The Matrix, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999

“Whoa.”

That’s what Neo said in 1999, at the doorstep of the new millennium and, perhaps more importantly for film, on the eve of a new decade. In 1999, the twin towers were still standing, New Orleans wasn’t underwater, and a Democrat had been in the White House for eight years. Even though there were rumblings of the future horrors of terrorism, the 90s were a decade tipsy off the bull politics of Reagan and the demise of the Soviet Union. It was certainly a decade of immense exuberance, if not hope. And at the end of it all, Neo, after escaping a world of bland office tyrannies and edgy nightclubs, took the red pill, floundered out of the matrix, and stepped into the blank space of virtual reality, and said, “We’ll need guns. Lots of guns.”

It’s hard not to see The Matrix as prophetic of things to come. Having been comfortably immune from the bloodshed in Africa, Europe, and Asia under the Clinton administration, in 2001 America was forced to wake up to the reality that some people wanted nothing more than to blow us up. It was a red pill, but perhaps not the one we would have chosen ourselves. Out of the wreckage emerged a Morpheus with a bullhorn, promising to wreak vengeance on these Agents of terror, who could slip out of our knowledge and crosshairs at will, seemingly invincible to traditional tactics. And then Morpheus turned out to be disillusioningly human – even less so, according to the cries outside his house. In 2008, America turned out in force to replace the bumbling warmonger with a political Messiah, “our own personal Jesus Christ.” The next decade may well define itself by whether this Neo can undo the damage before, or, like his predecessors, only disappoint.

The next 10 years of blockbusters seemed also to be encapsulated, spermatic, in 1999. Besides The Matrix, this was also the year of American Beauty and The Phantom Menace. Beauty contained a wryness, an introspection, and an uncompromised look at abnormality that would all continue in independent film over the next decade; The Matrix was a hybrid of shoot-’em-up and existential escapism held together with religious symbology, hinting at future experiments in either violence (Saw, No Country for Old Men, The Bourne Identity) or fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Benjamin Button, Avatar); and The Phantom Menace, which enjoyed a level of hype directly proportional to its later criticism, was a fitting precursor to future mindless special-effects movies, near-parodies of spectacle, such as Fantastic Four, Speed Racer, G.I. Joe, and most recently, the critically condemned Transformers franchise.

Inglourious Basterds, Universal Studios, 2009

“Watching Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies.”

The Matrix brought stylized violence to a new level in film, yet it was Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s tale of a dispossessed and enslaved Roman general, that set the trend of violent movies in the decade. After a harrowing fight in the Coliseum, for instance, involving various manifestations of bloodshed, including a charioteer’s bisection, the gladiator cooly informs the emperor who destroyed his family: “I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.” Gladiator, like Braveheart before it, received good press in conservative circles for its illustration of what it means to fight for what you believe; unfortunately, this sort of gung-ho, hawkish elevation of war ignored the revenge motif in both movies that made their heroes interesting characters but by no means role models.

Nor did the terrorist attacks a year later force a re-evaluation of the American approach to violence, but rather motivated Hollywood with a new revenge fantasy, and the guilt associated with it. The genius of the Bourne trilogy lay in its ability to create a nontraditional soldier – a professional American terrorist – whose methods could bring down both terrorist hitmen and agents of American overextension. It hurt all the right people with every resource not allowed regular soldiers, and in that manner it shared thematically with Jack Bauer’s efforts on 24.

Conservative pundits over the next several years were fond of crowing whenever a film critical of the war in Iraq floundered at the box office (Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss), while their liberal counterparts tried vigorously to whip up the kind of anti-war fervor that inspired so many great films based on Vietnam. The failure of these films was surely not due to overwhelming support for American action overseas; rather, what both conservative and liberal ideologues failed to understand was that Vietnam happened in a different country across the globe, but terrorism happened in our midst, which meant that, no matter one’s personal affiliation for or against President Bush, it was always going to be more cathartic to watch enemies of the state get blown to bits than to see their humanity redeemed and ours questioned – as happened, for example, in reality at Abu Ghraib.

No Country for Old Men, Miramax Films, 2007

There were other kinds of violence over the decade that were less obviously related to the war, yet still tapped into feelings of revenge and guilt – Casino Royale, in which terrorism was more global and less Muslim; There Will Be Blood, a drama showcasing a deeply violent soul; No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight, which both struggled with the containment of evil for evil’s sake; and Doubt, in which trust and decency were violated because of guilt. Violence has, of course, always been a dominant element in film and can’t be said to have suddenly appeared during this decade. Yet the approach to it, at once extravagant and personal, was in its own class.

