2021 Movies: A Year in Review

2021 Movies: A Year in Review  

 

2020 was a weird year, but 2021 was even weirder in some ways. For half the year we couldn’t visit movie theaters, until we finally got injected with vaccines, then after a few months of things looking up after such a long, abysmal stretch, things got bad again, but movie theaters stayed open (for the most part) and a Marvel movie managed to cross the billion dollar mark. I want to say things almost feel back to normal, but that would be a lie. What even is normal anymore?

I came to realize I probably won’t do conventional CCC lists for my favourite films of the year or my most-anticipated movies of the upcoming year anymore. It’s been fun in the past, and maybe I will compile a top ten or top five list of my favourite movies of the year in future years, but I had a look back on what I watched in 2021 that was new, and I don’t have enough to make either kind of list. There were some I enjoyed, a couple I thought were quite good, but nothing that stands out as anything I expect to love and continue enjoying again and again in the future (with maybe three possible exceptions).

Even though 2021 wasn’t a particularly memorable year for new movies, and 2022 doesn’t look all that promising, I still feel the desire to recap the uniquely-pandemic-influenced year, looking at highlights and lowlights, plus a little preview of things to look forward to in a hopefully more normal year.

First, here are the new movies in 2021, chunked into four sections. Tomorrow I will look at my favourite TV shows of 2021, broken into the same number of sections, and finally I’ll examine what to look forward to in 2022.

 

January to March

The year started off rough, with no announcement as to when theaters would re-open or when pandemic restrictions would ease. So, for the first few months, there was nothing to do but continue the 2020 trend: watch whatever was new on streaming and keep watching old stuff. The first “new” movie that stands out in my memory is Zack Snyder’s Justice League. I thought it was going to be a joke. I was ready to hate-watch this thing, which seemed like it would barely be a new movie at all, just an inflated re-edit of the 2017 Justice League that had been finished off by Joss Whedon after Snyder stepped down. It was presented in full frame, the cgi looked even worse than before, and it clocked in at a ridiculous 4 hours! Much to my surprise, Zack Snyder’s fully-realized vision was a genuinely entertaining superhero epic, with one of the coolest sequences I saw in any movie all year: The Flash turning back time. DC superheroes had never been as god-like before, and while the movie is still way too long, uneven, and punctuated with ridiculousness, it was far better than it had any right to be.

Finally, after three abysmal months, the movie I had been waiting for since I was a little kid finally had its big debut: the giant monster rematch of the century, Godzilla vs. Kong. Even though theaters remained closed, I rented it from Amazon Prime for 24 hours, watched it twice in that time on a brand-new 75 inch 4K TV with surround sound, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least. I was even lucky enough to see it once more in my local movie theater when they reopened three months later. It’s tough to say whether or not GVK is my favourite movie of the year, but I was entertained by it in a way no other movie could have matched. It was also the first big financial hit of 2021, and found more success than originally expected, which will hopefully ensure the Eighth Wonder of the World and the King of the Monsters will return in the near future. Here’s my review if you missed it: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/04/godzilla-vs-kong-review.html

 

April to June

After a painfully long time, the email I had been waiting for arrived in my inbox: theaters were welcoming back movie lovers! My cousin and I bought tickets for Mortal Kombat and we returned to those uncomfortable theater seats the same day they reopened. Mortal Kombat was more or less what I expected: a fitting translation of the game to the big screen utilizing modern cgi effects. Many of the characters were cool, some of the fighting was pretty well done, and there were a few parts that were so dumb they were funny, but overall, it wasn’t that memorable. I didn’t care though: I wanted to see everything that was playing, it had been far too long since being in a movie theater, and I didn’t care what I saw. After Mortal Kombat was A Quiet Place Part II, which had a terrific opening scene depicting the initial invasion of the aliens, but the rest of it felt a little more generic than the first movie. Still, it was pretty well done, especially for an unnecessary horror sequel. Speaking of unnecessary horror sequels, I also saw The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the third entry in the core Conjuring franchise, and it was not a bad movie. I wouldn’t say it was a good movie, either. In fact, I didn’t know what to say about it after I saw it back in June, and I still don’t know what to say about it now. It was just another possession story, inferior to the best of its kind, but better than the worst of its kind. It was so middle-of-the-road I can’t really say anything else.

