Perhaps it’s a little too early for me to speak so boldly on this topic, but 2022 was far-and-away the most formative year of my entire life so far, something that movies played no small part in. This was the year that I really discovered my taste in film, beyond the circle of stuff like Pulp Fiction or The Shining that everybody kind of likes anyways. A Sam Raimi binge fine-tuned my brain to horror films– a genre I had previously written off as not-my-thing, now one of my absolute favorites. I’ve begun to crack the pre-1980s bubble that had long eluded me, which opened my eyes to an entire new galaxy of movies. But what’s most relevant to anybody reading this article: 2022 is the year that I set up camp and became a movie theater goblin. I visited the movie theater 72 times in 2022, finishing the year having watched more than 60 2022 releases, a fair increase from having only seen 20 films in theaters the year before (granted, COVID was a much greater obstacle in the way of theatrical releases in 2021 than it is today). I will disclaim that my viewing habits are strongly dominated by American films, as I only have reliable access to Regal/AMC theaters– i.e., not arthouse. As such, the international presence on this “best of the best” list is more than likely underrepresenting the fantastic movies that are produced overseas– I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t get the chance to see them. But with that aside, here are my favorite films of 2022.
Honorable Mentions:
Barbarian (dir. Zach Cregger) – Watching Barbarian on an unusually packed opening night was one of the most exhilarating theatrical experiences of my life. Cregger’s comedy-horror debut demonstrates an astonishing understanding of screen tension without excessively crutching on loud jump scares, as most studio horror films have devolved to over the years. Barbarian is an unpredictable rollercoaster ride of weirdness; if Cregger continues to create horror films of this caliber, he will easily become this generation’s Wes Craven/Sam Raimi. Instant Halloween movie classic.
EO (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski) – Absurdly esoteric (in a good way), Skolimowski’s film about a circus donkey aimlessly roaming the countryside of Poland is far from being the most traditionally exciting film released this year, but its top-of-the-line cinematography by Michal Dymek and score by Paweł Mykietyn elevate the material into a rare audiovisual experience that deeply mesmerized me. I couldn’t tell you a thing about EO‘s themes or its story, but I can say with certainty that landscape drone photography and donkey silhouettes go unbelievably hard. The premise of “silent donkey protagonist” got me into the theater, and I would be lying if I said that EO doesn’t deliver.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. Rian Johnson) – Benoit Blanc’s on-screen return may very well be the single greatest cinematic moment of 2022. Johnson made an all-time great whodunnit film in Knives Out, and then somehow immediately proceeded to make a sequel of equal quality. Another all-time favorite theater experience, Rian Johnson is very quickly establishing himself as a master of playing crowds. I am more invested in the future of Benoit Blanc than any superhero universe.
L’Événement/Happening (dir. Audrey Diwan) – Chronicling a young college student’s journey to obtain an abortion in 1960s France, Diwan’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s Happening was easily my most challenging watch in 2022, theaters or not. Depicts pregnancy through the lens of a pseudo psychological horror, its protagonist experiences a saddening loss of her humanity as she unwillingly transitions from an individual into a prop of her society. Miserable & aggravating in all the right ways, Diwan’s film is an astounding exercise of empathy in a world that seems to be going increasingly without.
The Worst Person in the World (dir. Joachim Trier) –The Worst Person in the World is easily the most profoundly written film I’ve watched all year, tackling the feelings of being young and directionless in the modern world. I watched this at a time where I was on the precipice of adulthood, not even knowing if I’d be in college a year from then. Most of Julie’s dialogue felt as if it had been extracted from my own internal monologue, and needless to say, it touched me deeply. The only thing keeping this movie from being at the very top of this list is that it’s technically not a 2022 release– I just didn’t get a chance to see it until much later than the rest of the world. Regardless, I feel it deserves an honorable mention for being one of my favorite films ever, no matter what year it belongs to.
10. Terrifier 2 dir. Damien Leone
Am I destroying my own credibility as a critic by ranking a low-budget trash-‘n’-slash splatter horror as one of 2022’s greatest films? Perhaps. But when viewed within the context of its own genre, Terrifier 2 is wildly close to being total genre perfection. Independently financed, Terrifier 2 is unrestrained by the limits of studio horror, which enabled Leone to go completely off the rails with his maximalist gore and special effects work. Unabashedly self-indulgent in every conceivable way, Terrifier 2 doesn’t play well for everybody, but there’s something elusively charismatic about the film’s refusal to be anything less than itself. As a sequel to Terrifier, it’s noteworthy how much Leone has improved as a writer/director between the two films, making Terrifier 2 one of the biggest horror sequel glow-ups since Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. Listening to the criticisms of his first film, Leone has discarded the ugly fecal-splattered dungeons, the nonexistent special-effects-reel plot, and paper-thin characters, replacing them with a vibrant autumn aesthetic, a decent storyline, and characters worth investing in.
