...So first off, apologies for how long this took. It's mid-February, that's inexcusably late for a Best of 2021 list. But allow me to give my excuses. 2021 started on a hopeful note that we had licked this Coronavirus thing, only it end on the worst spike of infections ever in my area. Omicron could not have happened at a worse time either. It landed right in the red hot December prestige season. When the big Awards were out only in theaters, had to sit at home until the coast was clear. Numbers dropped down by the end of January, so I've been cramming these last two weeks.
Other than that inglorious finish, this 2021 was a very good year for movies. I have seen a grand total of 105 movies released last year. Of those, at least ninety were well worth the time, and only a handful I particularly regret. This was the best year at the movies of my entire life.
After 2020 put the entire industry hold, 2021 was this explosion of repressed energy. All those fantasies people had about a year-long party after the Pandemic, that never happened. However, it kinda happened at the theaters. Thanks to delays and schedule changes, 2021 felt like two years worth of filmmaking crammed into one. No week went by without something amazing to see either in theaters or on streaming.
2021 was an endless buffet where you could gorge yourself senseless - and I did. Therefore, this is a much longer list than I have ever done before. I could not fit all the movies I wanted to talk about into my traditional Top 15. I had to do a Top 20. And even then, I have another ten movies worth of Honorable Mentions that I discuss extensively as well. Then there's another thirty or so movies I've love to talk about that I have to cut for time. There's simply too much to 2021, it is a task that was beyond me. I do not recommend you read this entire list in one sitting.
And yet... with theaters open and movies coming out, important movies too, really fucking good movies, it hardly mattered. The main response I get to these lists from regular people I know is: "I've never heard of any of those movies". I can kick and scream and beg for people to care about the really cool stuff A24 is putting out or the adult dramas or foreign stuff. Great things could come out and have little impact outside a few online circles. Ticket sales have been declining since well before the Pandemic, and now you can feel it. Even with theaters open and a reasonable expectation of safety with vaccines, a lot of people did not come back. Big movies like The Suicide Squad did not do numbers. It would have made half a billion dollars easily a few years ago and was considered a kind of victory at less than $200 million. That terrifies me. If nobody is watching, what are we doing?
On the other hand, Spider-Man: No Way Home was an astronomical hit. That keeps the show going. It's a sign that people can still go to the movies in the massive horde-like numbers they did my entire life. However, it's also a bad sign. It's a sign that the interest is simply not there like it was before. If a movie can be successful, why are so few breaking out? Why does this medium feel so much smaller? Movies used to be the most important artform of them all, a true event like nothing else could be. And they are not anymore except for the rarest of circumstances.
No Way Home is a bad sign for another reason, that being that it isn't very good. I am a total hater on this front. There were much better blockbusters last year, even much better MCU movies. No Way Home is special yet by its nature it is not a sustainable enterprise. People saw it because of nostalgia for other movies that were twenty years old. We've been crying over the cycle of remakes and reboots for decades. With No Way Home, we're watching a star that's run out of hydrogen and forced to self-cannibalize to keep burning. Eventually, you'll exhaust all that nostalgia, and nobody will care about anything anymore. Movies might not slowly decline, but collapse.
Worse is the attitude that the big MCU movies seem to engender in people. There's also been stupid blockbuster movies and people who do not care what the critics think. There was a whole run of Transformers movies not long ago, and the critics hated those, and just nobody cared. The Spider-Man reaction to to criticism is a tribal conservatism. There's a violent reaction from many corners if you dare dislike something or simply question it. This is much worse in the gaming space where people have made a nasty sport of hating Kotaku for nearly a decade now, but it is everywhere now. This is the trend that disturbs me the most.
We can disagree on No Way Home, I hope we do, in fact. I'm glad to argue about movies for hours, I love movies. But when you're offended to a level of real aggression, you're not being just an asshole. You're effectively demanding that people stop thinking so hard about films. You actually do not want to talk about this thing, you simply want to worship it. You don't want to think about it, you want to surrender to it. When you can discuss a movie for its faults or merits, it is a living organism that still has an ecosystem in people's hearts. Once you seal it away into pure tribal points, it's dead. The fans killed Star Wars, not the critics.
Disney does not need you to defend them, and Spider-Man will never love you back. Sorry, Mickey Mouse isn't going to fuck you.
So maybe I'm talking to fewer people this year. Maybe I'm talking to nobody. It's always possible I'm the asshole. But I loved a lot of movies last year and I have frankly too much to say about too many of them. I want these movie to live and breath, I want this medium to thrive. The future is not particular positive, but the sky is also not falling. There are tons of great movies coming out right this second, and tons left to celebrate. So let's discuss the great year that was 2021.
