many films of the era, showing Neptune's fondness for the mysterious, the darkly moody, and the foreboding. Films such as Batman, Se7en, Interview with a Vampire, Dark City, and Jacob's Ladder all featured highly stylized nightmarish netherworlds and haunting hallucinations. In a similar vein, Neptune's "urge to merge" was as well-represented by romance films as by a series of tragic tales of drug-induced delusion and misery. Leaving Las Vegas, Drugstore Cowboy, Requiem for a Dream, Rush, and Permanent Midnight were only a handful of films that featured characters allured into the world of drugs, and who often lost their lives in an abyss of addiction.