Terrifier 2 is Damien Leone’s ode to trashy, over-the-top slasher sequels, and in the process he has created a film that is the trashy over-the-top slasher sequel. Leone homages the rapid deterioration of the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises by shoving 10 films worth of sequel brainrot into one package. Unexplained resurrections, evil child sidekicks, mystical prophecies, killer nightmares, you name it. Leone has overloaded the film with gimmicks, but it’s all in service of entertainment. And man, oh man, is Terrifier 2 entertaining. The behind-the-scenes featurette that played after the screening firmly reinstated in my mind that gore effects are a legitimate artform, and if that’s the case, Damien Leone is this generation’s Jackson Pollock. Terrifier 2 pushes the gore to its absolute limit, delivering some of the gnarliest kills ever put to screen. But unlike its predecessor, Terrifier 2 isn’t an exercise in cinematic misery due to Leone’s addition of jet-black comedy. Terrifier 2 is at its best not when Art the Clown is ripping limbs in half, but when Leone gives David Howard Thornton time to commit to the villain’s ridiculous vaudeville mime antics. Thornton is an actor who always works leagues above his paygrade, and it’s here that he’s solidified himself as the best performer in the slasher genre since Robert Englund hung up his sweater as Freddy Krueger. The film dedicates a lot of time to showing Art the Clown doing mundane things, such as doing his laundry, or losing his wallet inside a local Spirit Halloween; Thornton’s comedic physicality elevates these mildly amusing comedic bits into some of the funniest comedy scenes of the year.
Overall, Terrifier 2 is the movie for the slasher fans who think they’ve seen it all. It’s already gained prestigious status as an “endurance test” film amongst horror fans, and it’s a movie that people will be revisiting for a long, long time. Needless to say, Terrifier 2 is objectively the greatest Art (The Clown) film of the year. To all who enjoy gut-churning horror: check it out!
9. Pearl dir. Ti West
For those who aren’t aware, Pearl is a prequel to Ti West’s X, which was released only 6 months before. While X‘s production was halted by the pandemic, Ti West and Mia Goth got bored and wrote a prequel story about the film’s killer old lady. To be frank, I didn’t enjoy X very much when it came out, and Pearl, the aforementioned “killer old lady” was largely the reason why. A transformative performance from Mia Goth for sure, but otherwise Pearl was a shallow character in a story that demanded her to be tragic and complex.
Keyword: WAS.
Pearl accomplishes something that few prequels succeed in, as its existence retroactively elevates X from a by-the-numbers porno slasher into the first chapter of a genuinely interesting saga about age, the performance industry, and its trans-generational abuse and exploitation of female performers. Both X and Pearl hold their own as standalone films, but the subtext each one bestows upon the other is insurmountable, making for some of the most rewarding second watch experiences I’ve had this year.
Pearl has the exterior of a technicolor wonderland, capturing the essence of a live-action Disney princess movie better than the actual live-action Disney princess movies. The film is a modern-day Cinderella, the narrative setup being that of a rags-to-riches origin story as its protagonist longs to see the world beyond her family’s small Texas farm. Pearl’s quest for stardom is exciting to follow, but ultimately lamp shaded by the certainty that no matter what she does, she will be trapped on that farm for the rest of her life. Watching Pearl’s slow and inevitable loss in her race against time is compelling character drama, far superseding anything X had to offer. Semi-ironically, although Pearl will never be a star, Mia Goth came out of this film a Bonafide supernova. Goth nails every moment of Pearl‘s final 15 minutes, delivering the best monologue of the year and then proceeding to participate in one of my favorite credits sequences of all time. I literally watched this movie a second time just so I could see the credits again. They are that good.
As of writing, West & Goth are still collaborating on the script for MaXXXine, which is one of my most anticipated releases right now. After watching X, I never would have guessed how invested I would be in the finale to Ti West’s strange and unexpected trilogy. I guess Pearl really did have some X-factor after all.
