Hindsight: A 2023 Cinematic Retrospective

Once again I force myself to watch films albeit mostly a year late. Here are my thoughts in order of release if you give a shit. I watched a lot more kids' movies from 2023 for some reason.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

This works better as an exercise in making a film feel like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign than it does as a "film" in its own right. It feels like it was meant to be a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque romp but the screenplay just isn't strong enough to make it work. It has some good sequences poking good natured fun at the mechanics of the tabletop game, how different player characters tend to operate, and so on, but the characters and the story themselves needed, in my view, to be more engaging and the comedy significantly tightened up.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

I don't really know what to say about this. The animation is good and my nephews loved it so it probably did its job. Like with the D&D movie I just don't feel like the story and character moments were as tight as they could be. That being said, it tells a surprisingly coherent narrative for a movie based on the Mario games of all things.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse

This is a decent follow-up to 2019's Into the Spider Verse, but not as strong as that original in my view. I found the gimmick of all the different Spider-People and Miles's conflict with Miguel to not be as strong as the first film's focus on Miles's growth and his friendship with the alternate Peter. Add to that the horror stories about what it was like for the animators and the sequel hook ending and it feels like a classic case of a sequel that tries to be way too big and loses what made the original special. Nonetheless I admire it from moving away from the typical superhero sequel trend of just having Spidey fight a different villain.

Asteroid City

"You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." I thought this was one of the better films from Wes Anderson in recent years, certainly better than The French Dispatch, and enjoyed its structure and use of framing devices. I'm not sure I can casually say what I thought it was about, but I found it moving nonetheless, at the very least in terms of how it represented a struggle for the meaning of things. It also looks great, as they always do, and has some very odd and amusing moments. One of my highlights of 2023.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Full review here. In further retrospect I simply think that James Mangold missed the point. There was just no need to make such a sombre reflection upon the Indiana Jones legacy, nor in such an overextended manner. He could easily have made a film that celebrated the character, using Harrison Ford's age as an opportunity, while doing something more than what he clearly saw as the shortcomings of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I'm surprised so many people thought this was good (or at least okay).

Barbie

Despite not watching this until 2024, I gave myself the proper Barbenheimer experience by watching this and Oppenheimer in the same day. It's clever and entertaining, and Robbie and Gosling are both very entertaining in it, but because it's ultimately a piece of promotion for a huge toy brand it feels very corporate and safe. It ultimately offers up a very milquetoast Western middle-class vision of feminism to avoid taking too many risks and because Barbie is ultimately just not that progressive of a product. It's telling that all the memes and stuff that came out of this ended up being about Ken, not Barbie herself, because she's not developed or focused on as well as she should have been and weirdly the man ends up being the more fleshed out character. Look, I'm an upper middle class straight white guy and obviously not the target audience for this, so maybe I missed something, but as decent as it was I think this played things too safe.

Oppenheimer

I was put off watching this for a long time because of its length, so ultimately I was astonished by how well paced and engaging it was for all of its three hours. Regardless of its historical accuracy, which I think is somewhat high but not complete, it's an extremely watchable study of a man who can't seem to actually get a grip of himself, his life and the consequences of his work: a man who got carried away on an intellectual level with something terribly destructive and then couldn't handle the guilt so he lapsed into self-pity and was torn between regret and the significance of his legacy, a man swayed by stronger personalities than his own. Well-shot, well acted especially by Cillian Murphy, and terrifically paced and structured.

Talk to Me

A decent but, in my opinion, overhyped Australian horror flick. I get what it was going for about how trauma and unresolved grief can lead people to destructive and self-destructive behaviours, but it just didn't quite carry me along with it. I thought at points it was a bit over written and stated the obvious at times, and occasionally felt a bit like two YouTube dudebros trying to make an Ari Aster movie. Still, it's well structured, is a fairly effective depiction of teenagers doing stupid things for fun that end up coming back to bite them, and the surreal ending sequence was way better than anything that came before it in the film.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Another of the kids' movies I saw, it had great art, a good soundtrack, and the turtles actually felt like teenagers; it felt like it did a really good job of exploring the "teenage" aspect of the characters, which I believe was the filmmakers' intention. Yes, the big fight with the giant Superfly is a bit boring, but that's for the kids rather than me. Overall I thought this was a really well made TMNT film and it's good to see that people can still make fun films with such a well-worn premise after all these years.

