You know the name of every Jedi on the Council, even that fish-faced one. If you hated this movie, if you rage all over the forums in despair over this “betrayal,” you’re a faker. Jason Parham Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) Frankenstein, injecting the genre with fresh nuance and ultimately showing that horror could be more than what we had come to expect. Get Out was more than a box-office success with the film, Peele became his own Dr. It was a social thriller high on racial paranoia but anchored in everyday dread. The film, like the best of the genre, bent toward reality. Only, the Armitages aren’t just any white liberal American family (or are they?!?)-they’re body-harvesting psychos who kidnap black people and sell them to the highest bidder. Girl invites guy to meet her family for the weekend. On its face, the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) is a simple one. With Get Out, Peele’s 2017 breakout vehicle, he all but revolutionized the conventions of horror, journeying deep into the twisted interior of our minds and projecting what many black people had long suspected but feared saying aloud: Some white people are fucking crazy. Jordan Peele wasn’t always a rising horror master-a nimble, stylish experimentalist able to fuse the frictions of the modern world (racial strife, class immobility) with genre touchstones (notice how he slickly remixed the final girl trope in Us). The resulting image gave us a new way to see ourselves. The beauty of the Barry Jenkins-directed feature, which went on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, is how it forsook any kind of neat remedy on identity, sexual orientation, or gender performance.
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The anguished triptych is an extraordinary study in distance: Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaching a terrified Little (Alex Hibbert) how to swim Chiron (Trevonte Rhodes) reuniting with Kevin (Andre Holland) in a Miami diner, transforming the eatery into an Eden of unspoken desire. Originally adapted from playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film is flush with scenes of tenderness that keenly measure the depths of belonging, vulnerability, and black male intimacy. In 2016, that shifted with the release of Moonlight, a queer black love story that went mainstream. The structures of Hollywood simply don’t allow for the same kind of cultural disruption, no matter how hard Netflix has tried to shatter that model. Comparatively, films could feel a little less exciting. It was unavoidable, mostly, given that the chief cultural engines of the 2010s were image-centric innovations: updates to the iPhone camera, Instagram, the permanence of surveillance culture, TikTok. Whether they worship Instagram influencers or consider themselves true digisexuals, many people are now truly in love with their computers, and that ardor shows no sign of fading. Jonze’s vision has, in the age of social media and artificial intelligence, come true. Rather than imbuing the story of a man literally falling in love with a computer with an aura of freakshow, Her is oddly sweet, sympathetic to Phoenix’s Theodore and Johannson’s “Samantha.” It’s that sympathy-or, really, empathy-that made it last this decade, and will likely make it last the next.
(Lookin’ at you, Ready Player One.) Spike Jonze’s strange romance, Her, starring Scarlett Johannson as an operating system and Joaquin Phoenix as a sensitive, heartbroken man in high-waisted pants, leaps over that pitfall with ease. When striving to be prescient, science fiction often becomes a twisted, myopic portrait of the present. A jittery drone and disquieting bass blasts (scandals, notifications, atrocities) slowly drown us out, until all that’s left are discordance, disunity, devolution. We the people are the lone piano, plinking nervously in the foreground, straining for a melody. "Hand Covers Bruise," the opening track, which underscores Mark Zuckerberg’s scampering between Harvard’s redbrick dorms with baleful foreshadowing, might as well be the soundtrack to the decade. All of that was topped off with an Academy Award-winning techno-industrial-horror score that launched Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as the decade’s composers of America’s anxieties ( Gone Girl, Bird Box, Watchmen). Aaron Sorkin’s best script, a dolphin-skin-smooth nightmare, and Jesse Eisenberg’s best performance, megalomaniacal paranoia at its most delicious, nailed (spiritually, if not entirely factually) Facebook’s slippery origins and presaged its assaults on privacy, democracy, and consciousness. “The movie,” as Facebook executives still indignantly call it, set the tone for the decade in both film and the tech metanarrative.
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