8. The Fabelmans dir. Steven Spielberg
It’s fascinating how different a movie can become the more you choose to revisit it in your mind. On a first watch, The Fabelmans is exactly what it appears to be: an ingeniously made semi-autobiographical drama from Steven Spielberg– the world’s most sentimental filmmaker making his most inherently sentimental film ever. The movie follows every expectation and narrative beat one would expect, and then Spielberg drops the hallway scene picture above, which subverts the meaning of not just The Fabelmans, but every single movie Spielberg has made in his 50+ year career. It’s a direct confession from Spielberg that movies are a manipulative artform, his obsessive passion for film a symptom of his lifelong desperation for agency in a world that gave him none. He makes movies because they allow him a facet to control the world according to his image. He clearly sees manipulative filmmaking as unhealthy behavior on his part, which reframes the entire movie in a different light once it’s over. Because The Fabelmans is quite literally Spielberg manipulating the events of his entire life in such a way that he is the main character of the universe. His friends and family have all been reanimated as Oscar-caliber actors– no longer people, but storytelling objects designed to elevate the narrative of Steven Spielberg. It starts to become suspect how the film’s most powerful moments are of Spielberg’s childhood bullies getting their comeuppance, or his parents giving him positive affirmation that he’s made the right choices in his life. He’s hiding behind the paper-thin guise of fiction just so he can hear his mom say “I love you” one last time, and he knows it. But he can’t stop. As Judd Hirsch’s Uncle Boris says in the movie: Spielberg is a junkie, and art is his drug. It’s not often you see a director create an intensive psychoanalysis of themselves on the big screen. Is The Fabelmans obscenely self-absorbed? Absolutely. And that’s what makes it great.
But that’s not why The Fabelmans is actually on this list. It’s on here because a Seth Rogen performance got me to cry in the movie theater. Twice. If that isn’t proof that Steven Spielberg is one of the GOAT directors, I don’t know what is.
7. Babylon dir. Damien Chazelle
It breaks my heart to see Babylon‘s critical and financial failure, as general audiences have aligned the film with snooty, pretentious Oscarbait– as if a movie that opens with a massive pile of elephant crap was ever really gunning to appeal to notoriously conservative Academy voters. If anything, the ethos of Damien Chazelle’s latest movie is more aligned with its protagonist Nellie LaRoy: a crass, bold showstopper in an industry that has an ever-growing resentment for the bold or the controversial. Babylon‘s failure has turned it into a meta-commentary on itself, making Nellie LaRoy and Jack Conrad’s career downfalls seem oddly prescient. Dropping right in the midst of Hollywood’s latest identity crisis, Chazelle counters the widely held fear that cinema is dying by reminding us that it’s been “dying” for 100 years and will probably die for several hundred more.
Babylon forms an interesting sort of informal trilogy with Chazelle’s Whiplash and La La Land, as every film tackles the personal toll of art and legacy from three wildly unique angles. Chazelle’s persistent obsession with these topics is starting to grate for many, but Babylon‘s love-it-or-hate-it ending seems to solidify that the man has finally found his answer. That answer being: “I made La La Land and Whiplash, I think my legacy will be okay.” Even as I’m writing this, I’ve still yet to decide if the ending is hokey, genius, or both, but its greater idea that all art is fundamentally intertwined is one that I’ve found to be endlessly fascinating. In a climate where a movie’s value is placed in its potential for box office billions, it’s intriguing to watch a director make a film so predetermined to flop, yet so confident that it’ll be remembered as a classic on-par with its inspirations: Boogie Nights, Singin’ in the Rain and James Cameron’s Avatar.
But what really cemented Babylon‘s position on this list is its soundtrack, brilliantly composed by Justin Hurwitz. Hurwitz’ music has been a constant highlight throughout Chazelle’s directorial career, and I would argue the score for Babylon is his greatest, and most ambitious work yet– yes, better than La La Land. Hurwitz’ expansive use of character themes and leitmotifs forms the beating heart of Babylon, revisiting concepts and emotions as they evolve across Babylon‘s epic 3-hour narrative. The way the music dynamically grows alongside its characters reminded me of Ennio Morricone’s work on Once Upon a Time in America, which I consider to be one of all-time great film scores. I’ve listened to Babylon’s soundtrack countless times since its release, easily my favorite of the year.
