Need a good, nerdy movie marathon for year’s end? 2017 concluded with a surprisingly robust selection of enjoyable flicks in the Ars pantheon, which we consider a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, documentaries, genre pieces, and tech-specific fare. This year’s quality really only became apparent once I found myself enjoying putting this year-end list together. (Sometimes, these best-of pieces can be slogs. Not for 2017’s films.)
The following picks are not numbered or ranked, but the recommendations get better and better from bottom to top.
Starting with the cheese: xXx: Return of Xander Cage, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
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Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is riding a motorcycle to stop an evil connected device that can spy on you and control satellites and hold like half a petabyte of pirated music!
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This jacket is so big that it actually becomes sentient and starts speaking Wookiee at one point. There’s Deepika Padukone, whose character’s claim to fame is millions of YouTube views.
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Geeky Nina Dobrev is the team’s tech expert, but the only thing she can think about is Xander’s pecs.
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Greatest team ever of Deepika Padukone and Ruby Rose. I want to see the spinoff with just them shooting stuff and looking tough.
It’s hard to believe, but 2017 started with a thrilling, enjoyable surprise in the form of a new xXx film that was actually equal parts fun and clever. Ars editor-at-large Annalee Newitz and I vociferously agreed that Vin Diesel had possibly turned in his best “himbo” or “male Barbie” performance yet in a film that might have otherwise played out like a cheap, mindless entry in the Chinese-action-snoozer pantheon. From her January review:
“Jam-packed with fantastic character actors, full of ridiculously insane fight scenes, and centered on a functionally impossible piece of technology, xXx: Return of Xander Cage is everything you need from an action flick. There’s a thin scrim of a plot involving an evil laptop called Pandora’s Box, whose superpowers involve ‘spying on everybody,’ ‘controlling satellites,’ and injecting hostile poop emojis into Web sessions. Just kidding about that last bit. This movie does not know about Web sessions. But I’m not kidding about how Vin Diesel’s performance as ‘underground blogger’ Xander Cage is goofily badass, and the hijinks of his crew are equally fun.
“xXx: Return of Xander Cage is a delightful action flick with a heart of gold. There’s no complexity. The good guys are obviously going to win. Everybody in the diverse cast looks hot and tough. Characters express their feelings with lines like ‘that was fucking awesome!’ It’s the perfect weekend diversion for the middle of darkest winter.”
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Valerian and Laureline, seen here trying their best to imagine a romantic plotline that makes more sense than what they were given.
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I’d watch the shingouz characters in their own spin-off film, honestly. They’re everything in terms of sci-fi comic relief that Jar Jar wishes he was.
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A once-idyllic planet is destroyed, and its race of smooth-bodied aliens tries to survive.
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Once Valerian puts on an intergalactic headset, he finds his way to Big Market, which hosts the film’s most impressive special-effects sequence.
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The massive intergalactic space station known as “Alpha.”
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One of many alien species introduced in the film’s opening sequence. We never see most of them again.
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“Which button is the ‘make our romance believable’ button?”
Meanwhile, Valerian just barely crosses the threshold for deserving a year-end nod. This gorgeous, silly, wooden-acting burst through countless sci-fi clichés has a dumb beginning, some dumb parts in the middle, and a painfully dumb ending.
And yet! From my July review:
“Even with its issues, I still had a blast. I went into my Valerian screening hoping to get ‘Luc Besson sci-fi,’ with elaborate, beautifully illustrated sequences, tongue-in-cheek schlock, and a weirdly French skew on high-octane cinema. Those expectations were met. I laughed, cheered, and roared both at and with the film. Valerian comes packed with just enough Fifth Element flavor to make it worth a solid, low-expectations trip to the movie theater.
“Valerian plays out like Besson’s thank-you gift to the original comic series, which he (and many other sci-fi authors and filmmakers) have paid uncredited homage to for decades. His trippy, uncompromised vision takes enough chances to make this uneven film stand out above other ho-hum sci-fi, and I’ll take ambition and giant failures in my popcorn fare over paint-by-numbers action films any day of the week.”
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Flight Director Gene Kranz, naturally, is one of the central figures of the Mission Control movie.Mission Control Movie
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A shot of some of the Apollo flight directors walking to their consoles in the Apollo Mission Operations Control Room.Mission Control Movie
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One of several great images showing splashdown parties after successful missions. They were legendary.Mission Control Movie
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A great still image of Kraft from the movie.Mission Control Movie
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Kraft offering rare praise to the flight controllers after the successful Apollo 11 landing.Mission Control Movie
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A modern-day shot of the building that bears Kraft’s name.Mission Control Movie
Mission Control
Before Ars Technica’s expansive, comprehensive Apollo video series went live, the documentarians behind Mission Control brought together many of the Apollo program’s primary players to talk exhaustively about NASA’s most insane efforts. From Eric Berger’s April review:
“The 100-minute documentary is a fantastic way to relive the glory days of America’s space program through the eyes of those sitting behind the consoles, poring over data, and making difficult calls. One of the best aspects of the film is its homage to Chris Kraft, the nation’s first flight director, who used his experience in flight testing at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to conceive of, and develop plans for, tracking and controlling the flight of spacecraft into outer space. Kraft tells some of the story of mission control’s origin in his own words, saying that he became notorious for ‘saying what he thought.’
“The film excels in other ways, at least from my perspective as a space buff, space writer, and amateur space historian. It puts the spotlight on a group of men from varying backgrounds, many of them quite humble, and then shows the evolution of mission control from a basic operation into the complex organization that led to human landings on the Moon.”
Listing image by Disney
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1236651