 

July to September

Summer movies were back, new vaccines were in our bloodstreams, and for a while there, things started to improve. Even though the pandemic was far from over, movies, it seemed, had made a comeback.

Summer movie season officially began with Black Widow: a movie I originally had zero intention of seeing. I never found the character of Natasha Romanoff to be one of the most interesting in the MCU, even though I think Scarlett Johannson has been pretty good in the role, and getting a mid-quel (prequel to some of the MCU movies and sequel to some others) after her death in Endgame two years earlier felt a little weird, but hey, I wanted to see whatever movies were playing in theaters, and leave it up to Marvel Studios to have a fun-looking action movie at the ready. It was the first film entry in their post-Endgame lineup (not counting Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019), and wow, was it ever average. I was bored for some of it, mildly entertained for a decent amount of it, but after the initial astonishment of “wow, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be!” wore off, I realized I will probably have no interest in ever watching it again.

Following in the wake of Black Widow’s forgettable feeling, I saw Free Guy starring Ryan Reynolds, which also was forgettable and something I won’t watch again. For some reason I remember thinking it seemed like it would be R-rated when the first trailer was released pre-pandemic, but instead it showcased the Disney properties it had access to in cringe-inducing ways and aimed squarely for the PG-13 family comedy audience. It was watchable, but not worth watching.

Space Jam: A New Legacy looked terrible, but I saw it anyway, for one scene in particular, which I heard described in a review and saw clips of: Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner existing in the Mad Max: Fury Road universe. It was worth seeing for that scene alone, plus two other things: the ridiculous final basketball game with every random Warner Brothers character cameoing in the crowd, and the Porky Pig rap battle. It should have been called Ready Player Jam, because it was 100% a nostalgia cash-in a la Ready Player One and a feature-length advertisement for the Warner Bros. streaming catalogue. This was yet another one I was mildly entertained by (mainly because I was laughing at how bad, ridiculous, and embarrassing it was) but have no desire to see ever again.

The trend continues! Sort of. I reviewed M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, Old, in October, because when I saw it in August, I was floored. It was one of the weirdest movies I had seen in a long time, and I don’t know if I could actually watch it again, but it was still the most entertaining summer 2021 movie I had seen up to that point. Here’s my review: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/old-2021-review.html

Then came THE most entertaining movie of the summer, which I absolutely did not see coming. Even though it had been five years, I was still bitter about the agonizing experience of seeing Suicide Squad in theaters in August of 2016. But, the new one had nothing to do with that one, it was written and directed by James Gunn, who had killed it with Guardians of the Galaxy, and it featured King Shark, who dropped such classic lines in the trailers as “Hand” and “Bird”. Absolute gold. So I saw The Suicide Squad, and I loved it. I saw it twice. I frequently quoted King Shark for the rest of the year. Not only was it one of my favourite movies of the year (a concept I could not have imagined at the start of the year even if I tried), but it’s my favourite DC superhero movie since The Dark Knight trilogy. Seriously. It’s weird and character-driven and action-packed and well-made and has a giant monster that’s a star fish with a giant eye that spawns little facehugger-like versions of itself from vents under its arm tentacles. I loved it.

But that wasn’t all for surprising summer movies. On Netflix the Fear Street Trilogy was making waves, and while I didn’t enjoy all three of them so much that I would give them glowing recommendations, I felt they were worth watching, I was pretty entertained by all of them, and I reviewed them, spoiler-free, in October. Here are the links:

Part One: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-one-1994-2021-review.html

Part Two: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-two-1978-2021-review.html

Part Three: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-three-1666-2021-review.html

I usually know at least something about a movie before I see it, and often I know too much because of the trailers and my inability to resist reading all about them online prior to viewing, but when I sat down to watch The Green Knight, I knew next to nothing about it. I knew it was from A24, a studio that has developed a particular brand of film that I’ve enjoyed more often than not, and it was retelling the tale of King Arthur. I found it was very slow, though enjoyable, and thought it was extremely well made. It felt like something out of the 1970’s, but I mean that in a good way. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anybody, but if any of what I’ve just said has intrigued you, give it a shot.