6. The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers)
Coming off of two instant cult classic films: The Witch and The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers earned the opportunity to produce his first big-budget studio blockbuster: The Northman. The film has the characteristic energy of a creative madman like Eggers being given free rein to do whatever he wants for both the first and final time, an ultra-ambitious swing for the fences that is rarely seen in the current Hollywood ecosystem.
Robert Eggers’ three movies are all wildly distinct from one another, but if there’s one unifying trait between all of them, it is his sublime ability to create and develop atmosphere. From the opening shot of The Northman, Eggers creates a world unlike anything put on the big screen before. I don’t think a movie has ever immersed me in its environment as fast as Eggers did with The Northman. From there, Eggers takes us on a brutal and deceptively complex journey disguised as a barebones revenge story, as Alexander Skarsgård’s brutish Amleth seeks to avenge his parents and haunt his traitorous uncle. It’s astounding how this was Eggers’ first time directing an “action” movie, as he demonstrates a defter understanding of how to film action than the vast majority of action directors working in the industry today. The Northman is a phenomenal balancing act between legitimately awesome violent spectacle and a critique of toxic-masculine revenge stories, with Eggers reminding us every step of the way how futile Amleth’s rage truly is. The brilliant anticlimactic ending is probably the only factor that prevented The Northman from becoming a runaway blockbuster hit, but regardless, it was exciting to see a blockbuster this size take so many bold risks.
Thankfully, Eggers is continuing to collaborate with Focus Features and the Skarsgård family, currently working on a reboot of Nosferatu. As much as I loved The Northman, it’ll be exciting to see Eggers return to his horror roots with the knowledge of the studio system he gained from working on that film. Nosferatu is still a long way’s away, but I eagerly await Eggers’ return to the big screen after The Northman cemented his position as one of America’s most ambitious auteurs.
5. The Banshees of Inisherin dir. Martin McDonagh
The Banshees of Inisherin is just an all-around solid film, mesmerizing me in such a way that I find elusive to describe. Its four main characters are all brilliantly written and performed, just about every awards show has conglomerated itself around Farrell, Gleeson & Condon, and rightfully so. The acclaim for Colin Farrell in particular has been a major triumph, his success proving that there’s so much more to a quality performance than its actor’s ability to scream, yell and/or ugly-cry. The Banshees of Inisherin is the quietest film on this list, but it’s by far the most emotionally resonant. Its narrative thoughtfully taps into how it feels to be on either side of a failing friendship. The first half of the movie tackles this subject deftly, as Farrell’s Pádraic goes on a pitifully fruitless chase to make amends with his oldest (and only) friend, and his rapid spiral into depression as he fails to cope with the possibility that he’s a “dull” person. From there, a meaningless and petty quarrel between two men expands to have island-wide consequences, as the small town of Inisherin is painted with their hatred. McDonagh uses this conflict as an allegory for the divides that have long ravaged Irish culture and the suffering that is wrought when two parties find themselves unable to leave each other alone.
Of all the awards-season darlings, The Banshees of Inisherin is head-and-shoulders above the rest, in my opinion. It’s not the type of movie that I usually go around recommending to people, but it’s just that good. It deserves every word of acclaim that it’s earned these past few months.
My full review for The Banshees of Inisherin can be read here.
4. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio dir. Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson
Pinocchio marks the point in this list where I’ll no longer be writing about my favorite films of 2022, but some of my favorite films period. Guillermo del Toro’s spin on the fairytale classic was a passion project of over 15 years, and the final product reflects that in just about every conceivable way. del Toro views the Pinocchio character under his signature monster movie lens, which results in a story that’s almost equally an adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein as much as it is an adaptation of Collodi’s original Pinocchio novel. He’s on the record saying that both novels are the key influences behind his filmmaking career, and the thematic fusion of the two classics is naturally compelling. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio strikes the magical middle-ground between being a light-hearted children’s story and an emotionally heavy anti-fascist war movie, two things that absolutely should not be able to mesh together, yet somehow combine seamlessly in the context of del Toro’s vision. Tied together with a great soundtrack and some of the finest stop-motion animation ever put on screen, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is one of the year’s most immaculately crafted films.
My full review for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio can be read here.