Killers of the Flower Moon

This was another one that didn't feel its runtime. Martin Scorcese's crime drama about the systematic murder and robbery of the Osage community for their oil rights by trusted members of the local white community is powerful and morbidly fascinating. It's obviously approaching it from a white guy's perspective, something Marty is keenly aware of with how he handles the ending and the film's focus on the perpetrators played by DiCaprio and DeNiro rather than the indigenous population, and while that's kind of a shame one can't help but feel that Scorcese didn't think that it was his story to tell. Regardless, it's a sad and disturbing, but also very engaging, representation of the atrocities of colonialism and how people got away with them.

Poor Things

This is yet another weird one; it's a well-made, well-acted and very odd movie, but it definitely feels like a man's somewhat misguided effort to make a feminist movie which ends up still feeling very male-oriented. Emma Stone and the rest of the cast are great and the bizarre Victorian sci-fi premise is used to excellent effect, with Stone playing a young woman whose brain was removed from her unborn body and placed into the body of her dead mother, if that makes sense. Supposedly the novel this adapts has a framing device in which Stone's character, Bella, reveals that this whole element was something her husband made up, which leads one to wonder why Lanthimos omitted it and played the story straight without this postmodern twist of the diegesis.

Napoleon 

Putting aside the historical accuracy, it's just not a very good film. Despite trying to focus on the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, it doesn't do a very good job of characterising either of them. They feel flat and their relationship underdeveloped. The title cards are condescendingly fatuous, for instance specifically pointing out that the losses at Waterloo occurred in "one day" when the same is true of most of the other battles listed at the same time. It feels as if Ridley Scott has contempt for his audience and thinks that if he doesn't spell things out then his audience won't get it, yet at the same time introduces characters and events so rapidly that nothing has any weight and no one scene feels important or even finished. Admittedly I only watched the theatrical cut, but I couldn't be bothered spending another 45 minutes of my life on the director's cut. The best thing about it is the costumes; even the battle scenes are comically small and just show men rushing at each other as all lazy Hollywood war scenes do. It feels like Scott didn't particularly care about the film, so one wonders why he bothered to make it. His first theatrical release, The Duellists (1977), is a vastly superior film about the Napoleonic era made with much less money.

The Zone of Interest

Another highlight of 2023, this depiction of the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family in their lavish home and pleasure garden abutting the walls of the camp is a powerful vision of the bureaucratic mindlessness and careerism upon which the industrialised genocide committed by the Nazis was built. A highlight is obviously the soundtrack and sound design, with the horrors of the camp only ever heard, rather than seen, while our eyes are on Höss's wife's bland pleasaunce under the barbed-wire-topped walls. Perhaps its most effective feature is its depiction of Höss as just this boring guy who cares more about his horse than his family and whose violent and deplorable deeds, such as sexual assault and ordering the drowning of an unruly prisoner, occur offscreen. Similarly, his wife Hedwig is a social climber only concerned about losing her nice house and garden if she has to move because of her husband's job; they don't care a thing or even spare a thought for the forced labour and mass murder taking place next door, Höss and his colleagues seeing the Hungarian deportations as nothing more than a series of administrative and logistical challenges in the same manner as any kind of big corporate project. It's a very effective and disturbing look at how little empathy and what misplaced priorities humans are capable of having, and the banal context in which monstrous acts are so often carried out. It's quite an effective complement to Killers of the Flower Moon, as both films depict the murder and robbery of oppressed peoples being committed by those driven by self-enrichment in a manner which either does not recognise the humanity of the victims or seems to not even register them as living beings at all.