Here is a thread to talk about the movies you watched in 2018. Time to pretend we’re film critics.
I saw more films in 2018 than any year I have been alive. It was part of my project to educate myself on cinema, to watch lots of famous movies I hadn’t seen in years or never got around to. What brought this on? The Kingdom Hearts II trailers at E3. I caught the Disney bug and, over the course of several months, watched nearly every Disney movie made in the thirties through the fifties, most of them for the first time since I was a kid. Once I got tired of that, I started renting DVDs from my library, averaging about three a week. Oscar winners, cult classics, recent animated films. Everything was fair game. As of today, I’ve easily seen fifty movies since the year began. Only seven of them were in the theater. Only now do I realize that, of the movies I bought tickets to see, all but one were owned by Disney and nearly all of them involved superheroes. That’s a little depressing, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that I saw a much more diverse array of films on DVD and online. Plus, a few movies released this year I didn’t see (Halloween, Fantastic Beasts, Overlord), I will likely get to in the future.
So, what did I see?
Black Panther
It doesn’t matter. None of these MCU movies matter. They are ephemera, meant to be used once and thrown away. Every time I see one, I think “that was alright,” then immediately forget what I just saw. MCU movies aren’t bad, but they long ago served their function and no longer offer anything exciting or interesting. I wasn’t even going to see Black Panther until the ridiculous political hype got me curious. Was Black Panther historically significant? No. It was an entirely average superhero movie which will be forgotten in a decade. Intellectualize it any further and it falls apart. The only milestone it broke is being the first movie to get me into a Facebook argument.
Deadpool 2
Despite my apathy towards MCU movies, I still like Marvel stories outside the shared universe. While I didn’t fall in love with the first Deadpool as much as everyone else, I still enjoyed it as a refreshingly mature comedic take on the superhero genre. Deadpool 2 was…fine. The jokes worked. The new characters worked. The comradery between Deadpool and Firefist was a high point. Deadpool developing a no-kill rule was annoying, but not a deal breaker. I can’t point to any one thing that made it a lesser film, but I just can’t give it the same praise as the first. Maybe it’s that, while the first broke boundaries, the second just repeated the formula. There are very few parts of it that stand out to me and I don’t have any desire to see it again.
Avengers: Infinity War
Same as Black Panther, but even more so. Hearing people praise the new Avengers felt like listening to a guy talk about an unusually good stick of gum he ate last week. Still, I will admit that Thanos is more interesting than I expected. For an invincible space emperor, he is weirdly down-to-earth. There is no malevolence in his actions; he sincerely wants to help the universe with what he views as a logical solution. I am now avoiding MCU films but will probably check out the next Avengers just to see how this decade-long arc concludes.
Incredibles 2
I haven’t watched the original Incredibles in over a decade, but still remember all my favorite scenes. Only a movie of the highest caliber can retain such memorability. Does the sequel live up to it? No, but it’s still good. Like the original, the retro art and character designs impress, as does the mature writing. My main complaints are the villain’s lack of motivation and the kids having nothing to do until the last act. In short, Incredibles 2 is enjoyable but doesn’t reach the impossibly high bar set by the original. I wish I had more to say about it, but again, few movies this year made me feel anything but ambivalent.
Creed II
Creed, the original, was better than it had any right to be. I expected a rehash of Rocky but got a well-executed passing of the torch movie, successfully continuing Rocky’s story while introducing an interesting new character. Going in, I was concerned about Creed II, because I was skeptical that it could live up its predecessor and knew that some of the plot threads were going in a depressing direction. But it was great. Everything that works about Rocky is on display: character interactions, boxing scenes, training montages, visual storytelling, swelling music. All present and accounted for. What stood out to me is how it transformed Ivan Drago from a 1-dimensional villain into a sympathetic, dynamic character. Also, it was clever how scenes focusing on Rocky used the traditional score, then shift to hip hop for Adonis. Much as I enjoyed Creed II, I acknowledge that the protagonist’s character arc was repetitive. He learned the same lesson from the last movie again. I can forgive this because everything else was handled splendidly and Adonis moved forward in other ways, as a father and husband.