The Candyman reboot was another one I reviewed for October, but this one didn’t stick with me all that much. It too was well-made, but paled in comparison to the original, in my eyes. Review link: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/candyman-2021-review.html

Finally, at the tail end of the summer season, I saw the next big Marvel movie event: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which I was looking forward to more than I had been looking forward to Black Widow, but still wasn’t particularly excited about. That ended up making it way more fun and surprising when it turned out to be a really entertaining action/fantasy adventure, with some of the best fight scenes I’ve seen in a Marvel movie in a while, plus it was unexpectedly epic, with great visuals. It gave me a glimmer of hope for some of these new character entering the already jam-packed MCU and furthering the interconnected storylines. 

 

October to December

Even though the fall/winter steadily got worse in pandemic terms with the uprising of the Omicron variant and more restrictions returning, movies remained consistent, thankfully, but few really wowed me. Malignant had a lot of buzz around its release in September, and I eventually saw it and reviewed it in October (here’s the link: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/malignant-2021-review.html). Reflecting back on it now, I kind of want to see it again, just because it was so outlandish yet also pretty well produced. I think it might be worth a second look. On the topic of horror movies, I saw a Halloween movie in the theater on Halloween night for the first time. Halloween Kills—the sequel to the 2018 reboot that was just called Halloween and just followed up the original 1978 film—was not a good movie, but I was pretty thoroughly entertained by it. The violence was completely over-the-top, the recreations of the 1978 setting were extremely well-realized in the flashbacks, and certain moments were so dumb I couldn’t help but laugh. As entertaining as it was, though, it completely killed (no pun intended) any interest I had in the next one, which is supposedly going to wrap up this trilogy.

I haven’t been the biggest fan of the Daniel Craig James Bond era, and I didn’t even see the last one, Spectre, but No Time to Die was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed the incredible first season of True Detective, and this was supposed to be Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond. So, I was curious enough to see it. I liked some of the action, but the whole thing felt too bloated, running over two-and-a-half hours. The conclusion really did surprise me, though. Without spoiling anything, I think No Time to Die will be remembered as one of the most unique conclusions to any of the actors’ tenures who have played 007.

One of my most-anticipated movies of 2020 was Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, but just like my most-anticipated movie of 2020 (Godzilla vs. Kong) it was delayed multiple times. Finally, it came out in October. I won’t get too in-depth about it, but I was a bit disappointed, mainly because I didn’t realize it was only half a movie. It adapts the first half of the first Dune novel, but it also lacks any kind of conclusion and is paced strangely because it really is half of a whole movie, essentially, so I won’t really know how to fully feel about it until I see part two (which, luckily, is going to come out eventually). I thought the cast was great, the visuals were cool, the soundtrack was phenomenal, and having never read the novel before, the story was intriguing (if a bit confusing), but I couldn’t help feel emotionally unattached to the movie as a whole, and it didn’t stick with me the way I thought it might.

The trailers for Marvel’s next major superhero-team-up, Eternals, looked awesome. I was pretty excited to see it, even after hearing mixed initial reviews. Eternals was one of the biggest surprises for me in 2021, but not in a good way. I didn’t think an MCU film could be as bad as some of their worst efforts at this point, but they proved me wrong. Not only was Eternals visually bland, poorly written, and largely humorless, it was incredibly boring. I think it’s my new least-favourite MCU film. If I never see it ever again, I won’t care.

Luckily Marvel saved their best for last in 2021. Within a month-and-a-half of Eternals came Spider-Man: No Way Home, the third entry in a loose trilogy of Tom Holland-led Spidey adventures (don’t forget he appeared in Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame at varying points throughout the trilogy), and I can only compare it to Godzilla vs. Kong in the way that it exceeded my expectations, thrilled me in unique ways, and made for an all-around enjoyable time at the movies. No spoilers here, but as a fan of the character since 2002’s Spider-Man, I was very pleased with this sequel and the directions it went in. After I settled down from the shock and awe of seeing it for the first time I noticed some things that bothered me, a few inconsistencies, and the inciting incident for why the whole movie occurs seemed kind of dumb from the very beginning, but it played into my Spider-Man nostalgia in creative and satisfying ways rather than cheap, annoying ways. Now that they’ve used this particular bag of tricks, though, I’m not sure what direction they’ll take the wall crawler in the future, but I’m interested enough to keep watching his adventures.

So, that’s it: 2021 in film can be pretty easily summed up with a shrug of the shoulders and a little head nod. Not a bad year, all things considered, but not likely one to be fondly remembered. Tune in next time for all the TV shows I watched in 2021 and all the movies I’m looking forward to in 2022!