Great things about 2016 - Part Two

Evening. I've had a lovely 2016, when I haven't been looking at the news. In part one of this review, I talked about a couple of lovely bands whose music has made the year better. Now, films.

Movies used to be a much bigger part of my life. It was my job to know about them, so I watched a lot more, read about them more, and generally cared more. For a number of years television has been slowly taking over as my medium of choice, and now my job has changed to teaching about video games, the time I put into film has diminished greatly.

So, this year I have not watched too much, and so I may have missed some wondrous examples of cinema. I certainly saw some real rubbish (Suicide Squad may be one of the worst two hours of my life). But we're not here to complain, we're here to be happy. So here are some of the films that made me glad in 2016.


The Girl With All The Gifts

It's hard to overstate how much I enjoyed this film. I watched it with a constant internal voice chirruping away, saying "This is great. This is great. This, Rob, is great."

What made me so happy? Lots of things. Plot and genre wise, we are in my comfort zone. This is kind of a zombie film, set in a dystopian near future. I like those kinds of films. TGWATG (as surely it must be called) is close in tone and subject matter to 28 Days Later and Children of Men - two films I hold in very high regard. I like to see stories of civilisation collapsing; I think they have a lot to say about the scarily thin threads that bind us all together, and how easily they can snap.

But it's not just a zombie film and it's not just miserable. In fact, my experience of the film can best be described as joyful. I loved the colours. The movement of the camera, hiding and revealing the world of the film with knowing elegance. The music - another atypical, asymmetrical score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who seems to be scoring a lot these days.

I loved the characters, especially the Girl herself - Melanie. Wide eyed, wonderful, unnerving and real. I loved the script, both for its convincing dialogue and its ruthless yet inventive plot logic.

I loved it because it is great cinema. Confident, startling film making that forged a truthful, beautiful, terrible world. At the end, I felt we had been given a message of hope. My viewing partner thought it was a message of despair. We were both right. Now that's a film.


Zootopia

Or Zootropolis, depending on where you live. A clever and funny animated film that works two jobs. On one level its an efficient, funny tale of cartoon animals making their way in a colourful and inventive world. On another level, it's a timely tale of how our world - our less colourful society of humans, where animals never get to wear hats - is becoming less human and less friendly by the day.

A remarkable achievement. Really funny, too.


Arrival

I didn't really want to see Arrival. It looked grey, and slow, and serious. And for the first third of the film I wasn't really having a great time. It was well made, and I had no objective issues with the way it was constructed as a piece of cinema. But I just wasn't feeling it, and it seemed cold and without emotion. And I was hungry. Why wasn't the film giving me a pizza?

Over the course of its running time, however, Arrival... changed. Its themes rose up, subtly and without me really noticing, fading quietly up in the mix and taking their place in the narrative. I realised that I wasn't just looking at Amy Adams' face any more, or wondering what kind of pizza I was going to have. I was being drawn into something quite amazing.

It's the kind of story you don't want spoiling, so I won't. Which isn't to say it hangs on some huge twist. It's to say that the experience of the film needs to grow as you watch it. Appropriately enough, for a film about language, the experience is one of slowly understanding what it is you are seeing and hearing. As the film progresses, you start to make sense of its vocabulary, and the things it's been saying all along become more clear.

It's a beautiful experience. And, like Zootopia, it feels made for our times. We are in a world where we talk to each other more easily than ever before, but rarely do we listen. Rarely do we even try to understand.


So there you go. Three excellent films. And that's me done for blogging this year. But don't worry - I'll be back, to tell you what video games I liked best, in the New Year. That's something to look forward to, isn't it?