Film Ramble: Top 10 Fantasy and Science Fiction Films of 2021

 I skipped my genre-film best of last year for fairly obvious reasons, and I would have skipped this year, too, for the less obvious reason that, having mostly quit writing, I'm free to just fill up this blog with vintage anime reviews if I so choose.  But a friend asked if I'd be doing one, and I've just about seen enough good movies to fill out of a top ten, and I've not much better to do, so why not?

First up, then, I'll concede that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings possibly ought to be on here somewhere, but I just hate its last act so goddamn much - it's the most aggravating example yet of the trend whereby Marvel only have one idea for how to handle a big action climax - and I'm also more annoyed that I probably ought to be that they've taken a street-level martial arts hero and turned him into yet another clone of Iron Man.  Lupin III: The First was a close call and Venom: Let There Be Carnage could also easily have taken the bottom spot, which is more than could be said of The Matrix Resurrected: while I have a measure of respect for Lana Wachowski for making a feature-length essay on how badly she didn't want to make another Matrix movie, and there was a marvellous little Reeves / Moss romcom tucked away amid its bloated running time, would a single half-decent action sequence have been too much to ask?  Ghostbusters: Afterlife I ignored because it looked terrible and I refuse to get nostalgic over something I was never obsessed with even as a kid.  And was there a Pixar movie this year?  If there was, it must have looked so boring that I immediately forgot its existence.

I ought to note, too, that everything bar the last three entries is ordered according to little more than the whims of a moment, since quality-wise the films are all good but not great in a largely indistinguishable fashion.  So if you want to get annoyed that I rated, say, Eternals over Encanto, then obviously feel free to do so, but perhaps don't tell me, since I'll probably have changed my mind anyway.  Let's go!

10) Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night

I've always quite liked Sword Art Online without exactly knowing why or feeling especially good about devoting my time to it, but if there's been one glaring problem right from the off that the show's seemed incapable of or unwilling to fix, it was the way it treated its female characters in general and female lead Asuna in particular.  And it's desperately embarrassing that it took them this long to set that right in any meaningful way, but hey, here we are, and the result is some of the best work the highly inconsistent franchise has managed to produce.  A retelling of the first series from Asuna's perspective, it benefits greatly from the fact that she's not immediately a badass the way the series' male protagonist Kirito was, and indeed not even a gamer - a detail that makes the desperately played-out isekai genre feel a little fresher - and gains, too, from an emphasis on friendship and its pitfalls that makes for a rewarding first half.  Once Kirito shows up and the film's events veer closer to those of the show, the film loses steam somewhat, but still, for anyone curious as to why Sword Art Online is so huge and eager to experiences its virtues with less of the nagging flaws, Aria of a Starless Night is the new best starting point.

9) Monster Hunter

Bless Paul W. S. Anderson, the man's a national treasure who'll never get a fraction of the credit he deserves.  For over two and a half decades now he's been churning out B-movies, and some of them are marvellous and some of them are mildly terrible, but they're all kind of joyous in their own ways and there's not a one that feels as if it was made with less than total commitment.  Plus most of them star Milla Jovovich, and anyone who manages both to wed Milla Jovovich and find a place for her in damn near every project they go near warrants an extra measure of credit - bringing us neatly to Monster Hunter, which quality-wise is definitely nearer to the top than the bottom of Anderson's CV and indeed has a good solid stretch toward its middle that may be the best filmmaking he's produced since way back in Event Horizon.  That Monster Hunter tails off a bit in its back third is definitely a shame, but it's never less than thoroughly entertaining.  In a better world, this is the sort of of disposable-but-well-crafted fluff that would come out every month, but our world sucks and Hollywood has long since lost the art of making consistently good B-movies, so we should be extra glad of them on the rare occasions they do appear.

8) Earwig and the Witch

Is Gorō Miyazaki the equal of his father Hayao Miyazaki, our greatest living animation director by a country mile?  No, he isn't, and the answer's right there in the question.  Was a movie made for TV ever going to be the equal of cinematic masterpieces like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro?  Clearly not, in the same way that no one holds Ghibli's other made-for-TV project, Ocean Waves, to that standard.  Will CG ever truly capture the handmade loveliness of top-tier hand-drawn animation?  Actually, that one I'm increasingly on the fence about, and while Earwig and the Witch doesn't get us there, it's a better stab at recreating Ghibli's distinctive aesthetic while at the same time edging it toward new places than most reviewers gave credit for.  At any rate, while an undeniably lowkey effort coming from the greatest animation studio to ever exist, Earwig and the Witch is a delight watched purely as itself, with its thoroughly prickly protagonist and a plot - in which, as many a bitter critic pointed out, nothing much happens - that plays out more like a procedural than the twee fantasy fare it clearly doesn't intend to be.  It's also very, very English, in ways that it's frankly astonishing anyone who hadn't grown up in the country could pick up on: note, for example, how many pubs the tiny village setting has!  And while Englishness is hardly a virtue in and of itself, it's indicative, I think, of how much love and care Gorō put into this, his third directorial effort.

