Films of the 2000s - Six of the Best

Not necessarily a favourite choice here, or even a list of the best films of the decade, but the ones that have had arguably the greatest influence.

It was a decade largely forged by the fashions and technological advances of the late 1990's: so many of the major films were based on concepts already covered in the latter part of the 20th century. Both the Matrix and the Star Wars prequel trilogies were completed, and there had long been rumblings before the turn of the Millennium about Peter Jackson's epic 3-film version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS - and most of these expectations were satisfied. As cinema it was exhausting to sit through - and its happier home is probably on DVD for Tolkien collectors - but it was a triumph for Jackson and his team of New Zealand special effects artists, and to give him credit, he also gave his actors enough to chew on so that they weren't upstaged by the CGI. It led to 14 Oscars for the third instalment, The Return of the King (although the other two in the trilogy were just as good), and led to a feeding frenzy of ambitious blockbusters based on adventure novels. The success of LOTR probably helped the synchronous release of the Harry Potter films, and Disney have also tried their hands at adapting C.S. Lewis's Narnia trilogy. I suspect however that this trend may be dying on its feet, as the recent Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has so far faltered after the first episode, and these huge films will only last as long as studios can afford them, or if they think children are too bored with this kind of entertainment.

The musical (too rarely seen and often quite difficult to make) had something of a resurgence during the 2000's with the film version of Moulin Rouge and CHICAGO, the latter significantly introducing the concept of the all-actors' singing musical (not dubbed by professional singers), so that by the end of the decade we also had The Producers, the long-awaited film of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, and the very successful Mama Mia, with Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, and - for better or worse - Pierce Brosnan doing their own singing.

The key event of the 2000's was too awful an event to want to be made on film (because it so mimicked disaster movies) but was however brought to the screen most respectably in United 93, the best of the bunch. Its director Paul Greengrass also made cult Bourne trilogy which has redefined the concept of the spy film, which showed through in Casino Royale, one of the most forceful Bond films ever made, putting Daniel Craig into a quite different category from any of his predecessors, including Sean Connery.

The return of James Bond was one of a whole score of movie series "reboots", a curious mixture of remake and prequel (as influenced by Star Wars Episodes 1-3), of which the first to start this new trend was BATMAN BEGINS, intending to revive a series that was proverbially dying on its back side after the turgid Batman and Robin. Christopher Nolan's film perhaps took itself too seriously, with the Caped Crusader not appearing until well into the second half, but it had a fantastic (mostly male) cast, and gave a rare proper psychological insight into the making of a superhero (in my opinion Christian Bale should have been the actor to play the young Darth Vader).

It led in even grimmer fashion to The Dark Knight, which however shifted the emphasis away from Batman to his psychotic nemesis The Joker (a disturbing performance by the late Heath Ledger), trying to reflect the insecurity of the times with the threat of suicide bombing. This was a general trend among Hollywood films, which felt they had to incorporate the insecurities and the moral ambiguity of the War on Terror. Personally as an observation of the post-September 11th world I much prefer SPIDER MAN, which had the misfortune to be in post-production when the Twin Towers were struck, requiring the removal of an action scene on the World Trade Centre itself. The general tone of both Spider Man 1 & 2 was a celebration as well as a commemoration of New York, and the uncertainty of its hero Peter Parker reflected the uncertainty (and the idealism) of America at the time.

Thematically this is is a most interesting time for American cinema, in which they are reassessing their own role in the world as much as they did during the 1970's, particularly in the documentary field. Michael Moore was the most outspoken voice, although his hectoring Fahrenheit 911 made little difference to the 2004 Presidential election. The documentary that seems to have had the greatest resonance however, is Al Gore's film essay AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH - a warning to the world about the continuing waste of our environment. In another world, Al Gore would have been President at the beginning of the decade, not George W. Bush - how different would things have been then?

It leaves the impression that there was little to laugh about in this grim decade; one of the most popular but hardly witty or sophisticated comedic forms was the "gross-out" movie, begun in 1997 with Dumb and Dumber, and continuing something of a tradition from 1980's comedies such as Porky's or the films of John Hughes (who died in 2009). This comedy cycle will last as long as the next one - my personal wish is to see a return to the style of the 1920's and 30's (Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, etc) which can't be far away as their appeal has never diminished - and we all need cheering up nowadays.

In the meantime, the animation field has kept the comedic banner flying a great deal at the box office, with a continuing large audience for the output of the Disney Pixar studio and their counterparts at Dreamworks, whose SHREK was perhaps the biggest cult of them.

The same scriptwriters also wrote The Pirates of the Caribbean films, which have seemingly gone on to do very well in spite of their general cynicism towards the action genre (a sign maybe that the blockbuster is dying on its feet.) More and more nowadays, the field of special effects and animation in popular cinema is taking over from people and characterisation, so that actors are becoming increasingly superfluous, and 3-D is making a strong return at the end of the decade. These again, may be fads, and whether the blockbuster can survive in another ten years time is open to doubt, as cinema is increasingly turning into an old-fashioned 20th century medium where mass audiences are only to be found in major cities, whilst the average viewer is just as happy watching their chosen film entertainment at home.

In 2019, it will once again be a very different cinema to the one we knew in 1999.