Top Ten Films of 2017: A Retrospective
I like to leave it until the spring of the following year to look back at the previous year’s releases and pick my Top Ten films of the year – partly because it gives me an extra few months to catch up with some of the releases that I may have missed in the cinema, and partly because sometimes the real test of a film is how well it ages in the weeks and months after you first see it.
With that in mind, it’s now time for my retrospective Top Ten review of 2017 – a year that saw some stiff competition for a place in my Top Ten, with a number of films that I really loved narrowly missing out on a spot…
10) War For The Planet Of The Apes - This would be a fantastic film even if it was watched on its own, but as the culmination of a trilogy for the Caesar character, it’s an incredible achievement. Intelligent, thought-provoking, morally-challenging – this is grown-up filmmaking that also still works as blockbuster entertainment. I sometimes spend so much time praising the script, the acting and the themes that I completely forget the technical accomplishment that this film represents – it’s entirely carried by CGI-ape characters, but they are so believable you forget and just react to them as normal actors!
9) Baby Driver - The most inventive original film of 2017 (and the only non-sequel in my Top Ten!), this balances the tone between the drama and the comedy perfectly. Some parts are laugh-out-loud funny, others are nail-bitingly tense, but all of it is undeniably cool. A great melding of music and movies, with an excellent supporting cast, including impressive turns from Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm in particular. This kind of innovative filmmaking needs to be recognised and appreciated.
8) Spider-Man: Homecoming - With hindsight, it’s easy to just think of Homecoming as the great film that it is, and to forget about what an impossible task they faced when making it. Coming just a couple of years after the disappointing The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Homecoming surpassed all expectations, and is for my money the best Spider-Man film since Sam Raimi’s original, and Tom Holland is the best Spider-Man bar none. Plus, Michael Keaton is arguably one of the best MCU villains in my book, and gives a really interesting, and strangely sympathetic, performance.
7) Kingsman: The Golden Circle - I’ll be honest with you, from this point on in my Top Ten, any of my favourite 7 films could have arguably taken the crown in a less competitive year… This sequel is every bit as good as Kingsman: The Secret Service (which was my second favourite film of 2015), and manages to be just as clever, creative and fun as the original, without ever becoming a re-tread.
6) Wonder Woman - Perhaps it helped that I went into this without particularly high expectations (not being very familiar with Wonder Woman as a character), but everything about this film blew me away. The script and its thought-provoking and morally-challenging themes, the excellent supporting cast both on the island and in WW1, and the sweeping score which had both new and returning elements – I loved it all! But the really stand outs were Gal Gadot in her first leading role, and Patty Jenkins who knocked it out of the park with her direction. I’ve re-watched this film multiple times already, and it literally never gets old. Up there as one of the best “superhero” origin films of the last decade.
5) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - I loved what The Last Jedi did with the Star Wars saga, and the fact that it only came in at number 5 (lower than either The Force Awakens or Rogue One) is a sign of how stiff the competition was this year, rather than a lack of enjoyment of the film. While The Force Awakens had to (to a certain degree) play it safe to assure everyone that Star Wars was in safe hands (to the extent that some have accused The Force Awakens of being “Star Wars karaoke”), I loved that The Last Jedi had the freedom and the courage to cut loose, and take the saga in some unexpected directions. Without going into spoilers, the film “zigged” when I expected it to “zag” in several of its plot threads, and to quote the aging Luke Skywalker, “This is not going to go the way you think”. In particular, the revelation about Rey’s parents (avoiding specific spoilers!) is, in its own way, as shocking as the “I am your father” moment in The Empire Strikes Back. Mark Hamill and Adam Driver are both fantastic, giving very layered performances, and rather than it feel like it was treading water (as some middle-chapters in trilogies do), by the end of The Last Jedi, I literally had no idea what to expect from Episode IX… All that, and it was a fitting tribute and farewell to Carrie Fisher too.
4) John Wick: Chapter 2 - Sometimes you have to go with your heart over your head! Intellectually, I know that John Wick Chapter 2 is “just an action film”, and so perhaps it shouldn’t be so high on my list … and yet, if I listen to my heart and think about how much I enjoyed the film, there’s no question that it deserves its ranking. And, in fairness, it’s a huge disservice to the film to call it “just an action film”, as the secret underworld society that’s fleshed out in this film is as meticulously crafted and realised as the worlds of any sci-fi or fantasy film. The first film may have been a (gloriously OTT and amazingly choreographed) revenge action flick, but this sequel is so much more – I genuinely think it builds from the first John Wick film in the same way Aliens did to Alien. All that, AND it’s got some of the best fight choreography to every come out of Hollywood. Just so much fun … and I cannot wait for the promised Chapter 3, which is apparently due out next year.