7) Encanto

This would be awfully near the top of the list if the last five minutes weren't such a monumental act of creative cowardice and generally pissing the entire message of the movie up the wall just because Disney can't possibly leave something without the possibility of sequels and spinoffs: it's that rare ending so misconceived that it manages not only to suck in its own right but to hurt everything that was great before it.  So that's a shame and all, but if you stopped watching at just the right time, you'd be left with one of Disney's strongest efforts in a good few years, and perhaps their most radical attempt at shaking up their formula by looting from cultural sources outside of the European folktale - in this case meaning a bafflingly earnest effort to transform the raw stuff of the Latin American magic-realist tradition into a funny kiddy musical.  Its also their most explicit shot yet at aping Studio Ghibli's emphasis on essentially villain-less narratives in which what propels the story is more a working out of internal conflicts than a response to external aggressions.  And that it lands on both those counts while also being a pretty good traditional Disney movie is honestly kind of a wonder - which is why it's so maddening when the post-climax comes along and nukes all the film's good intentions from orbit.

6) Eternals

After the manipulative poverty tourism of Nomadland and the hopelessly lacklustre trailers, and given the very likely probability that nobody anywhere cares one iota about these characters, my hopes for Eternals weren't what you might call high.  And sure enough, it proved to be something of a trainwreck.  But it was an interesting trainwreck, and I was very ready for an interesting Marvel movie by that point.  And if many of the ways in which it's interesting aren't good and some of them are quite actively bad - The leaden anti-humour!  The constant self-congratulation at being slightly less awful at representation than most big budget movies! - a few are actually kind of exciting.  Really, I'd have forgiven it a lot for its earnest attempt to have actual, meaningful themes and to grapple with big ideas and to try not to be too pat in its answers.  This is exemplified by a climax that does practically none of what we expect from the climax of a Marvel movie, or any sort of big-budget movie, and instead expects us to watch our "heroes" fight each other over what amounts to differing interpretations of their faith.  And look, I'm not saying Marvel ought to be replacing their done-to-death "fight on the ground / in the air / in the sky" third acts with religious wars every time, but as a one-off?  It's certainly different.  I couldn't swear that being different is equal to being good - I couldn't swear that anything in all of this works! - but better a brave failure than a safe success.

5) Raya and the Last Dragon

I'd argue that the good stuff in Encanto is better than the good stuff in Raya and the Last Dragon, but at no point does Raya and the Last Dragon defecate all over its bed and then fling the filthy sheets in your face, so it gets to be a little higher up the list.  On the other hand, Raya and the Last Dragon does have a couple of great virtues of its own, one being that it's absolutely bonkers - somewhere along the line, somebody thought that remaking Mad Max, but with a teenage girl riding a giant pill bug, was a good idea, and that someone was actually listened to instead of being quietly ushered in the direction of the nearest sanatorium! - and the other being that, more so than any other film since Disney burned the last tattered shreds of its soul and abandoned traditional animation, it looks staggeringly lovely.  Get past the unapologetic mangling of various Southeast Asian cultures into one misshapen whole, which is possibly more offensive than the way Encanto does the same with Latin America but yields far more entertaining world-building results, and there's a pleasurable, if distinctly rote, fantasy coming-of-age tale here that's well toward the upper end of the middling ground that both Disney and Disney-Pixar seems convinced is what doing their jobs means these days.

