Year in Review: Movies in 2019

This was a grotesque, weird year for movies. I personally think it all boils down to the nine-foot tall purple gorilla in the room: Avengers: Endgame came out this year (remember that movie?!?!?) and it overshadowed everything else before and after it. The rest of the year was, at best, a middling to average year for movies, with a vast number of serious duds in the mix.

So here are the high (and low) moments I noticed for 2019:

The MCU's Grand Finale Couldn't Be Beat

Avengers: Endgame dominated, so maybe other films knew they couldn't compete and dished out their subpar content instead? This argument doesn't really hold up; lots of movies this year clearly thought they had the chops to contend. No movie this year (not even Star Wars Rise of Skywalker) could possibly hold up to the 20-film long conclusion to the MCU juggernaut.

I think it is more likely that, outside of the sharp contrast of a monumental conclusion to a united film series in the final Avengers film, every other film this year suffered from a dearth of new content ideas; even the really good movies suffered from this simply by comparison; Shazam was great, but really just the Superman film we didn't get with Man of Steel. Terminator Dark Fate was an impressive film to the few people who saw it, but really just the Terminator 3 we wanted but didn't get back in the day. Spider-Man: Far From Home was proof a Marvel movie could be fun post-Endgame, but also still very much a continuation of the "let's fix Sony's horrible mistakes from the past" kind of movie.

The Duds Were Many And Prolific

Hollywood flooded the theaters this year with movies which couldn't hold a candle to the major blockbusters. If your movie wasn't a Disney film, then as a director, producer or distributor you were probably sweating in your boots this year. The list of distinct duds....movies which fell flat or failed to stand out in the crowd in a meaningful was way was shocking. In prior decades these were called "normal films," but today, anything lacking the clever polish of an MCU film when it comes to action blockbusters seems doomed to fail.

Examples I was subjected to (some I enjoyed, some not so much) were prolific: X-Men Dark Phoenix, Zombieland Double Tap, Hellboy, Men in Black International, Godzilla: King of the Monsters....all of these movies came out this year, and I ended up seeing them. Of these movies, each had something good, but some were grimly bad in weird ways. It could just be me; as I get older and more curmudgeonly (it's a horrible thing to feel your mind and body aging into something less pleasant, something which disdains fun in the conventional sense) but honestly....none of these films really "had it" regardless.

Streaming Got Complicated and Expensive

You can't just subscribe to Netflix anymore. Now you need to consider at minimum four or five streaming apps for your entertainment if you're serious about watching TV or have a family to entertain. It's annoying; we thought we were moving away from the cable companies, but in a sense we're right back where we started; too much money, spread too thin for the entertainment value.

I've personally continued to maintain my subscriptions to Netlix, DC Universe, Disney+, Shudder and Curiosity Stream....but five services is honestly too much for the actual amount of time spent watching TV in my "mostly gamer" house. 2-3 stations almost feels like too much! But such is the era we now live in.

Star Wars IX Ended an Era and The Mandalorian Started an Era

I've worked through my antipathy for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; I may post more (like I haven't enough already) but I've decided it was totally fine, even if it's plot and pacing sucked, in terms of a Star Wars film. I recalled having similar feelinsg of antipathy for Return of the Jedi when it came out; in 1983 the RotJ movie felt like something for my younger self from age 7-10, not my 12-13 year old self; I had moved on from Star Wars (at the time). Now, decades later, I realize I was prepared to go in expecting the movie to be bad; actively looking for it. That Abrams accomodated with lots of obnoxious plot and pacing issues was a coincidence; I could have overlooked many of those, as I had in all the other movies. Honestly....I suspect that, except for Revenge of the Sith (which I loved), I think I just experience burnout with Star Wars periodically and it just so happens the release of this movie coincides with that period of burnout.

But what about The Mandalorian, which itself kicks off an era of streaming films for Star Wars? I totally love it....but also probably because it feels so different from the latest movies; Mandalorian is a thing unto itself; something which manages to get back to an old version and style of Star Wars I had forgotten I loved so much.

Crap! Writing about Star Wars again. Okay....enough of this for now....will dig up my predictions from the beginning of the year next to analyze for accuracy (or lack therof).

The Avengers: Endgame Non Review

It hardly seems worth posting a review to a movie doing $1.2 billion in opening weekend box office totals, and likely will be seen by everyone on the planet. So rather than do that, I'll just make the following comments (possible SPOILERS ahead):

--If you want to get off the treadmill of Marvel movies, this is a good one to go out with. It neatly wraps up the last 21 movies into a nice, tight package. Sure, there are future stories, but honestly? I feel like this was a pretty good close to the first decade of Marvel films.

--Now that all the high-cost actors are out of the way for the most part, the movie quietly suggests the direction this future franchise can go with big name characters, even Iron Man (did you catch it?). The questions is....will anything post Robert Downy Jr/Chris Evans really be as fun? I bet the next Captain America movie will be amazing, but I'm not so sure about Iron Man. And Thor....hummm, well, I guess time will tell.

--The Marvel Cinematic Universe is definitely doing one thing boldly no comic universe has done before: it's sticking to real time in its own universe. This means, among other things, that the "roling timeline" of the comic universes does not apply here. In the comics, everything before the current issue happened in the last ten years, and everything in the future is malleable. In film, we have a universe that needs a replacement for guys like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers because they are aging in real time with the actors. Or dying, or retiring, or getting fat and out of shape....you get the point.

--The movie does jump forward five years. It's a weird notion, but it fits well with the "weird events happening to our characters/weird alternate future timelines" theme of many Marvel crossover events. Except this time it's permanent and is the new "now" for the MCU. This is weird. I was not expecting them to project a future in which we really do see all the key Avengers effectively out of commission for various strange reasons.

So....good film, good run, and good closure on ten+ years of interlinked films. I'd like to say I am excited to see what the next ten years will bring (and I am, for sure), but I am honestly just elated that I could stop now and feel like I'm actually at a point of closure. It will be weird seeing what the future holds, though....ten years of a future franchise carried by mostly B-List heroes, barring maybe Spider-Man and Black Panther, and the inevitable post Stark/post Rogers incarnations of the two top dogs in the Marvelverse is going to be interesting. Maybe.