The final word on violence of the last ten years was best said, fittingly, by Quentin Tarantino in his film Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino is no stranger to violence onscreen, directing the Kill Bill volumes and backing the Grindhouse double-feature. In Basterds, all coliseum-goers are on trial – not just the visible bloodthirsty Nazis, but we ourselves, the audience, who are invited to cheer at their bullet-riddled, dynamite-blasted, bat-disfigured demises. One particularly damning moment of the movie comes near the end, when Hitler and Goebbels laugh from a theater box as Allied soldiers are sniped one-by-one in the Nazi film “Nation’s Pride.” We know that there is a plot in place to bomb these German bastards, and so we smirk at what we know will be a fine old explosion, getting ready for some Nazis to get their collective ass kicked Indiana Jones-style – and for that, are not far removed from the Fuhrer’s own bloodlust. “This may be my masterpiece,” says Pitt in the end, clearly speaking for Tarantino. Insofar as he demands we pay closer attention to our cinematic violence, we can agree with him, for now.

Return of the King, New Line Cinema, 2003

“The ring is not safe here, Sam.”

Had Tarantino made a polemic about our obsession with violence in documentary fashion – something along the lines of Redacted or Sicko – he might have earned more philosophic praise but would almost certainly have created a lesser movie. Placing his basterds in the “realistic” context of WWII nevertheless allowed him to play with themes outside the bounds of actuality. In this sense, Inglourious Basterds is as much a fantasy film as Star Wars.

Fantasy has often provided a way to analyze, criticize, and clarify the problems of the present without resorting to familiar (and therefore oversaturated) terminology. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, along with MacDonald’s Phantastes, Lewis’ Narnia septology, and other efforts earlier in the 20th century, crafted several Western mythological systems into diverse stories capable of probing into truth, beauty, uncertainty, and evil. That field fell prey to so many copycats after Tolkien’s success that only science fiction, which could pull from ongoing research and discovery, continued the practice of asking pressing questions in alien territory.

It is perhaps, then, a form of genre revenge, a contrapasso of media, that it was the Jackson iteration of Lord of the Rings that reinvigorated fantasy environments in film, and not, as was expected, Lucas’ tastelessly hyperbolic CGI worlds or the similarly over-the-top and over-stylized action sequences of the latter Matrix films. Lord of the Rings defined the struggle of good and evil indubitably – there was no sympathy for Sauron or his satellites – and clearly, without incomprehensible plodding as showcased by the entrance of the Architect in, again, the latter Matrix films or Captain Jack Sparrow’s hallucinogenic adventures in the latter Pirates of the Caribbean films. Although, like the original books, the film was guilty of inspiring numerous cinematic copycats – the Narnia films, Eragon – it proved that fantasy was not the province of nerds or hippies any longer, but of serious filmmakers. Return of the King’s Oscar takeover in 2004 marked the return of fantasy.

Jackson won most visibly in this area, and deservedly so, but there were others during this decade whose work in fantasy augmented its potential. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, I & II, elevated the weird, tuberous, and colorful in a way not accessible via Tolkien’s Germanic, medieval motifs, while Terry Gilliam increased his offbeat portfolio with films such as The Brothers Grimm. The Harry Potter franchise moved from a shaky, sloppy debut to films that learned how to balance the sheer volume of material in each book against the limits of a few-hour block (thereby taking a page from Lord of the Rings, which accomplished this flawlessly over three movies). There was the comic-book fantasy, too, which deviated along one of two paths: the “hero” blockbuster, wherein a familiar icon such as Superman, Batman, the X-Men, or Spiderman was reinvented for the age of believable spectacle; or the “anti-hero” blockbuster that favored larger-than-life worlds of shadow, grit, and gore and of which 300, Sin City, and Watchmen are the best specimens.

Twilight, Summit Entertainment, 2008

Two movies were produced near the end of the decade that will certainly determine the shape of the fantasy genre over the next ten years. The first, Twilight, an adaptation of Stephanie Myer’s forbidden-love story between human and vampire, planted the angst-ridden image of Edward Cullen into numerous female hearts and as many product placements, completely reversing the model of Anne Rice, who told us that vampires are neither sparkly nor happy, but trapped by death into monstrous lusts and a frozen lifespan. At the end of the 90s, it was sexy to kill bloodsuckers (Blade), ; later, with Underworld and Twilight, it was sexier to be one. The lines of good and evil that had been marked by Lord of the Rings are no longer determinative of the fantasy genre – at least, not while something like vampirism is currently so attractive.

Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2009

The second movie was Avatar, James Cameron’s epic retelling of, well, other James Cameron epics. Moviegoers were invited to watch something breathtaking, the likes of which had never been possible onscreen before. On the big screen, yes – anyone who had played video games seriously in the last ten years was familiar with the kind of technology at work in Avatar; nor was the 3-D experience much more sophisticated than the Muppets theater at Disney World. Even the story was familiar, and not like a friendly and familiar face, but like that god-awful story your Uncle Merv tells at every family reunion: an ecological fairy-tale version of Pocahontas involving the same tired fight of pitiless industrialists versus free-born natives in tune with the planet. As a director, however, Cameron is unquestionably at the top of his game, seamlessly incorporating astounding visuals, a love story bound to appeal to countless female demographics, and fight sequences that make explosions fun to look at instead of, as in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, oppressive, confusing, and redundant. By doing so, he has, implicitly, issued a challenge to filmmakers everywhere: if I can make this kind of film out of this kind of story, I can do anything. What about you?

The Incredibles, Walt Disney Pictures, 2004

“If everyone’s super, no one will be.”

Ask anyone to name their top ten movies of the last decade, and you will probably hear, among the movies that are supposed to be great but are, in fact, neither much fun to watch nor that rewarding of contemplation (Crash, anyone?), one happy word: PIXAR. The company launched its feature-length animation canon with Toy Story in 1995, followed by A Bug’s Life in 1998 and Toy Story 2 in 1999. By that point, it had established a solid presence as a creator of excellent children’s films. Many reviewers found themselves, ecstatically, recommending the films for all ages; by the beginning of the 00s, a PIXAR film was sure to receive a blurb like “for the whole family” or “great fun for parents, too!”

Over the next decade, PIXAR did more than retain that reputation, which it did absolutely. More significantly, it showed that it could produce films that were not only great fun for everyone, but could be considered serious artistic endeavors. The pinnacle was Wall-E in 2008, which came close to achieving what only Beauty and the Beast has ever done: receiving an Oscar nomination as an animated film for Best Picture. Wall-E is not a “preachy” film, although it has been called so; it is instead a steady, curious, and sometimes sober reflection on the potential for consumerism and materialism to literally make us aliens from Earth. Some conservative reviewers criticized it for buying into myths of global warming and the green movement, little understanding that Wall-E is as much about what has already happened to American society as it is about what might happen after a Wal-Mart apocalypse: we are fat and bored now. Wall-E’s only innovation was to put us into orbit.

The tale of Wall-E and EVE managed to take the dreary visions of An Inconvenient Truth, I Am Legend, or 28 Days Later and re-make them for a younger audience – or rather, a more inclusive audience. So, too, The Incredibles made a fun and emotionally compelling superhero movie; Finding Nemo put a road trip and a father-and-son drama in a vibrant, beautiful ocean; Ratatouille showed children the joy of cooking; Up, the joys, and griefs, of growing old. Few production companies have given the last decade so various and so excellent an assembly of films. Fewer still, if any, can boast of also being an animation studio.

That caliber of entertainment demolishes the idea that what appeals to children must be insipid, simple, or banal, or that what makes great film is violent and dark. There is darkness in every PIXAR film, but as a shadow in a world of light, as something to be fought or redeemed, and never giving the last word.

Wall-E, Walt Disney Pictures, 2008

—

Looking back over the last decade, one is overcome by the amount, variety, and impact of films both foreign and domestic. So much could still, without question, be said about this decade: about Clint Eastwood’s streak of compelling dramas; about the blossoming subculture of independent film; about Slumdog Millionaire, The Last King of Scotland, A Beautiful Mind, The Departed; about Scorcese, Shyamalan (oh, how the mighty are fallen!), Howard, and Lynch; about Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck and Meryl Streep and Don Cheadle and a host of others. But while all these were significant and will certainly be remembered, they were, I think, less significant for the decade than the perfection (and abuse) of CGI, the rejuvenation of fantasy film, the elevation of violence, and the solitary shining star (or mere desk lamp) of PIXAR. The 00s were either a Saturnalia, excessive and violent, or saturnine: grim, honest, reserved, introspective, and above all, uncertain. It was a decade of revenge against the heedless optimism of the decade before. What it will mean to us in ten more years is a story yet to be plotted: a corpus of films yet to be directed, created, enjoyed, and remembered.

[This article was written with the invaluable assistance of Tobin Duby.]

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