4) Spider-Man: No Way Home

Right from the off, for anyone who's lost patience with the Marvel juggernaut and is sick to the back teeth of this current suffocating wave of nostalgia in lieu of entertainment, No Way Home sounded like the worst damn thing.  Even if we ignore the fact that you really ought to be able to walk into a cinema and watch a movie without having seen seven other movies put out by two different companies over a two decade period, who could think that doing the precise same thing as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse only inevitably worse while also reminding people of those Sam Raimi Spider-man movies, two thirds of which were better than anything in your own series, was a bright idea?  And so, with all that, it's possible I'm giving Spider-Man: No Way Home credit for not being a ghastly wreck.  But I hope not.  It finds journeyman director Jon Watts getting up to considerably more interesting stuff than in his previous efforts (bar that one terrific sequence from Far From Home) and features some of the best effects work the MCU has yet to produce (if we ignore The Lizard, anyway; whatever Watts paid his eight-year-old nephew to fling that crap together in an afternoon when he realised they'd somehow missed out an entire character, it was too much.)  Yet, if I'm being honest, what really worked for me was the nostalgia, in part because I actually liked most of the preceding Spider-man movies but also because, shockingly, it opted to be so sad.  Seeing Tobey Maguire, whose career's been in the toilet for years, back in the spider-suit was sad; likewise Andrew Garfield, whose films may not have been the best but who did good work in the role.  Among the things I found weirdly moving, the amount of closure it delivered for those long-lost incarnations of the character was the most startling; but really, for all its quipiness, No Way Home was a strikingly melancholy and earnest movie, one that truly seemed set on doing right by its title character.

3) Dune

I actually have a bunch of problems with Villeneuve's take on Dune, and two of them are far from trivial.  It's absolutely half of a movie, and as the running time dragged on, I found that harder and harder to ignore, because there's just no arc here: it's a story that runs and runs and runs and stops, and that stopping point could easily have been anywhere in the last third without leaving the result any more or less shapeless.  And while there was a lot in the design work that I found thrilling, it bugged me deeply that, having found an aesthetic he liked the look of, Villeneuve seemed determined to plaster it over everything.  Say what you like about the Lynch version (or don't, since I like it and you probably don't) but it did a hell of a job of creating a universe that felt full of wildly different and competing cultures and ideologies, whereas Villeneuve's Dune does a hell of a job of creating a universe where everything's drab and brutalist.  Neither of those are small issues, so that the film gets this high on the list is a testament to how good every other element is, and more than anything to how it does the one thing genre fiction needs to do and rarely nails, which is to transport us somewhere totally other and make it feel real and true.  I didn't always love Dune, but I believed it, and arguably that's nearly as valuable.

2) The Suicide Squad

I don't much like James Gunn as a writer and I'm lukewarm to him as a director; there's nothing on his CV prior to The Suicide Squad that I'd rate as highly as other people generally do, not even the first Guardians of the Galaxy.  But with the astonishingly free rein DC appear to have given him, Gunn got to lean hard into the black humour and wanton sadism that were an uncomfortable fit for his PG13 projects, and with Margot Robbie now the undeniable MVP of the DC comics universe and Daniela Melchior stealing the film from under almost everyone else, he finally managed to make a film that does right by its female characters, and with a project that plays to his strengths and irons out his weaknesses, the results are a thing of wonder.  Incredibly dark and mean-spirited wonder, to be sure, but then, that's a big part of the fun and also wholly appropriate: The Suicide Squad ponder the notion of a US supervillain strike team mucking about in world affairs for all of about three seconds, recognises it for the grotesquery it is, and proceeds accordingly, crafting a delirious two hours of entertainment that skewers its concept with fanatical dedication.  Though written like that, it sounds like a grind, and thanks to a splendid cast doing splendid work and some truly excellent gags and just the right amount of decency and kindness at the centre of its shrivelled tumour of a heart, it somehow never is.

1) Zack Snyder's Justice League

I can't possibly justify this decision, except by saying that the existence of Zack Snyder's Justice League feels to me like a miracle and, let's face it, we don't see a lot of those these days.  And yes, I get that you might choose instead to view it as a win for the tenacity of toxic fandoms, but consider the alternative: that Snyder, an inconsistent craftsman who nevertheless clearly believes deeply and wholeheartedly in what he's up to, set out to create something of epic grandeur as one part of something even more preposterously epically grand, and a bunch of studio execs who'd lost faith in his vision because it wasn't as shiny and quippy as what those other studio execs were doing used a horrifying family tragedy as the leverage to push him off the project so that he could be replaced by a philandering, abusive hack who everyone pretty much knew by that point ought not to be working in an industry where he might get any chance to abuse his power - and then, somehow, years later, the stars aligned in such a way that Snyder got not only to fix his film but to then break it in a whole bunch of other ways that are giddily fascinating if you're a certain kind of film nerd.  A more than four hour running time!  A 4:3 aspect ratio!  A goddamn black and white version!  Clearly this sort of auterishness is madness and not a remotely sustainable model for making films, but just once in a blue moon, to experience something so vast and singular and magnificently demented - well, it was a rare treat, and for me, one of 2021's much-needed highlights.