3. The Batman dir. Matt Reeves
Every time the trailer for a new superhero movie drops, it never takes long before I encounter someone online who says: “this looks just a comic book!”, which almost always reads as a disappointingly superficial understanding of the medium’s infinite potential. The comic book “look” is far-too-often reduced to the iconic trope of the “double-splash page”– the visual hodgepodge of dozens of ultra-colorful costumed characters jumping at one another in a grand display of spectacle. Marvel in particular has begun to coast along on the idea that comic book “faithfulness” extends only to its ability to replicate these epic double-splash moments, all while gutting the thematic potency of the source material. What makes The Batman so special lies in Greig Fraser’s cinematography– he understands the panel-by-panel grammar of the superhero comic and has effectively translated it to the cinematic medium. The Batman truly feels reminiscent of the character-defining art of Frank Miller, Tim Sale, etc., beyond just copying the obvious iconography and calling it a day. Every major player in the film’s story cuts a powerful silhouette, instantly recognizable from any distance. Reeves constantly shifts focus from intimate close-ups to breathtaking, shadowy wide shots– undoubtedly inspired by noir films, but also accurately homaging the necessity of simplistic silhouettes in a medium that requires artists to output 30 pages of artwork every 30 days. Thanks to Fraser, The Batman is one of the most visually stunning films in the history of the superhero genre, deserving of its gargantuan blockbuster budget.
In terms of story, The Batman is above-and-beyond my favorite Batman movie, as Reeves actually seeks to critique the mythos of the character and the idea of the costumed vigilante to begin with. As much as I love Batman, the conceit of a billionaire hoarding military technologies, collaborating with the police, and violently pursuing “criminals” (really just anybody with “radical” ideology) has become discomforting in light of modern America. With his Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan went all-in on the idea of the militaristic power fantasy– to successfully defeat the bad guys, Batman has to invest more money into his military-grade arsenal, he has to dedicate more resources to help Gotham’s underserved police department, and he has to convert Gotham into a surveillance state to counter the threat of radical anarchism. Zack Snyder’s vision of Batman pushed him even further into becoming the incarnate of Bush-era politics (although, to Snyder’s credit, Batman is far from being portrayed as a moral paragon in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). Batman has become an icon of conservative American politics, and Reeves’ The Batman is the movie that finally dares to step up and shatter the character’s modern ethos. After The Dark Knight, it feels so refreshing to see a Batman movie that concludes with the idea that Bruce Wayne’s caped crusade for justice is morally hollow, that promises his growth as a character to pledge more to his community than just his weapons, constructively helping the people of Gotham instead of hunting them as criminals. It feels significant that the film ends with Gotham in the very 9/11-esque ruin that Nolan and Snyder’s Batmen feared, only this time Bruce is shown helping his community instead of stepping up as its brooding avenger.
Robert Pattinson is excellent in this movie, putting aside the usual A-lister ego and spending the vast majority of The Batman behind a mask, arguably its boldest creative decision. It fully commits to the idea that Batman is the primary alter-ego, and that “Bruce Wayne” is his disguise. Batman’s highest form of tech in this movie are his eye contacts that double as camera lenses, and Pattinson’s physicality reflects the character’s use of this tech beautifully. He moves as a passive presence throughout every scene, his eyes cold and robotic, absorbing as much information as he can, yet completely detached from the situation at hand. Batman’s borderline-nonexistent personality makes him the perfect complement to the vibrant ensemble of characters he encounters throughout the film. I could write a full paragraph each about Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, John Turturro, and twenty about Colin Farrell’s Penguin, but this mini-review is pushing its limit as it is. Needless to say, The Batman has a top-tier cast of actors, and every one of them gets their moment to shine.
Also worth noting that Michael Giacchino delivers some of his career-best work in this movie– no small feat by any means! I usually try not to judge movies for their marketing, but WB made the right call by heavily using Giacchino’s Batman theme in all of its promotion. It’s not often that a movie’s soundtrack becomes iconic almost an entire year before it drops.
I recognize that I’m an outlier when I say that I didn’t think there was a single truly excellent Batman movie before 2022, but The Batman is head-and-shoulders the best film in the history of the franchise as far as I’m concerned. Reeves has perfectly distilled the essence of the character’s 80-year history and applied it to the lens of a (relatively) lower-stakes noir thriller. A breath of fresh air in a sea of superhero movies, The Batman is everything the genre should aspire to be, unless they wanna be like Spider-Verse. That works for me too.
You can read Spencer Malmberg’s review of The Batman here.
