Top Six Best Movies of 2016

Honorable mentions go out to Suicide Squad for managing despite massive studio interference to somehow make a better superhero movie than Captain America: Civil War and a better ensemble action movie than all three Expendables films, but all in all, it moved a bit too fast to earn itself a spot on this list. I'd also like to give a shout-out to Finding Dory, while it was a damn good movie, it still wasn't The Incredibles 2. Jason Bourne was also pretty good, having less shaky-cam in it than the last canonical Bourne movie, but it wasn't quite as enthralling as it possibly could have been. Warcraft also gets a nod because it had a lot of potential and pretty visuals, all of which were ultimately wasted on a mediocre fantasy movie.

#6: X-Men Apocalypse
Coming out later in the same month as Captain America: Civil War was the best thing that could have happened to X-Men Apocalypse. After seeing my favorite superhero destroyed I was in the mood for some classic, animated-series-style X-Men, and boy did they deliver. While not being a perfect adaptation of the Apocalypse storyline from the comics, this film was at least thematically similar and felt like the Apocalypse storyline, which is saying something considering what Tom Rothman and Brett Ratner did to the Dark Phoenix Saga. Apocalypse actually feels like the ancient mutant monster he's supposed to be, and above all, this feels like an X-Men movie more than it feels like a muddled fever-dream put together by someone who had only ever vaguely heard of the X-Men and the storyline concepts from people on the street.

#5: Doctor Strange
After the disaster that was Captain America: Civil War, and the complete mess that was the 2016 Marvel television lineup, I wasn't expecting Doctor Strange to turn out as good as it did. In a lot of ways, this movie was the Ant-Man of 2016, an unexpectedly good movie that followed on from a bafflingly bad Marvel crossover film. Benedict Cumberbatch dominates this role like he does any other, and his American accent never once slips or sounds unnatural. I think that this movie might be one of the few classic origin-stories we've seen in recent years, all the while being far better at telling its story than almost every other equivalent it had in the early 2000's. In a lot of ways, this movie reminds me a lot of films of the 1970's and 80's, films like Commando, Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Rocky, Alien, Star Wars, and Kickboxer. They start, they introduce the heroes, the villains, the driving conflict of the plot, the hero does whatever they need to to prepare, the heroes and villains face off, then they face off again in the climax. Simple, to the point, paced out perfectly, and creates a satisfying conclusion. Hardly any films do that these days, most of the time they either spend way too much time on minutiae (Ghostbusters: Answer The Call) or speed past all the relevant details for meaningless action (The Expendables)

#4: Deadpool
2016 was a hell of a year to not be a mainline Marvel film. Marvel Studios only managed to produce one good movie based on their properties, while Fox managed to produce two. Deadpool is a character Fox never wanted to make a movie out of, but thanks to fan demand and some leaked test footage, he finally got his own film. Sections of the film were reportedly shot without permission from the studio, and the filmmakers managed to work around a smaller budget to create a damn great movie. Here's hoping that when Deadpool 2 comes along it manages to top this movie in every way.

#3: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
I was somewhat cautious about Rogue One going into it. I thought it might just be a soulless cash-in Disney was making to wring every bit of money they could out of the Star Wars universe, but it actually did the impossible by making A New Hope, one of the greatest films ever made, into a better movie. I was stunned by the storytelling, the effects, and the continuity between it and the original Star Wars. They managed to resurrect dead actors and make old ones look young again, all through incredible use of CGI that would make George Lucas weep. Rogue One is not just one of the best Star Wars movies ever made, but an example of how to do a prequel right. It might even be higher on the list if they'd managed to get a good take of Darth Vader's lines, and hadn't criminally underutilized Mads Mikkelsen.

#2: Star Trek Beyond
When I first watched this film, I was awestruck. This was one of a very few movies that I've watched that I immediately thought "This is a Best Picture contender." By the end of the movie I was convinced that this would be in my top five (now six) at the end of the year. Star Trek Beyond is the best of the three Star Trek reboot movies, not that the previous ones weren't pretty damn good too, but that this was a cut above the rest. Star Trek Beyond is easily the best Trek film since First Contact, and I don't say that lightly. Not only does it feel a lot like a Star Trek movie, it also feels like it could be a giant episode of the TV series, which for once isn't a negative aspect of the film.

#1: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition
Speaking of being a good year to not be a Marvel Studios film, I looked back hard. I watched a lot of movies from 2016 to try and populate this list, but not a single one of them compared to the sheer stature of Dawn of Justice. I debated whether I wanted to make Star Trek Beyond my best movie of 2016 or this, but in the end, BvS won out. With hidden depths and allegories requiring multiple viewings to fully comprehend, even with everything it had working against it in terms of studio interference and blatant critical bias, this was almost certainly the single greatest film of the year. The performances of everyone involved greatly impressed me, the score from Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL is stupendous, the writing and pacing is supurb, and Zack Snyder's direction manages to set new standards for filmmaking that I don't think will be able to be topped for a long time.




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