5. The Third Act – “mother!”
The only reason Darren Aronosfky‘s “mother!” hasn’t taken the top spot here is that it would be kind of a cheat to put an entire act up as an “action scene,” though the last 20-30 minutes of his honkingly batshit, insanely divisive movie comes about as close to a sustained action-moviemaking exercize as anything we’ve seen. Using relatively few camera angles (it’s mostly close-ups on Jennifer Lawrence‘s terrorized face, over-the-shoulder shots following her around the house and the odd POV angle to give a broader impression of what’s going on) Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique create a landscape of escalating lunacy the like of which, if we’re being quite honest, we really can’t remember ever having witnessed before. A quiet dinner turns into a raucous party, which turns into a riot, which turns into a war zone which turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by baby-eating cult members, and at each point you believe the gathering insanity has to have been tapped out. You are wrong. There’s always some new level of excess Aronofsky can attain, and he always does, in a film that, like it or loathe it, is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable achievements in dizzying, assaultive filmmaking craft of this or any year.
4. Snoke’s Throne Room – “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”
It’s proved surprisingly divisive in the days since its release (Team Playlist are split right down the middle on it), but one thing we can hopefully all agree on about Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is that its action sequences are absolutely cracking: even given the high standards set by the new era of Star Wars movie, this might have the most thrilling and varied collection of set-pieces of all nine films to date. From the opening bombing-run sequence (immediately making clear why Johnson named “Twelve O’Clock High” as one of his main influences on the film, to that gorgeous, red-dust spewing last battle, every sequence truly thrills and pops. The unforgettable one, though, takes place just after supposed arch-villain Snoke (Andy Serkis) is neatly bisected by his protege Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), an act of betrayal that leads to an almighty throwdown between Kylo and Rey (Daisy Ridley), and Snoke’s red-clad guards. Easily the best lightsaber fight in the series since “Duel Of The Fates” at the end of “The Phantom Menace,” it feels very different from anything else in the saga, with an expressionism that nods to Kurosawa and Powell & Pressburger, even while still delivering some head-rolling thrills. On this evidence, we dearly hope that Johnson’s new trilogy still includes some laser sword stuff.
3. Spitfire Battles – “Dunkirk”
Compared to, say, the mind-bending cityscapes of “Inception,” or the wormhole trippiness of “Interstellar,” Christopher Nolan’s World War Two picture “Dunkirk” could feel oddly traditional in many ways, not pushing formal and visual boundaries in the way that we’ve come to expect. But then we come to the aerial sequences in the film, and it doesn’t feel like an overly liberal of superlatives to say that they might be the finest ever put on screen. Using vintage planes, Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX camera, and the expertise Nolan and his team picked up on the opening sequence of “The Dark Knight Rises,” the scenes (and it’s hard to pick just one) see Tom Hardy and Jack Reynor’s pilots take on Nazi pilots over the channel, captured as an endless horizon in the deepest possible blues. Somehow, Nolan captures both a strange beauty as the planes swoop and dive, and a claustrophobic panic as the pilots try to keep track of their quarry and down them with bursts of gunfire, sometimes feeling more like a nature documentary than “Top Gun.” At least visually, they’re the most extraordinary part of an extraordinary film.
2. Bellbottoms – “Baby Driver”
Edgar Wright says that he was inspired in part to make “Baby Driver” by a 2003 music video he directed for Mint Royale’s “Blue Song” and the opening sequence of his car-chase fantasia, a movie that feels like if Jacques Rivette had directed “The Driver,” suggests a man who’s spent fifteen years making that movie in his head. Scored memorably to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion‘s “Bellbottoms,” with Baby (Ansel Elgort) singing along in his getaway car while Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal and Eiza Gonzalez pull a job, before one of the more fast and furious recent car chase sequences (and that’s including the “Fast & Furious” movies), it’s a sequence where nothing is out of place. Every swerve, gesture, shot and cut, from the great gag where Bernthal makes a ‘let’s go’ gesture and Elgort speeds off the other way, to the gorgeous late moment of three red cars shot from above, is exactly where it needs to be, and in sync with the music like a band at the peak of their powers are in sync with each other. In some ways, the film never quite matches it: in part because it’s always cleverly shifting and evolving, but in part because, well, how could it?
1. Seoul Chase – “Okja”
As one of the few people lucky enough to get to see Bong Joon-ho‘s sentimentally nutso manifesto for vegetarianism on the big screen when the Netflix title premiered in Cannes, I think I was more impressed than many who came to it later with the sheer tactile quality of the CG on the lovable hippo-pig. And that’s probably all to do with scale: there’s a flolloping, fleshy heft to Okja that really shows when she’s life-size or bigger, whether she’s rolling down a hill, careening through a tunnel or thrashing against her restraints in a dismal windowless “labattoir” run by a deranged Jake Gyllenhaal. And of course, her meatiness is exactly the point. But the sequence that really showed her off was the spectacularly witty scene in which she destroys an underground mall in Seoul, sending selfie-cam teens running for their lives, sliding her flab up against a big store window, and in an inspired flourish, ending up in a branch of Japanese gimcrack store Daiso so that brightly colored knick knacks, rainbow umbrellas and plastic gizmos can all play a role. It’s a chase and also a rescue as Paul Dano‘s animal rights activists defend Okja from the darts and stun guns of her pursuers, but by the time John Denver’s sappy “Annie’s Song” kicks in, the sequence shows off exactly what Bong always does so well: combining pathos with action and comedy. Only this time he further hybridizes it with sheer, bull-in-a-china-shop physics and the result is both exhilarating and adorable.
Among the other sequences we considered including here were Sam Rockwell getting a redemptive kicking in “Three Billboards,” Vin Diesel surfing down a forest in “xXx: The Return Of Xander Cage,” Milla Jovovich driving her jeep into a dragon in “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter,” Batman and friends taking on the villains at the end of “The Lego Batman Movie,” the escape sequence in “Get Out,” the opening gunfight of “Ghost In The Shell,” the spoilery final monster fight in “Colossal,” and more or less the entirety of “Free Fire.”
There were also multiple sequences in “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2,” The Rock and Jason Statham brawling in prison in “The Fate Of The Furious,” the neomorph attack in “Alien: Covenant,” the admittedly fun plane crash in the otherwise rotten “The Mummy,” the chase sequence in “Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets,” Tom Cruise crashing a plane in “American Made” (man, Tom Cruise crashed almost as many planes in movies this year than Harrison Ford did in real life), the waterlogged fight sequence in “Blade Runner 2049” and the cab fight in the otherwise negligible “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”
Not even considered for a second: the dimly-lit CGI clusterfuck of “Justice League.” Anything we did miss, though? Let us know in the comments.