2. RRR dir. S.S. Rajamouli
To fully grasp the magnitude of RRR‘s greatness, one must understand just how much it accomplishes with its budget. With a reported budget of $70 million dollars– the most expensive Indian movie ever made– RRR cost $5 million less to produce than a low-end Hollywood action blockbuster like Morbius. Despite having roughly the same budget as Morbius, RRR is spectacularly larger in scale, has infinitely more exhilarating action sequences and vastly more innovative use of VFX. S.S. Rajamouli has slowly built a reputation over the past decade as the king of Indian blockbusters, with RRR finally being his big break into worldwide recognition as it became 2022’s dark horse cult hit.
RRR does everything a movie can possibly aspire to be, and does it all brilliantly. But while you’ll generally hear that RRR is great because of its rambunctious action setpieces and high-octane dance sequences, what really makes RRR soar is its classical epic structure and approach to character drama. The world of RRR is one of emphasized dramatic hyperbole, a heightened version of reality where everything exists in its most superlative form. Based on the alternative history hypothesis of what would have happened if two of India’s most respected revolutionaries (Alluri Sitarama Raju & Komaram Bheem) had encountered one another in their respective crusades against British imperialism, Rajamouli elevates these two men into Gods, the avatars of an entire nation’s rage against their oppressors. The righteous anti-imperialist justice of RRR is so unbelievably satisfying even from an American perspective, I can only imagine how well the film resonates with Indian viewers.
Sometimes it’s hard to parse within the RRR discourse if the universal acclaim for it is genuine– a film this exaggerated invites equally exaggerated praise. But make no mistake, when I say that RRR is one of the finest action movies of the past decade, maybe even all time? I mean it. This movie really opened me up to other Indian-produced action films, and thanks to Rajamouli these movies will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. That’s the power of inteRRRnational cinema, baby!
1. Avatar: The Way of Water dir. James Cameron
The journey to Avatar: The Way of Water‘s release has been the single most fascinating cinematic buildup of my entire life. The original Avatar came out when I was barely even 6 years old, and in the 13 years since I had grown apathetic to the film due to the nefarious influence of social media. I was successfully manipulated into believing that Avatar was anything less than the most spectacular blockbuster of all time, just because Jake Sully didn’t have a Funko Pop, Neytiri doesn’t have any memetic lines, and because I’d never seen anybody tattoo the likeness of Colonel Miles Quaritch onto their thigh. But there’s a certain point where one must realize that none of these things contribute to what makes a movie truly great. If memes made a movie great, you would be seeing Morbius in the #1 position on this list right now. Yeah, no. What makes Avatar great rests in its ability to dazzle its viewer, to completely transport them into another mental state of being, to immerse them in a world unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. From the very first second of Avatar: The Way of Water‘s first teaser, I instantly understood that I had been taking this series for granted. James Cameron is our last blockbuster auteur remaining, and he’s the only one left who cares about pushing the cinematic medium to its absolute limit– or at the very least, he’s the only person left who has the knowledge and influence to do so.
But what makes Avatar: The Way of Water particularly special in my eyes is how Cameron has chosen to scale downwards in spectacle from its predecessor, despite its status as the single most expensive movie ever created, and the sequel to the highest grossing movie of all time. The original Avatar is a grand hero’s journey, exploring an alien world truly unlike anything on Earth. The forests breathe, the grass hums with every step, the mountains and the jungles float in the air. Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t at its best when its characters are on the back of a dragon soaring through the flying mountains of Pandora; the film is at its best when its characters are laying down in a shallow pool of water, watching grains of sand fall through their fingertips. When they swim through the coral reef, brushing against the seaweed. These scenes are astonishing because of their top-of-the-line VFX, but when you strip all of that away, Cameron has successfully made science-fiction spectacle out of scenery that we can already find here on Earth. Pandora is no longer beautiful because it’s an alien planet. Pandora is beautiful because it’s Earth. You don’t need a spaceship to explore nature and observe its wonders– it’s something that any one of us can do whenever we want, should we choose to seek it out.
That’s what makes the Avatar series so magical, the fact that its foundation isn’t action, isn’t to see which superhero can invent the biggest gun to defeat the anonymous bad guy. It’s a series about preserving the majesty of the natural world from the omnipotent threat of human greed– a threat that is textually established to be the literal United States of America. It’s the only major blockbuster franchise left that is certifiably about something: standing against the evils of imperialism, condemning the destruction of our planet and the exploitation of its animals. With these films, Cameron is pushing the boundaries of blockbuster filmmaking, both technologically and thematically. It is the best of every world, and the best movie of 2022.
Viva la Na’vi!