davidmann95:

Not for Superman or Batman – Affleck remains a well of untapped potential, and I need to see more of Cavill. In the movie itself, it goes for me Batman (a little overcorrected and lacking a complete arc) < Aquaman (I like his personality but I feel like they realized he wasn’t as fully-formed in here as the others and so threw in the lasso) < Flash (good gimmick overplayed, hopefully they’ll fine tune him) < Wonder Woman < Cyborg, with Superman being great but not especially functioning as a character aside from his scene with Lois.

So with this, all the comic book movies of this year have come out, so I can finally rank those (with the exception of Wilson, which I haven’t seen):

10. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: When I walked out of Justice League, one of my first thoughts was “neat, a year of all good comic movies!” But then I remembered this particular turd in the punch bowl – visually breathtaking, but a dead, limp, lifeless plot with insufferable non-characters that squanders Dane DeHaan’s considerable talents, as well as what I understand was highly regarded source material. Apparently making this was one of the great dreams of Luc Besson’s life, and if we weren’t collectively on the tail end of the second in a row of what the scientific community has formally classified “hell years”, that’d be one of the saddest things I’d have heard in this one.

9. Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Without the base of Mark Millar’s respectably entertaining original comic to work on and flying free beyond the premise of “what if James Bond had trained his cocky underprivileged nephew as his successor?”, this doesn’t attempt to pull together the stitches of a message it has, nor does undoing one of the central emotional moments of the original flick amount to much of anything, but it’s a fun, well-directed time nontheless.

8. Atomic Blonde: Our other spy-fi entry, this time on the more traditional end of brooding people muttering a little too quietly too be heard properly about too many names and conflicting entities to recall, with an endgame twist that doesn’t recontextualize the movie so much as render if that much more incomprehensible. But you know what? The point is that it’s a bunch of beautiful people in lovely or seedy places (or indeed lovely seedy places) whispering conspiratorially at each other – except MacAvoy’s unhinged deep-cover agent – interspersed with murdering and fucking each other in equally lovely ways, and on that front it entirely succeeds.

7. Thor: Ragnarok: Yeah, I’ll be the bad guy on this one. I dug the hell out of it, it’s hilarious and stylish and epic, but the actual *story* it tries to build between its comedy and action setpieces feels half-formed and ill-served.

6. Wonder Woman: I’m not quite as beaming on it as I was when it came out, but it’s still by far one of DC’s best efforts, with chemistry among its colorful leads and supporting players, a real sense of moral conviction, and the standout action sequence of the year. It would be higher if not for Paradise Island itself being presented as an agonizing black hole of tired exposition that swallows the first chunk of the movie whole, with it only truly getting going once Diana and Steve leave for man’s world.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: One of the most remarkable cinematic turnarounds I’ve ever seen, with the smirking, soulless, self-parodying trashbag mediocrity of its predecessor blown absolutely to hell by a follow-up that’s somehow stylish, funny, and weird as hell in all the best ways even though it’s by all the same people; while some characters don’t get their full due, it’s anchored by the central story of awful fathers and the scope of how bad they fail their kid, with Rocket trailing in its wake as he learns to be a little bit less of a dickhead.

4. Justice League: I know, I know, and if it wasn’t about characters I’m so predisposed to love I almost certainly wouldn’t put it this high, but it was and I did and I’ll stand by it. It’s exciting and satisfying and lean and tied together by a set of enjoyable characters arcs, somehow a perfect expression of the middlebrow popcorn sensibility this Snyder/Whedon hybrid freakshow ended up aiming for.

3. Spider-Man: Homecoming: Finally, a Spider-Man movie that’s both good and recognizably about Spider-Man. It’s awkward and quirky and silly and heavy in ways none of its MCU contemporaries were quite willing to get, and because of that it’s near the head of that lot as their biggest hero finally comes close to living up to his premise of feeling like the hero – who could be you!

2. The Lego Batman Movie: I never thought I’d see a kids film where a substantial part of the emotional core is Batman and Joker implicitly arguing about the boundaries and commitments of their open relationship, but that’s the world we’re living in. It’s the kind of parody that could only truly work for a character as embedded in the global cultural consciousness as Batman, playing off the popular understanding of him and bit by bit forcing that particular brand of unwittingly absurd avenger forever howling in the wind to grow up and become something like how Batman works at his best. It’s wild, and I absolutely loved it.

1. Logan: Some of if not the only real competition The Dark Knight has for title of absolute best superhero movie, this was absolutely next-level work on just about every level, and I’m honestly not sure that we’ll ever see the likes of it again, so unique and unlikely was its conception as a hard-R pseudo-post-apocalyptic depressing western character study with the guy with knife-fists; it’s a miracle that it worked at all, nevermind as well as any of these things ever have. It doesn’t seem to be kicking off a new wave of grim-and-gritty superhero shit – the catastrophic wake the DC movies have left behind them made that impossible – but I have to imagine this’ll have an influence, so here’s hoping it’ll be more of its contemporaries being willing to branch out into unconventional territory and commit with all they have the way this did.