3) Blade Runner 2049 - Sometimes you just have to go with your head over your heart! I joke – as one of the things I loved about Blade Runner 2049 is that it is so packed with emotion – but my point is, this is a slow-build “thinky” film that is, in many ways, the polar opposite to something like John Wick Chapter 2. I really had low expectations for this belated sequel, but was blown away not only by how faithful it was to the tone, aesthetics and themes of the original, but also how it built naturally on the foundations laid by the original so that it all felt like one unified story. It was by no means a re-hash of the original, and yet the investigation of the central mystery felt like an organic continuation of the plot from the first film. I got pulled in by several of the plot’s twists and turns along the way, and Blade Runner 2049 even has its own unanswered mystery to rival the original’s “is Deckard a Replicant” debate – namely is Joi capable of genuine emotion, or is she just a mirror for what you want to see/hear? I’ve watched the film several times, and still don’t think I know the answer…
2) Thor: Ragnarok - Marvel’s highest scoring film this year (and their second Top Ten entry) was nothing short of a revelation. You’d have thought that after making 17 films (at the time this came out), including five starring Thor himself, that Marvel films would be feeling repetitive and samey, but Ragnarok felt like one of Marvel’s most creative films in years. Marvel’s strength is that it rarely makes “superhero” films, instead it makes various different genre films in which “superheroes” appear. Ragnarok is an outlandishly creative space epic with a wickedly subversive sense of humour … which just happens to star a superhero. The Thor and Loki relationship is taken in intriguing new directions, the supporting cast are great (Tessa Thompson and Jeff Goldblum in particular), and Taika Waititi’s direction brings an incredible freshness to everything. Thor feels like he’s finally slipped the shackles of being “Shakespeare-man”, and the script makes the most of Chris Hemsworth’s comedic talents, in a storyline that really highlights how much the character has grown and evolved over the space of his trilogy. Proving that films don’t have to be “gritty” to be good, no film made me laugh-out-loud more in 2017 than Ragnarok.
1) Logan - If I’m being honest with myself, I think my choices for films 2 to 7 in my list could change day-to-day depending on my mood, but I think my Film of 2017 was always going to be Logan. It’s a tour de force, and it’s criminal that it was overlooked at the Oscars (except in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, where it got the first ever scripting nomination for a comic book movie). Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career, and Patrick Stewart deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the very least. Holding her own against these legends of the big screen, Daphne Keen makes an instant impact, and will go on to do great things, I’m sure. Even Stephen Merchant impressed me with his performance in this melancholic masterpiece. The film is poignant and touching even if just watched in isolation – but as Hugh Jackman’s farewell to the character he’s played for 19 years in nine films, it packs an incredibly powerful emotional punch. Normally, I naturally gravitate towards the more “feel good” end of the movie spectrum (and I’m really not a fan of tear-jerkers), but Logan, despite having a tragic and mournful tone from the start, never descends into melodrama. It is about finality and mortality, but it’s also about so much more, and even finds moments of hope and optimism for the future. If Hugh Jackman wanted to go out on a high note, he achieved that and then some.
If you want to read my full (non-spoiler) reviews for any of these Top Ten films, just click on the above links.
Before I sign off, it’s only fair to also give a shout out to those films that just narrowly missed out on a spot in my Top Ten of 2017 (and which, in a less competitive year, would easily have made it in) – so I tip my hat to Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, The Lego Batman Movie and Paddington 2.
While I don’t do a list of the "worst" films of the year (because I try to avoid paying to watch "bad" films), here's a brief run down of my biggest disappointments of 2017 in terms of the films that I did see:
3rd place – Sleepless: I was really excited about this film as it has a fantastic cast (including Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan and David Harbour) and a gripping premise … but unfortunately, after a really promising first half, the film pretty much falls apart with a series of predictable and unrealistic plot-twists in the second half. It’s a shame, as during the first half, I really felt this could have been something special.
2nd place – Bright: I actually really enjoyed Suicide Squad for what it was, and I also thought End of Watch was great, so I was really excited to see what director David Ayer did with this fantasy/buddy-cop hybrid … but unfortunately, Bright doesn’t live up to its potential and is let down by a pretty bad script. Still, Netflix have greenlit a sequel, which Ayer himself will write this time (having previously written Training Day and End of Watch) – so maybe the sequel will live up to the promise of the great concept?
Biggest Disappointment of 2017 – The Dark Tower: Given all of the hype surrounding this adaptation of Stephen King’s series of novels (which some say are his best work), and given how awesome Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey are in pretty much everything they do, it’s hard to believe that this film is so … average. Not even “bad”, just totally and utterly forgettable. This 95-minute film feels like it does nothing more than set up the basic premise of the universe and then – it’s over. It might have worked as, say, a double-length pilot episode of a TV show, where we only had to wait until next week to get into the “real” story – but as a standalone film, this just feels like a simplistic and uninspired re-tread of various fantasy clichés, and we’re left with an unforgivable number of unanswered questions and unresolved plot-holes.
I’m not saying that the above films were necessarily the worst films of 2017, but they were by far the most disappointing.
Still, let's not end on too much of a downer - you can also check out my earlier blog of my Cinematic Highlights of 2017, which includes my nominations for “Hidden Gem of the Year” and “Guilty Pleasure of the Year”.
