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| Den of Geek.com |
Giving all credit where its due, 2017 hasn't really been that bad of a year for film all things considered. The summer season might have been a general dud but where the year has managed to hit, it has succeeded in straight up knocking the ball clean out of the park.
If any of these 5 films get pushed out of a proper top 10 for me by year's end, we'll have one hell of a successful Fall season on our hands.
The Lost City of Z
The tale of an explorer’s obsession with finding a lost
ancient Amazonian civilization’s ruined city is a love letter to a style of Hollywood
adventure filmmaking long gone and overdue for return.
“The Lost City of Z” clocks in at just under 2½ hours but makes
expert use of every single second to produce a journey of grand and epic scope
that never once releases its firm grip on the human element of a man’s
reluctant drive to perform his duty and feed into his obsession at the cost of
the life that he owes his family, composed with a stellar sense of direction in
locales that could not have been more difficult to shoot in and stellar
performances from the underrated Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson, who’s
finally shed his Hollywood It kid status to live up to a potential I wasn’t
even fully aware that he had.
Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan’s ability to utilize his technical mastery of film within the art of storytelling is almost unparalleled in the territory of mainstream filmmaking.
Opting to buck the trends and tropes of traditional war
narrative, “Dunkirk” instead uses a single scenario encompassing nearly all
perspectives of wide scale armed political conflict to paint a picture
simulating the chaos, intensity and exhausting nature of war itself in which
the only true character of the film is the presence of war as a force of nature
that innocent people can find no escape from until it runs its course.
While its narrative style may not be attuned to everybody’s sensibilities,
“Dunkirk” takes a major gamble on a massive scale to boldly carve out a new way
to tell a unique story on film the only way that it could be told.
Logan
Cementing the “X-Men” franchise’s place in the modern cinematic superhero pantheon as the unapologetically experimental alternative of the genre that the Hollywood age of formulas so desperately needs, “Logan’s” successes are hard to overstate even as the film can be a rough sit through for all of the right reasons.
As a potential finale to the 17 year old cinematic “X-Men”
narrative as we’ve known it up to this point, it’s a hard edged, biting
reminder of the harsh realities of our world that sit at the heart of the themes
and questions that make its franchise so provocative but tinged with just
enough hope to make the ride well worth taking even if it’s not always pretty.
As Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart’s swan song for iconic characters, it hits
even harder and lands with firm impact, showing us heroes we’ve watched grow
and love for nearly 2 decades at their highest and lowest before closing their
chapter of the mutant saga once and for all.
Above all else though, “Logan” is simply damn fine character
driven filmmaking at its finest, using a celebrated franchise, genre, and set
of characters to explore unflinching realities of this world without sacrificing
the reasons we revere them so much in the first place in a movie that’s equally
haunting and beautiful from start to finish.
If “Colossal” were being graded sheerly on its uniqueness and creativity alone, it would be one of the best American genre films that I’ve seen of the decade hands down.
Mashing up an unlikely combination of relationship comedy
with Kaiju action, the film’s usage of the monster attacks as a metaphor for
the toxicity of bad relationships would be rather on the nose at face value
were it not bolstered by a well layered drama that can be equally darkly
comedic as it can compellingly tragic, bringing out top notch performances by
well known character actors who could not be more at the top of their game.
If you haven’t seen this film yet and consider yourself the
least bit of a fan of prime storytelling, you are doing yourself a major
disservice.
War for the Planet of the Apes
What more can be said at this point? It’s the third entry of
a perfect trilogy in a series that came swinging hard out of the starting gate
that has long proven its salt 10 times over by now; an excellent and improved
sequel to a great sequel to a strong first film.
What easily could have been a cash in on a recognizable name
has evolved into a full blown science fiction epic more worthy of the legacy of
its original film than its own original film’s sequels.
“War for the Planet of the Apes” explores themes of tragic inevitability,
the darkness and brilliance of human nature, the philosophical paradox of
sapient species coexistence in manners that could even be seen as paralleling the
modern day, and so much more wrapped up in a complexly crafted yet cohesively
plotted character study of one being with more perspective than any of the
players of the conflict he finds himself at the center of and this final entry
hits hard on the emotion, the spectacle, the humor, and the impact the series
has been known for and building upon for over 6 years now.
The end of Caesar’s journey is some of the best science fiction
and best storytelling that the film industry has seen in quite some time on any
level much less at that of the mainstream blockbuster and watching it come together
the way that it does is a once in a life time beauty.
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